Further Reading
Jeff Akst. Let's Talk Human Engineering. The Scientist, December 3, 2015.
Article on the December 2015 Human Gene Editing summit, where scientists were discussing ethics of and limits on human genetic engineering.
Jeff Akst. Year in Review: CRISPR Blossoms. The Scientist, December 16, 2015.
CRISPR is a relatively new technique allowing for low cost, very precise gene editing
Anthropocene (Wikipedia), What is the Anthropocene and are we in it ? Smithsonian.com.
Charles Arthur. Robot panic peaked in 2015 – so where will AI go next? The Observer, Sunday 27 December 2015 .
Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. In: Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey (editors). The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge University Press, 2014
Nick Bostrom. What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? TED, 2015
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
University of Cambridge (UK) based institute, studies extinction level threats of present and future technology. Co founded by Jaan Tallin (ex Skype), Huw Price (philosopher, University of Cambridge) and Martin Rees (astrophysicist, University of Cambridge).
Boer Deng. Machine ethics: The robot’s dilemma. Nature 523, 24–26 (02 July 2015)
Thomas Dietterich and Eric (2015). "Rise of Concerns about AI: Reflections and Directions" (PDF).Communications of the ACM 58 (10): 38–40.
Le Cong, F. Ann Ran, David Cox, Shuailiang Lin, Robert Barrett, Naomi Habib, Patrick D. Hsu, Xuebing Wu, Wenyan Jiang, Luciano A. Marraffini, Feng Zhang. Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems. Science 15 Feb 2013: Vol. 339, Issue 6121, pp. 819-823 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231143
Seminal paper on CRISPR-Cas9, 1 of 3.
Jennifer Doudna. We can now edit our DNA. But let's do it wisely. TED Global, London September 2015
One of the inventors of CRISPR-Cas9 explains what it is, and makes a case for discussing the ethical implications.
Maureen Dowd. Elon Musk's Billion Dollar Crusade to Stop the AI Apocalypse. Vanity Fair, April 2017.
Editing humanity. A new technique for manipulating genes holds great promise—but rules are needed to govern its us. The Economist, August 22, 2015.
Richard Feynman. There is plenty of room at the bottom. Lecture given at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Transcript published at Caltech Engineering and Science, Volume 23:5, February 1960, pp 22-36
Forward looking talk about miniturisation and the nano scale
Founded in 2005, part of the University of Oxford Faculty of Philosophy and the Martin School. Current Director is Nick Bostrom (AI Ethics philosopher).
Cambridge, US based institute founded in March 2014 by Jaan Tallin (Skype) amongst others and scientific advisors such as Nick Bostrom (University of Oxford), George Church (Harvard), Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley), Elon Musk (SpaceX & Tesla), Stephen Hawkins (Cambridge University) amongst others. Mission is '"to catalyze and support research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges". Focussing on keeping AI beneficial as well as reducing risks from nuclear weapons and biotechnology. See also this open letter on autonomous weapons.
I.J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965
Jeff Goodell. Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1. Rolling Stone, Feb 29 2016.
We may be on the verge of creating a new life form, one that could mark not only an evolutionary breakthrough, but a potential threat to our survival as a species
James Hamblin, But what would the end of humanity mean for me? The Atlantic, May 19. 2014
Jeremy Howard, The Wonderful and Terrifying Implications of Machines that Learn, TEDxBrussels, December 2014.
Jeet Heer. The New Utopians. New Republic, November 2015.
Eric Horvitz. One-Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Reflections and Framing. Stanford University, 2014.
Humanity Plus. Humanity Plus Magazine.
Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity. Science 17 Aug 2012:Vol. 337, Issue 6096, pp. 816-821. DOI: 10.1126/science.1225829
Seminal paper on CRISPR-Cas9, 2 of 3.
Joichi Ito and Kevin Slavin. Extended Intelligence. Draft of a MIT Medialab discussion on Extended Intelligence, PubPub, retrieved Feb 28, 2016.
Bill Joy. Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. Wired, 2000.
Seminal article arguing that robotics, genetic engineering and biotech will make humans endangered species - if we don't take care.
Floris van Kaayk. The Modular Body.
Vinod Khosla. Is AI and existential threat to humanity?
Question on Quora, with a range of comments from well know AI researchers such as Yoshua Bengio and Andrew Ng.
Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence.
Luddite (Wikipedia)
Machine Intelligence Research Institute
Alexis C. Madrigal. The case against killer robots, from a guy actually working on artificial intelligence. Fusion, Feb 27, 2015.
Quotes Andrew Ng, Baidu & Stanford: “I don’t work on preventing AI from turning evil for the same reason that I don’t work on combating overpopulation on the planet Mars”
Prashant Mali, Luhan Yang, Kevin M. Esvelt, John Aach, Marc Guell, James E. DiCarlo, Julie E. Norville, George M. Church. RNA-Guided Human Genome Engineering via Cas9. Science 15 Feb 2013: Vol. 339, Issue 6121, pp. 823-826. DOI: 10.1126/science.1232033
Seminal CRISPR-Cas9 paper - 3 of 3.
Amy Maxmen. The Genesis Machine. Wired, August 2015.
Story the on invention of CRISPR-CAS9, the latest breakthrough in low cost and precise gene editing, gene drives to change the genetic make up of entire populations. and the potential impact. See also CRISP(Wikipedia), a movie explaining CRISPR-CAS9 by MIT, the various Science papers quoted, and the articles by Zhang and Zimmer referenced below.
Brian Merchant. You've got Luddites all Wrong. Motherboard, 2014.
Thomas More. Utopia, 1516. (Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, British Library Dreamers and DIssenters ).
George Musser. Consciousness creep.
Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness. Aeon, February 2016.
OpenAI and it's in augural statement: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and the OpenAI team. Introducing Open AI. December 11, 2015.
Michael Sainato. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates Warn About Artificial Intelligence. The Observer, August 19, 2015.
Anders Sandberg, We can programme you to live forever: The Register Winter Lectures, 2015
Singularity (Wikipedia)
Singularity University & Singularity Hub
Kevin Slavin. How algorithms shape our world. TedGlobal, 2011.
SFTN: The Singularity, Futurology, and Transhuman Network. Reddit.
Derek Thompson. A World without Work. The Atlantic, July/August 2015.
Transhumanism (Wikipedia).
Roey Tzezana. Singularity: Explain It to Me Like I’m 5-Years-Old. Futurism, March 2017.
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (Wikipedia)
Alan Yuhas. Would you bet against sex robots? AI 'could leave half of world unemployed'. The Guardian, February 13, 2016.
Vernor Vinge. Technological Singularity. VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.
Sarah Zhang. Everything You Need to Know About CRISPR, the New Tool that Edits DNA. Gizmodo, May 2015.
Carl Zimmer. Breakthrough DNA Editor Borne of Bacteria. Quanta, February 2015