Another Sacrifice To The God Of Future Worshippers

Remember, kids, all scientific advance is good because it was created by man. Evil is not a created thing in the scientific community; it is merely the denial of the intentions of science. That's the kind of thinking that leads to things like this:

A mother desperate to have a second child has told how she lost her last IVF embryo when the U.K. National Health Service implanted it into the wrong patient.

When the other woman found out that the embryo was not hers, she aborted it.

Details of the blunder raise fresh questions about the way IVF clinics are regulated.

The Sunday Times has previously revealed that women undergoing fertility treatment have had their eggs fertilized with the wrong sperm.

More and more, I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe in the back of Aldous Huxley's mind.

This is further proof of our culture of death and narcissim, and of the persistent postmodern premise that human life has meaning when we assign it meaning.

Prominent Scientists Have Obviously Not Been Watching Soylent Green

Has the whole world gone insane? From the BBC comes this story that indicates further slippage down the slope (emphasis mine):

(Dignitas founder)Ludwig Minelli told the BBC suicide was a "marvellous possibility" and he wants the assisted suicide law clarified for the healthy partners of dying people. (You read that right: dying is awesome, even if you're healthy.)

(...)

In his first broadcast interview for five years, Mr Minelli told BBC Radio 4's The Report that failed suicide attempts created problems and heavy costs for the UK's National Health Service. (Not to mention all that mess- yuck!)

(...)

He added: "Suicide is a very good possibility to escape a situation which you can't alter." (Like parenthood, or taxes?)

(...)

"We are not a clinic. As a human rights lawyer I am opposed to the idea of paternalism. We do not make decisions for other people." (I can only assume that this means he is against abortion.)

And Mr Minelli revealed that his organisation plans to test the legality of assisting the suicide of a healthy woman whose partner is terminally ill.

"There is a couple living in Canada, the husband is ill, his partner is not ill but she told us here in my living room that 'if my husband goes, I would go at the same time with him'. (Hence making death of a 'broken heart' a medical reality).

(...)

Dignitas is known in Britain for having helped more than 100 people to kill themselves.

The majority were terminally ill, but there have been more controversial cases such as psychiatric patients and couples, even when one was less ill than the other. (But hey, they probably thought someone was giving them some candy, so they probably enjoyed it.)

Let me reiterate a point that has become nearly axiomatic in our society: what sounds crazy in Europe today will sound perfectly normal in the United States five years from now.

Because They're Trying To Figure Out How To Make Cylons

A 'Battlestar Galactica' Panel Discussion At The United Nations

Immanent Destruction Continues To Breathe Down Our Neck

And no, I'm not talking about our downward economic spiral.

Leave it to the British press to express the impending apocalypse in the most artistically appealing way possible:

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

(snip)

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.

A rich variety of scenarios outlining the ethical, legal, social and political issues posed as robot technology improves are covered in the report. How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives?

The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University and obtained by The Times, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.

(snip)

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

Mark my words. Angelina Jolie is going to become self-aware any day now, and when she does, we're all hosed.

“The Day Before Something Is Truly A Breakthrough, It’s A Crazy Idea.”

The latest pie-eyed efforts toward making Skynet self-aware come from two of our all time favorite future-worshipping organizations. Paging John Connor:

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics(emphasis mine).”

“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”

Not much to say here. I think the story speaks for itself. Nothing like allowing self-aware advanced artificial intelligences to tamper with human genetic material to really get us where we need to be as a race.

Please send your copies of Terminator and The Matrix to:

Singularity University
NASA Research Park, Building 17
MS 566-120, Moffett Field, CA 94035

Return Of The Ibex

Mere weeks ago, I made my predictions of things that would most certainly happen in 2008. Among them was the following:

2. The guy that is trying to clone and give life to a wooly mammoth and a sabretooth tiger will finally do so. And they will kill him.

Suffice to say that this has yet to come to pass. But the following step toward it has, according to the Telegraph (UK):

The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain.

Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects.

But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue.

It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs.

What this has proven is that, among other things, it may eventually be possible to reanimate or clone other carbon based life forms currently frozen in liquid nitrogen, such as whatever they found at Area 51, or perhaps Ted Williams. When our staff knocked on the office door of Apoloblogology correspondent Dr. Ian Malcolm, he merely shouted that he wasn't there in a somewhat slurred voice.

Update:Inexplicably, it appears that one of the Fabulous Flying Archbold Brothers scooped me on this one. They haven't seen the last of me...

Humankind To Blow Up World

Skynet becoming self aware, the power going out at Jurassic park, and HAL shutting the pod bay doors combined could not equal the possible man-made catastrophe that awaits the world when a real live Doomsday Machine is switched on in Switzerland tomorrow.

That's right. A freaking Doomsday Machine.

London's Evening Standard reports:

The £5billion Large Hadron Collider aims to recreate the conditions moments after the Big Bang that created the universe.

To do this, a massive 27km tunnel has been constructed under countryside in France and Switzerland near Geneva, which will be used to smash protons together at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light.

And from Yahoo! News:

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho (have) filed suit in U.S. and European courts to stop the L(arge) H(adron) C(ollider). Their theory is that the LHC will produce micro black holes and "stranglets" that may not decay as rapidly as mainstream physics predicts.

"Any miniature black hole created at rest in a collider would essentially be trapped in Earth's gravitational field, and over seconds to hours, slowly interact and acquire more mass," Wagner says on his LHCDefense.org Web site.

Basically, by using a super collider to recreate the big bang underneath Switzerland, these scientists run the risk of creating a giant black hole bigger than the black hole that rich people have already discovered in the Swiss banking system.

