Archive

The Principles of Citizen Behavioral Science

In a series of short talks we’re going to share exam­ples of some of our past and upcom­ing work, along­side exam­ples from our par­ent orga­ni­za­tion Global Voices. But I want to start by say­ing some­thing about how we go about our work.

Biohackers Die

So grinders are a com­mu­ni­ty com­mit­ted to rad­i­cal­ly alter­ing the body. And so some­times it’s treat­ments like tran­scra­nial mag­net­ic, or direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion. It could be through the use of pre­vi­ous­ly untest­ed chem­i­cals like VIP. Often it takes the form of implant­ed devices. All these approach­es come with risks. What I’m going to focus on today is why despite all the risks being tak­en, a grinder has­n’t died yet.

Safeguarding Science: The Heat Enlisting the Street

What I’m try­ing artic­u­late here is that there is a real­ly fine bal­ance between how do you spur and invig­o­rate inno­va­tion, and then also address secu­ri­ty at the same time. Because one can­not drown out the oth­er. Because you’re going to have all kinds of issues.

Rebel Scientists

I’m going to make an argu­ment in this talk that dis­sent is valu­able not mere­ly to estab­lish your moral dimen­sion or to make a moral act or moral pos­ture. It’s essen­tial to sci­en­tif­ic progress. So we can’t do with­out dis­sent; it’s not an affectation.

Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Target Conservation Efforts

The smart­phone is the ulti­mate exam­ple of a uni­ver­sal com­put­er. Apps trans­form the phone into dif­fer­ent devices. Unfortunately, the com­pu­ta­tion­al rev­o­lu­tion has done lit­tle for the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of our Earth. Yet, sus­tain­abil­i­ty prob­lems are unique in scale and com­plex­i­ty, often involv­ing sig­nif­i­cant com­pu­ta­tion­al challenges.

Forbidden Research: Sexual Deviance: Can Technology Protect our Children?

One of the big things that we’re going to talk about here is para­phil­ia. We’re going to talk about sex­u­al deviance. We’re going to talk about the prob­lem of peo­ple whose sex­u­al desires lead to attrac­tion to chil­dren, lead to attrac­tion towards vio­lent sex, lead to sex­u­al trans­gres­sion in one fash­ion or another.

Forbidden Research: Messing with Nature Part I: Genetics

When it comes to a field as fast-moving and as high of stakes as genet­ic engi­neer­ing, how do we pro­ceed wise­ly? How do we bal­ance our own wild­ness and civil­i­ty as we devel­op increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful ways to inter­act with the liv­ing world?

Forbidden Research: Messing with Nature Part II: Climate

Solar geo­engi­neer­ing rests on a sim­ple idea that it is tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble to make the Earth a lit­tle more reflec­tive so that it absorbs a lit­tle less sun­light, which would part­ly coun­ter­act some of the risks that come from accu­mu­lat­ing car­bon diox­ide in the atmos­phere. When I say tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble, it appears that at least doing this in a crude way is actu­al­ly easy, in the sense that it could be done with com­mer­cial off-the-shelf tech­nolo­gies now, and it could be done at a cost that is real­ly triv­ial, sort of a part in a thou­sand or a part in ten thou­sand of glob­al GDP.

The Conversation #13 — Ariel Waldman

I think the sad­dest thing is if you ever stop want­i­ng to learn new things. And it can be about any­thing. That’s just real­ly heart­break­ing. I don’t know. It’s just so much part of like who you are as a human to learn new things con­stant­ly. And so to not be curi­ous, not want to learn new things and not cre­ate new pat­terns and connections…you’re pret­ty much giv­ing up your human self.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science

Hacking sci­ence and space explo­ration isn’t just about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing things. But it’s about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing dis­rup­tive­ly acces­si­ble things. Things that real­ly dis­rupt the cur­rent state of sci­ence and a lot of the elit­ism around it, and tru­ly make it acces­si­ble for everyone.