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.

How do we fix science journalism ? Simple: we don't. We let it sink, and be reborn in a different form.

It is rather utopic to insist that in a world of changing means of communications, a world where printed matter is losing ground to the advantage of electronic media, the diffusion of scientific information may or shall stay the same.

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: