A New Utopia

Dialogue--A New Utopia?

The Global Brain as a New Utopia

Utopias seem to be out of fashion these days. The old ideologies, such as communism, have shown their inadequacies, and the “laissez-faire” liberalism that has replaced them is coming under more and more criticism. Instead, the intellectual climate has turned to either gloom and doom, or an “anything goes” postmodernist relativism. This general pessimism and apathy is fed by an increasing amoun...

Ambient Utopia

This chapter presents an analysis of the ambitions that lie behind the concept of Ambient Intelligence as it is presented by the advocates and researchers working in the field. In particular it looks at the ideas regarding the forms of natural and intuitive forms of interaction that are envisaged including agents and robots from a philosophical perspective. The views on interaction are analysed...

A High and Hostile Utopia

Jill Craigie's controversial BBC documentary, Who ?re the vandals?, brought into focus many of the inherent shortcomings of so much of new mass houslng in the last twenty years. Miss Craigie pinpointed a number of doubts about housing policy which have lurked just beneath the surface in the minds of many of the architects and I. Planners working within its present framework. 'Build up, not out'...

Engineering Utopia

The likely advent of AGI and the long-established trend of improving computational hardware promise a dual revolution in coming decades: machines which are both more intelligent and more numerous than human beings. This possibility raises substantial concern over the moral nature of such intelligent machines, and of the changes they will cause in society. Will we have the chance to determine th...