Apocalyptic thinking is frequently found in certain future scenarios, especially when those scenarios are created by people concerned with military conflict, climate change, artificial intelligence, disease outbreaks, or other scary possibilities. CRN has ourselves participated in the making of such...

What if they gave a war and nobody came? That was a popular slogan for peace demonstrators of the Vietnam era (including me). It might be repeated, with a slight revision, at some point during this century: What if they gave a robot war and nobody came? Military robots already have been deployed by ...

It's another new year, and that means it is time once again for the Edge Annual Question. This year's question is: WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? My initial reaction to their question, I'm sorry to say, is a...

3 5 0 James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist and the first to warn about global warming more than two decades ago, recently wrote: If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing cl...

A hot topic of conversation at last week's CRN/IEET seminar on Global Catastrophic Risks was the whole issue of privacy, surveillance, security, and anonymity. In honor of that probably endless and always fascinating debate, I'm going to repost an entry we made here in 2006 that garnered a l...

Think of a futuristic war scenario where soldiers are firing smart weapons from the confines of their command centres. Weapons that are capable of intercepting and destroying virtually all enemy attack weapons and yet, they are fired from unmanned vehicles thereby minimising all possibilities of hum...

I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a short stopover in Cairo, Egypt. It's not clear how much online access I'll have during the next week, or how much time I'll have for blogging. But I'll try to give updates when I can and perhaps also post some photos...

At the Responsible Nanotechnology blog, we have three favorite sources for significant technical developments leading toward advanced nanotech: Nanowerk, Nanotechnology Now, and Nanodot (notice that their blog names all start with 'Nano' while ours begins with 'Responsi...

Gareth Evans is President of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group and co-chair of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, based in New York. Today on "To the Point," a program that airs on National Public Radio (US), Evans was a guest of host Warren Olney, and they ha...

Not Necessarily Relevant Quote of the Week: That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches . . . Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles or gives me any best place. And a'nt I a woman? Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gath...