Lifeboat Foundation

Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”

Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/

By Dave Parrack — Gizmag

Microsoft Research has moved on from IllumiRoom, its concept for adding visuals to the periphery of gamers’ television sets. After concluding that that system — which used a Kinect camera and a projector to bring video games into the living room — was too expensive to be released commercially, the company has revealed RoomAlive, which is even more expensive and even less practical. Thankfully, it’s also an intriguing glimpse at the possible future of gaming.

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By Colin Campbell — Polygon

Firaxis’ strategy game Civilization: Beyond Earth, shows humankind populating new worlds. Set in a not-too distant future, the game demands that players choose and invest in technologies to ease their path.

VICTORY: Getting Fortune-500 Prospective Client’s Cash, Continually and Successfully! By Mr. Andres Agostini at www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS ACCORDING TO THESE COMPANIES:

Mitsubishi Motors, Honda, Daimler-Chrysler’s Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company, Google, Xerox, Exxon-Mobil, Boeing, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, NASA and DARPA, Lockheed Martin, RAND Corporation and HUDSON Institute, Northrop Grumman Corporation, etc.

Continue reading “VICTORY!” »

Adam Gell — HITC

Destiny has been in players’ hands for the past few days now, and I’ve also been doing my part to fight The Darkness this week too. But, as the game uses our own galaxy as the setting to tell its story, complete with futuristic space travel and talk of a Golden Age brought by the arrival of The Traveller, Activision and Bungie have worked with the National Space Centre to see what the UK could look like in the future when space travel is real.

Similarly in the images below, Destiny lets you travel to the futuristic imaginings of the Russian Cosmodrome, which is the real-world site of Earth’s first and largest space facility, and where Sputnik 1 (the first artificial Earth satellite) was launched in 1957. In the game the site looks quite different from today’s real-world counterpart, as humanity has gone through a Golden Age of space travel, and reached the brink of extinction with the arrival of The Darkness years later.

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Continue reading “'A struggle between humans and nature'” »

Continue reading “Political futurism, ethics energized by sci-fi” »

By JASCHA HOFFMANJUNE — NY Times

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Directed by Matt Reeves. Opens July 11.

In this second big-budget prequel to the 1968 technicolor classic, intelligent apes are thriving in the forest while human cities crumble. If that sounds depressing, think again: In this version of “Planet of the Apes,” the chimps are the heroes. Rather than shooting in a studio, as is the custom for motion capture, much of the film was shot in the forest, where actors playing apes, their bodies covered with infrared dots tracked by hidden cameras, controlled the skeletons of their primate avatars. How does one walk like an ape? The motion is “heavy, weighted and circular,” said Terry Notary, a former gymnast who served as movement coach for the film, although “the pace, energy and feel” differs for gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. To capture emotion, a small camera mounted on the actors’ heads harvested facial data to drive the apes’ expressions. “This high-tech rig is so powerful and transparent that it allows actors to abandon control,” Mr. Notary said. The results are apes so magnetic, it’s hard not to empathize with them, even as they take up arms against their human rivals. “We’re making a film where apes are causing our downfall,” said Joe Letteri, the senior visual effects supervisor, “but they’re the ones you want to root for.”

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