Author: Paul Bassett
Paul Bassett is past president of the Central Ontario Humanists Association. He taught computer science at York University and cofounded two software engineering companies. He is the author of Framing Software Reuse (Prentice Hall, 1997)
Is Intelligence Toxic?
Introduction Once upon a time, as a young researcher in the nascent field of artificial intelligence (AI), I was full of excitement and optimism. Sooner or later AI was going to be the secret sauce that would transform the world; discovering the recipe was my mission in life. But back then the idea of “thinking …
This article is available for free to all.The Post-Humanists Are at the Gates!
If you think a lot has happened in the past few centuries, then, to echo Bachman Turner Overdrive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari echoes the increasingly popular refrain that humans are on the brink of becoming superhuman. Harari, an Israeli history professor and author of the best-seller Sapiens, uses his scholarly worldview to take an unflinching look at a range of possible futures, most of them dystopian.
The Sacred Emerges from the Secular
Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, by Stuart A. Kauffman (New York: Basic Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-46500300-6) 320 pp. Cloth $27.00. Science and religion are bicameral lawmakers that mathematical biologist and philosopher Stuart Kauffman would prefer to harmonize. Science, despite its stunning successes, can never unify all laws of nature. …