Ralph Nader – Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, Revisited

When the stunning article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” by Bill Joy, chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, made the cover of Wired Magazine in April 2000, it created quite a rumble in high-tech circles. Its argument was that “our most powerful 21st century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” Bill Joy was writing about out …

Rob Price – Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and thousands of AI researchers just issued a warning about killer robots

More than a thousand artificial-intelligence researchers have cosigned an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons, or “killer robots.” As The Verge reports, they have been joined by hundreds more sympathetic signatories from outside the industry — including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, scientist Stephen Hawking, and social theorist Noam Chomsky. Autonomous weapons capable of attacking targets without human …

The Other Conspirator By Barbara Myers

The witness reported men being hung by the feet or the thumbs, waterboarded, given electric shocks to the genitals, and suffering from extended solitary confinement in what he said were indescribably inhumane conditions. It’s the sort of description that might have come right out of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released last December. In this case, however, the testimony …