Manipulating Memories: The Ethics of Yesterday's Science Fiction and Today's Reality.

The Reality of Arabic Fiction Translation into English: A Sociological Approach

English translations of texts associated with Arabic fiction remain largely unexplored from a sociological perspective. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, this paper aims to examine the genesis of Arabic fiction translation into English as a socially situated activity. Works of Arabic fiction emerged in English translation in the early twentieth century. Since then, this intellectual field...

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Paragon of Trauma Fiction

Morrison’s Song of Solomon could be viewed as a paragon of trauma fiction. Since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, Morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery, and flashbacks. Accordingly, the readers are compelled to concoct the disjointed and fragmented memories in order to solve the riddle of the text, in which...

The limits of intelligent personal assistants

In almost every science fiction movie you’ll see people conversing with machines. Of course, the rise of intelligent personal assistants means you probably do this yourself already. This posting asks: what’s the difference? Also, recent news on Facebook acquisitions, spoken language translation, and sentiment analysis. Science fiction fascinates us because it paints a picture of a world that is...

Today's misery and yesterday's happiness: Differential effects of current life-events on perceptions of past wellbeing

Robot ethics? Not yet: A reflection on Whitby's "Sometimes it's hard to be a robot"

Science fiction stories seductively portray robots as human. In present reality (early 21st century) robots are machines, even though they can do many things far better than humans (fly, swim, play chess to name a few). Any ethics for or of robots is therefore a seductive mix of fiction and reality. The key issue for rational discourse is to provide a rigorous framework for reasoning about the ...