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Food For Thought: The Power of Social Technology

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” -Anne Frank

News

The Technological Citizen was featured on the blog Moral Machines:

Moral Machines is a blog on the theory and development of artificial moral agents and computational ethics, maintained by Wendell Wallach from Yale University’s Center for Bioethics and Colin Allen, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University.  Be sure to check it out!

Food For Thought: Cognitive Stimulants

“If we have a tradition it is this: Everything can always be done faster and better.” – Henry Ford

Food For Thought: The Singularity and Transhumanism

“Man…is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.” - William S. Burroughs

“The more we learn about what we are, the more options we will discern about what to try to become. Americans have long honored the “self-made man,” but now that we are actually learning enough to be able to remake ourselves into something new, many flinch. Many would apparently rather bumble around with their eyes closed, trusting in tradition, than look around to see what’s about to happen. Yes, it is unnerving; yes, it can be scary. After all, there are entirely new mistakes we are now empowered to make for the first time. But it’s the beginning of a great new adventure for our knowing species. And it’s much more exciting, as well as safer, if we open our eyes.” - Daniel Dennett

Food For Thought: Technology, The Environment, and Deep Ecology

New Ethics:

“An object of an entirely new order – no less than the whole biosphere of the planet—has been added to what we must be responsible for because of our power over it.” -Hans Jonas

“It will certainly not be easy to awaken in people a new sense of responsibility for the world, an ability to conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever, and to be held answerable for its condition one day.” -Vaclav Havel

“The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?” -Jeremy Rifkin

Deep Ecology:

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.” –Leopold’s Land Ethic

“The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, — of sun, and wind, and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford for ever!  And such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rains tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.  Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?  Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” -Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Food For Thought: The Solar Decathlon and Building Greener Homes

“It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient is collective will.”

-Former Vice President Al Gore.  Read more here.