End of the World Sci-Fi


Oryx and Crake (2003)
The Year of the Flood (2009)
by Margaret Atwood


In Atwood's world of Oryx and Crake, biotechnology has ruined the world, in more ways than one. As the result of a near-omnipotent ability to manipulate biology, society has become structured around biotech consumer products and services, with a major division between the consumers and the powerful biotech companies. The consumers (the "pleebs") live in a polluted, crime-ridden world outside of the highly secure, isolated, wealthy compounds where the employees of the biotech corporations live.

There are currently two ambitious projects straddling artificial intelligence and neuroscience, each with the aim of building big brains that work. One is The Blue Brain Project, and it describes its aim in the following one-liner:

In the past week or two, there have been several news stories and blogs (including here on SB) written in regards to a paper that came out this month titled, "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent". It would be easy for the untrained eye to read such a headline and think, "gee.... this was published in a peer reviewed journal, so this must really be something..." However, if you read through the paper in detail, and look at the longitudinal data methods used for the analysis, one begins to question the validity of such broad assumptions.