Archive for June, 2008
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Was World War II Necessary?
I just finished Human Smoke, by the novelist Nicholson Baker. Subtitled “The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization,” the book implicitly challenges the notion that World War II was necessary and just. Baker assembles factoids—from contemporaneous newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries—intended to morally complicate the war. Hitler was bad, but Churchill was a [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
Singularitarimania
I swear I want to move past the Singularity, but it’s too much fun! Just talked about it on the NRP show “Here and Now.” I’ve also gotten some funny emails on the topic. One guy said the Singularitarians reminded him of the Jonathan Coulton song “The Future Now.” I listened and laughed out loud, [...]
9 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
Snipping Strings on Bloggingheads.tv
Physicist Sean Carroll and physicist/philosopher David Albert are the Science Saturday duo on Bloggingheads.tv this week. After chatting about David’s turn as a quantum pundit in the cult film “What the Bleep Do We Know?”—which David views with ambivalence, to say the least—they spend 10 minutes critiquing my critique of string theory. Because I have [...]
9 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
Another Singular Chat
The versatile podcaster KMO, who describes himself as a “recovering Singularitarian,” has just posted another conversation between us. We talk about why artificial intelligence and neuroscience have made such little progress as explaining and replicating the human mind; why I don’t believe in ESP; why I’m excited by the resurgence of research into psychedelics at [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Gunther Stent, End-of-Science Seer, RIP
The biologist Gunther Stent, whose writings on the limits of science inspired my thinking on that topic, died last week. The obituary in the Times suggests that toward the end of this career Stent renounced his predictions about the end of scientific progress. Bullshit. This is like a church claiming after the death of a [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, June 16th, 2008
Podcast on “Future Hype”
It’s the worst of times and the best of times in media. The industry is in turmoil, trying to figure out how to make a buck in the internet era. Advertising at traditional publications is collapsing, along with job security and rates for freelancers. No one knows what new equilibrium, if any, lies beyond the [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, June 13th, 2008
All Anti-Singularity, All the Time
Through sheer coincidence, the Wall Street Journal recently asked me to review Year Million: Science at the Far Frontier of Knowledge, a collection of essays by writers with backgrounds in economics, physics, medicine, mathematics, computer science and science fiction. Most of these essays imagine, in effect, what will happen after the Singularity, when we turn [...]
17 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
The Singularity Is Coming (Not)!
The June issue of IEEE Spectrum, the magazine where I started my career in 1983, has a whiz-bang special issue on “The Singularity,” the prophesy of technotranscendence first uttered by the computer scientist and si-fi writer Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity.” The issue was put together by my buddy Glenn [...]