Music, Movies & Madness?


This week we will be looking at the issues arising from the impact of technology including the Internet and World Wide Web upon some established intellectual property based industries.
Location: Nottingham, UK

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Super-intelligence and eternal life: transhumanism's faithful follow it blindly into a future for the elite

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Super-intelligence and eternal life: transhumanism's faithful follow it blindly into a future for the elite Distant Earth. Alexander Thomas , University of East London The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies – nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science – are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end. They may enable us to enjoy greater “morphological freedom” – we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI). Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this “co...
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Facebook ten year challenge: how our need to belong trumps our distrust of social media

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Facebook ten year challenge: how our need to belong trumps our distrust of social media ra2studio via Shutterstock Ana Isabel Domingos Canhoto , Brunel University London When the ten year challenge began doing the rounds on social media, people rushed to post profile pictures of themselves from 2009, side by side with one from 2019, to highlight how much they had changed (or not) in the meantime. It is estimated that more than 5.2m social media users participated in this challenge. It started on Facebook towards the end of January 2019, and it didn’t take long for experts like tech author Kate O’Neil to suggest that the trend could have harmful consequences. Specifically, by posting the now-and-then photos with the #10yearchallenge hashtag, social media users were, possibly, helping to train facial recognition software to recognise – or predict – age-related changes. Facebook has denied that it is behind the viral trend or that it had...
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Robots are coming and the fallout will largely harm marginalized communities

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Robots are coming and the fallout will largely harm marginalized communities Those who are most affected in the labour market by robots are those who tend to already be marginalized. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu) Constantine Gidaris , McMaster University COVID-19 has brought about numerous, devastating changes to people’s lives globally. With the number of cases rising across Canada and globally , we are also witnessing the development and use of robots to perform jobs in some workplaces that are deemed unsafe for humans. There are cases of robots being used to disinfect health-care facilities, deliver drugs to patients and perform temperature checks . In April 2020, doctors at a Boston hospital used Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robot called Spot to reduce health-care workers exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 . By equipping Spot with an iPad and a two-way radio, doctors and patients could communicate in real-time. ...
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