Posts

Self driving cars

Here they come, no here they are!  With Waymo testing their driverless cars in Phoenix, Dallas and Shanghai allowing them on their streets, this paradigm shift is beginning before our eyes.  Self driving cars are definitely inevitable at this point.  There are several high dollar companies throwing their weight around as well as many smaller start ups.  I am not going to bore you with the technical side of this issue and discuss Lidar vs. HD video.  Instead I am going to discuss the many and varied uses and abuses possible as well as talk about some of the ways this technology will change our world.  There will be no more taxis or truckers in the near future.  Millions of mostly men will be out of a job.  Nevermind that there will be less deaths in automobile accidents because the unemployed will still be upset.  Cars will be shared and public transportation won't need buses or trains nearly as much, but the possibility for harm is increased ...
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Feminism?

Amidst renewed allegations against supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh I find myself thinking of the seemingly ever present Me Too movement.  Never let it be said that I think woman are less or that they don't deserve equal respect.  Human beings should be treated with kindness and respect period!!  That being said I am not so sure that this new feminist movement will turn out well for anyone, men or women.  Slogans on t-shirts representing compressed ideologies like "I believe all women" do more damage than good.  One listen to the song "Elderly woman behind the counter in a small town" by Pearl Jam brings to mind the malleability of memory.  Not only does this slogan, if applied, put any man at a woman's mercy it also goes against our entire justice system.  I will not say that our courts are perfect but that is a conversation for another time, what I will say is that innocent until proven guilty is a cornerstone of justice.   I require a...
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Super Babies

Super Babies!!!  We are close, so very close to designer babies.  I am not sure how up to speed you are but let me give you the run down.  CrispR:  Technique used to sever and introduce new genes into DNA.  Chinese CC5 babies:  Twins that have been genetically engineered to resist HIV.  These are facts.  This is happening now.  It wont be much farther into the future when ethical qualms stop outweighing predicted benefits of expensive designer babies.  Genetics can be tied to almost everything, in at least some small way, about a person and we are starting to control heritable genes with science.  Dare we play GOD?  The answer is YES WE DARE.  Or at least some of us do, those with less than rigorous scruples.  But since when has that stopped us from advancement?  Consider the atom bomb!  I would go so far as to say this is more of a paradigm shift than the manhattan project ever was.  Imagine babies ...
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Neuralink

I will try to keep in mind the title of my blog for most of my entries.  Today I will be discussing a company called Neuralink.  It was founded by Elon Musk.  For those of you that don't know he started Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla.  With this company he intends to plant microscopic electrodes into peoples brains allowing more information to pass through from your thoughts straight to your phone, computer, or AI in the future.  This has been achieved with rats and monkeys so far with success.  This technology immediately brings to mind dystopian futures from sci-fi horror stories, but there is also a unlimited capacity for good.  Sure someone may be able to influence thought with this technology but someone else may be able to cure cancer or invent something that changes the world.  I can easily dream of great things accomplished with the merging of a computer and my brain.  But, I can just as easily imagine controlling subordinates overriding t...
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