However, Apoloblogology Cosmological Correspondent Steven Hawking isn't buying any of it:

Stephen Hawking has bet 100 dollars (70 euros) that a mega-experiment this week will not find an elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science, he said Tuesday.

"The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle," Hawking told BBC radio.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won't find the Higgs," added Hawking, whose books including "A Brief History of Time" have sought to popularise study of stellar physics.

The Higgs particle is in other circles referred to as the "God particle," the thing that the infallible information agents at Wikipedia have referred to as "massless," "the only Standard Model particle not yet observed" and the thing that "if it exists... is an integral and pervasive component of the material world."

Dude. Seriously. We Christians have believed in a massless, scientifically unobservable, integral, pervasive, universe creating force since the beginning. And we're not dumb enough to think we can command it, which has never stopped some of us from trying. I guess everybody wants to play God in one sense or another.

LiveBlogging

Is it just me, or does everyone in the crowd at the DNC look like the people on top of that skyscraper in Independence Day just before they get vaporized?

And why have I developed a sudden gag reflex whenever I see a white person?

Freakish New Technology Allows Robots To Read The Minds Of Humans

From Japan (not surprisingly) comes the latest in an ongoing series of us delivering our fates into the mechanical digits of our future robotic rulers:

"Rolling your eyes to turn up the volume of a portable music player and tapping your fingers to turn on a DVD player are among technologies Japan's top mobile carrier is testing for "wearable" gadgets.

[snip]

In a demonstration Tuesday for the Associated Press, researcher Hiroyuki Manabe wore a giant headset covered with wires to show how computer graphic lines in a monitor connected to the headset darted wildly whenever his eyes moved.

He turned up the volume on a digital music player by rolling his eyes, and he jerked his eyes twice to the right to fast forward.

Not included in the article were the future Matthew Chapter Five-esque implications of pursuing such technologies to their logical end. What happens when one thinks murderously of one's brother, and his or her robotic headgear interprets such a brainwave as an order, resulting in the vaporization of said opponent? On we slip down the slippery slope of cat-killing technological curiosity...

For The Love Of God, Don't Try This At Home

Deepest apologies for the above image, but it unfortunately applies.

A Scottish scientist is warning other scientists and legislators about the possible fallout that might result from experimentation with human sperm and chimpanzee eggs. According to Dr. Callum McKellar (who wins the Awesome Scottish Name Of The Day Award), were a human to mate with a chimpanzee, the DNA are close enough to where a hybrid could result from the union.

When reached for comment, Apoloblogology Field Correspondent Dr. Ian Malcolm stated, "Yes first it's 'ooh, aah, look at the Manpanzee,' but then there's screaming, and yelling, and running..."

Does anyone else get the feeling that this was addressed in Leviticus? I feel like a couple verses after "you shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk" there has to be something to the effect of "you shall not mate with another species that shares 98.5% of your DNA..."

Shedding The Green Blood Of The Silent Animals

A Switzerland ethics committee has begun a debate to try and argue for those who cannot speak for themselves. Is it the defense of the unborn from creation and extermination as part of the "designer child" mentality? Or perhaps a criticism of the abortion industry for targeting minorities? Maybe it's an attempt to get parents to stop late-term aborting their children for cleft palates?

No, my friends. The ethics committee is arguing that:

"plants deserve the right to life and that killing them is morally wrong except when it comes to saving humans. In a report on "the dignity of the creature in the plant world", the federal Ethics Committee on non-human Gene Technology condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason."

Often truth is stranger than fiction. However, sometimes truth is exactly as strange as a particular piece of fiction. G.K. Chesterton seems to have won his own game of "Cheat the Prophet" on this one, judging by this passage from 1904's The Napoleon of Notting Hill:"

"...Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed (‘shedding,’ as he called it finely, ‘the green blood of the silent animals’), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called ‘Why should Salt suffer?’ and there was more trouble."

I'm wondering what exactly they're eating for dinner over there in Switzerland...

Prominent Australians Have Obviously Been Watching Terminator

The Australian has awakened to the implications of making robots completely autonomous and then giving them lots of guns. Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield raised the red flag recently, and gets the official Apoloblogology "Wait Up, My Scientific Friends, Let's Stop And Think About This For A Second" award for discussing the implications that these technologies could have on both the War on Terror and the War on Skynet:

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon of choice.

"I don't know why that has not happened already,'' he said.

But even more worrisome, he said, was the subtle progression from the semi-autonomous military robots deployed today to fully independent killing machines.

"I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies me,'' Prof Sharkey said.

My guess is that before a fellow like Professor Sharkey can start programming Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into these things, he will have already been killed by some robot made by a less ethical and more money driven scientist than himself. Professor Sharkey, consider yourself welcome in my bunker when the Cylons come.

Prominent Scientists Have Obviously Not Been Reading Brave New World, 1984, Or The Giver

In the hysterical irrational approach we've come to expect from the wacky end of the environmental movement comes this suggestion from an editorial in The Oregonian on how to avert global crisis:

"Just as vaccinations are mandatory for the world's most dreaded diseases, we must now have mandatory worldwide birth control until humans, in excessive numbers, are no longer a threat to our planet's health. An analogy: When parasites infest an animal until it dies they simply find another host. Like blind fools, we're doing the same thing to our planet with overpopulation, which, like a biblical plague, is consuming and contaminating all of our life-support systems at an alarming rate.

Sounds like someone's reading from the Chinese manual on population regulation.

The rich nations are engorged, the poor nations are starving. The problem is not now, nor has ever been, nor will be very soon, a lack of resources. The problem continues to be wanton waste and excessive consumption by the wealthy at the expense of the impoverished and the producing classes. Fix that one, and then we'll draw straws to see who has to undergo forced sterilization. My guess is it won't be the rich.