Argonauts: Organizations of Similar Interest

Over the next few years, the nascent Argonaut Council for Responsible Science recruited heavily from organizations with similar interests such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Institute for a Transhuman Future, the Lifeboat Institute, and the Singularity Foundation. Researchers at government organizations such as the UK’s Bletchley Park and the Chinese Machine Intelligence Directorate quietly subscribed as well. In most cases, these new argonauts kept their original affiliation, givi...

 Bandwidth Explains Fermi's Paradox

"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Eco...

 Keynes Predicts Unemployment from Automation

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

 The "Powers" in Vernor Vinges' Universe

Marketing calls our current visitor ‘Old One.’” He smiled. “That’s something of a joke, but true even so. We’ve known it for eleven years.” No one really knew how long Transcendent beings lived, but it was a rare Power that stayed communicative for more than five or ten years. They lost interest, or grew into something different—or really did die. There were a million explanations, thousands that were allegedly from the Powers firsthand. Ravna guessed that the true explanation was the simples...