Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part III

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether). Today's retrospective reviews the best of 2005 and the first several months of 2006.
  • Early last year Spanish socialists wanted to give apes human rights prompting me to write about the myth of our exalted human place. I also proclaimed that cows are people, too and predicted the end of livestock.

  • I wondered if active SETI was imperiling humanity and if science fiction was bad for bioethics. I looked deep into my crystal ball and saw a very bald future.

  • I wondered if we live in a non-arbitrary universe.

  • I wrote about James Lovelock's Gaian despair and his thoughts about environmentalist sabotage.

  • I tolerated David Irving's bullshit.

  • The future of warfare was on my mind, including cyber warfare and the "blogger threat", neurohacking, and the perils of miniaturization on the battlefield. I also worried that the anthropic principle did not imply future gain.

  • I wrote about the end of gender.

  • Consciousness and brains: I wrote about how you could think faster by altering your perception of time, extreme 'natural' brains, and the phenomenon of blindsight.

  • And finally, I wrote about how pop art will gets proletarianized, or how technology will enable anyone to play guitar like Eddie Van Halen.
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