Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Greg Miller the American news correspondent on Science with a focus on neuroscience and other areas of biological, behavioral, and social science has published an article on Wired titled ‘Open Your Mind to the New Psychedelic Science’ in which he states “Timothy Leary really screwed things up for science. By abandoning the scientific method for a mystical embrace of hallucinogenic drugs, the Harvard-professor-turned-LSD-evangelist became a symbol of ’60s-era drug-fueled degeneracy. Worse, the ensuing backlash pushed these drugs underground and caused an enormously promising field of research to go dormant for nearly half a century. …But the times they are a-changin’. In recent years, a small cadre of scientists has cautiously rekindled the scientific study of psychedelics. …they reported new findings on how these drugs scramble brain activity in ways that might help explain their mind-bending effects. They’re also slowly building a case that these drugs might help people with depression, anxiety and other disorders. Roughly a dozen small clinical trials are now underway worldwide. But the idea isn’t “take two tabs of acid and call me in the morning.” Instead, these trials are testing the idea that psychedelics taken in a therapist’s office as part of a series of psychotherapy sessions can make talk therapy more effective. …The classic psychedelics, including psilocybin and LSD, stimulate receptors for serotonin, a neurotransmitter that’s also targeted, albeit in different ways, by approved antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs like Prozac and Zoloft. …People in the grips of depression, the thinking goes, are trapped in an endless cycle of critical self-examination, and a little neural desynchronization might help them reboot. …Psychedelic scientists still face obstacles at every step of the process, from getting research funding, to getting the compounds themselves, to publishing the findings…”

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Clive Thompson the 44 year old Canadian freelance journalist, blogger and science technology writer has published an article on the Wired titled ‘No Longer Vaporware: The Internet of Things Is Finally Talking’. Thompson states “…The Internet of Things is the long-prophesied phenomenon of everyday devices talking to one another—and us—online, creating odd new behaviors and efficiencies. Fridges that order food when you’re almost out of butter! Houses that sense when you’re gone and power down! Back in the ’90s, big companies built systems to do tricks like this, but they were expensive, hard to use, and vendor-specific. The hype eventually boiled away. The Internet of Things turned out to be vaporware. Until the past few years, that is, when the landscape shifted from below. … After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, many Japanese worried that the government wasn’t providing adequate data on areas outside the evacuation zone. So some hackers designed customized Geiger counters that automatically updated radioactivity levels on an online map. Soon there were more than 300 jury-rigged all over the country, so the public could see real-time radiation levels. “It was the largest nongovernmental radiation-monitoring network in Japan,” says Chris “Akiba” Wang, one of the hackers. A similar example recently emerged in earthquake prone Chile, where a student modded a seismometer to tweet its readings. It quickly amassed more than 300,000 followers, who were grateful for the early alerts. In essence, the Internet of Things is happening because it has reached the “Apple II stage.” This is the moment when a new technology finally becomes easy enough to use that thousands of people start doing experiments to scratch a personal itch—like Sande with his fan. And the pace of experimentation is going to accelerate, as new gear arrives that makes it even cheaper and easier.”

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Spencer Ackerman the American national security reporter and blogger has published an article on Wired titled ‘Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You’. In the article Ackerman states “The Pentagon wants to make perfectly clear that every time one of its flying robots releases its lethal payload, it’s the result of a decision made by an accountable human being in a lawful chain of command. Human rights groups and nervous citizens fear that technological advances in autonomy will slowly lead to the day when robots make that critical decision for themselves. But according to a new policy directive issued by a top Pentagon official, there shall be no SkyNet, thank you very much. …the Pentagon wants to make sure that there isn’t a circumstance when one of the military’s many Predators, Reapers, drone-like missiles or other deadly robots effectively automatizes the decision to harm a human being. The hardware and software controlling a deadly robot needs to come equipped with “safeties, anti-tamper mechanisms, and information assurance.” The design has got to have proper “human-machine interfaces and controls.” And, above all, it has to operate “consistent with commander and operator intentions and, if unable to do so, terminate engagements or seek additional human operator input before continuing the engagement.” If not, the Pentagon isn’t going to buy it or use it. …Human Rights Watch…among the most influential non-governmental institutions in the world, issued a report warning that new developments in drone autonomy represented the demise of established “legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians.” Its solution: “prohibit the “development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument.”

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