Home on the Clone

A poem by Isaac Asimov

Does Siri Have a Soul? Exploring Voice Assistants Through Shinto Design Fictions

It can be difficult to critically reflect on technology that has become part of everyday rituals and routines. To combat this, speculative and fictional approaches have previously been used by HCI to decontextualise the familiar and imagine alternatives. In this work we turn to Japanese Shinto narratives as a way to defamiliarise voice assistants, inspired by the similarities between how assistants appear to 'inhabit' objects similarly to kami. Describing an alternate future where assistant presences live inside objects, this approach foregrounds some of the phenomenological quirks that can otherwise easily become lost. Divorced from the reality of daily life, this approach allows us to reevaluate some of the common interactions and design patterns that are common in the virtual assistants of the present.Comment: 11 pages, 2 images. To appear in the Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20

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Isaac Asimov: 10-20-1976

The science fiction writer Dr. Isaac Asimov begins the interview by reading “Insert Knob A in Hole B” from his anthology Nightfall and Other Stories. He continues the interview by discussing sociological aspects of science fiction. He then talks about how he came back to science fiction after writing nonfiction for several years, the evolution of his writing style, and the evolution of science fiction in general. Asimov then discusses the controversy behind genetic engineering, gives advice to beginning science fiction writers, and concludes the interview by discussing his works in progress.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/writers_videos/1023/thumbnail.jp

Centerscope

Centerscope, formerly Scope, was published by the Boston University Medical Center "to communicate the concern of the Medical Center for the development and maintenance of improved health care in contemporary society.

A better life through information technology? The techno-theological eschatology of posthuman speculative science

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article, published in Zygon 41(2) pp.267-288, which has been published in final form at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118588124/issueThe depiction of human identity in the pop-science futurology of engineer/inventor Ray Kurzweil, the speculative-robotics of Carnegie Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec and the physics of Tulane University mathematics professor Frank Tipler elevate technology, especially information technology, to a point of ultimate significance. For these three figures, information technology offers the potential means by which the problem of human and cosmic finitude can be rectified. Although Moravec’s vision of intelligent robots, Kurzweil’s hope for immanent human immorality, and Tipler’s description of human-like von Neumann probe colonising the very material fabric of the universe, may all appear to be nothing more than science fictional musings, they raise genuine questions as to the relationship between science, technology, and religion as regards issues of personal and cosmic eschatology. In an attempt to correct what I see as the ‘cybernetic-totalism’ inherent in these ‘techno-theologies’, I will argue for a theology of technology, which seeks to interpret technology hermeneutically and grounds human creativity in the broader context of divine creative activity

Scope

Scope, later retitled Centerscope, was published by the Boston University Medical Center to report on events at and around the Center