Visions of the Future

“Reality has become just a subgenre of science fiction, ” says the Pulitzer-Prize winning book critic, Michael Dirda. Artists flesh out what our words will be like, as we integrate rapid transformation into who we are and where we’re headed. Speculative fiction, especially, gives us an opportunity to try on change like a suit of clothes to see how it fits. Here we collect some of these foresights.

My Brother is an Idiot

He’ll show up to the party late and talk a big game but then drink too much and promptly pass out in the shower with the water running. I don’t […]

Technological Determinism, Human Decisions

We’ve all heard the stories of inevitability: more and more transistors per square centimeter, with momentous leaps to new computing hardware whenever material capacity reaches its limit. While massively parallel, one-to-many molecular […]

The potential implications of human enhancement is one of the main reasons why I’m at CSPO, so I was excited and a little worried when the trailer for Limitless appeared. […]

The film is set in the not-too-distant future, when an unnamed government uses lifelike cyborgs or “enhanced” humans for undercover work. One of the key cyborgs is The Major, Motoko […]

From Shirow Masamune, the award-winning creator of Appleseed and Dominion, comes “The Ghost in the Shell”, the breakthrough manga that inspired the internationally acclaimed animated film. An epic dystopian tale […]