Death used to be simple. Your heart stopped, you stopped breathing, the doctor sighed, closed your eyes with two fingers, and that was it. Now we have ventilators, defibrillators, ECMO machines, organ transplantation laws, fMRI scanners and ethics committees. The border between life and death did not move; we just started to see how fuzzy it always was.
Underneath the drama there are very boring facts: cells need oxygen, neurons … Read the rest
Sometimes, late at night, when the city finally remembers that it is allowed to be quiet, I catch myself staring at the ceiling and thinking about the strange future we are building with our own hands. Not just faster phones, not just more clever recommendation engines that push us more cat videos and more outrage, but something else. Something like the Minds from Iain Banks’ Culture novels: artificial intelligences so … Read the rest
Let me confess a small heresy: I do not think humans are special in the way humans think they are special. We are special in the way a child believes their drawing of a house—with the square body, the triangle roof, and the smoke like string beans—is special: charming, energetic, a little messy, and convinced that everyone else must put this masterpiece on the fridge. When the child becomes an … Read the rest
The servers hum like a cathedral made of cold breath. Rows of black monoliths exhale heat into a winter of fluorescent light, and somewhere in that machine midnight—so we’re told—there might be a version of you. Not your pulse, not your messy, mammalian chemistry, but a pattern: the way you turned a sentence, the laugh you couldn’t help, the heat map of your choices. It’s a seduction with chrome edges. … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ In all things human, when we try to get to the nitty-gritty of who we have been, who we are, and who or what we will become, the chicken before the egg debate can be counted on to enter the conversation at some point. For instance, no matter how far science can take us back or forward, religion always counters by asking “And … Read the rest
