What Are You Reading 2014 - Page 64

I dont know about the Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep book but imo Blade runner is not that great for a movie but people loved it for the theme. The concept of such dystopian futuristic society that the movie introduced was simply way ahead of its time thus create a shock, provoking creativity in viewers. However in the 21st century, its pretty hard to re live such experience again as the concept has been talked about in many many movies and books.

The closest ones that should be mentioned first is definitely Ghost in the Shell. Both the original movies and the SAC series introduced a great range of views over a society where Android and Cyborg were widely popular and accepted among human. It raised a lot of questions about identities, individualities, existence and consciousness. What does it mean to be human when your physical bodies is replaced by mechanical parts? What do "living" and "dying" mean when your consciousness could be uploaded and stored in the virtual world, indestructible? What define individuality when most human race are connected via a network, sharing thoughts and making decisions as a whole single unit?
Follow ghost in the shell there are a lot that decided to expand on the same topic, most noteworthy is probably Matrix trilogy and the Matrix Animated series. But very recently a non-fiction, scientific book of Michio Kaku was also attempted to retrace the same route but with the assist of the latest technological advancement in neuroscience. Definitely check out The Future of the Mind if you wish to explore further.



That was human consciousness in a cyborg age. The other expansion from blade runner is android and AI exploration. It helped movies like A.I. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720/, I Robot http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/, Moon, 2001 Space odyssey(i know this came first), Transcendence.... Very interesting and highly underdeveloped topic about technological singularity with many many layers of complexity from every field of modern science research to computer science to psychology to philosophy. There are not that many good books about this that i know of but the topic is brought up every now and then in big tech Q/A sessions like the latest Facebook Oculus VR. Oh yeah the Ender's Games series also did a wonderful job of visualizing such structures and imagining its potential growth and impact.

Its funny because if you work in tech or in finance firms that is close to tech, you could notice how close things are to reach this point. We had a lot of advancement in material research as the mobile field developed. Fusion nuclear, which supposed to solve the power problem, is being pushed to construction phase and have gained a lot of investment in the last decades in research. Obama poured money into the brain initiative with all the alzheimer lobbies happening. AI field is rapidly growing with new GPU architectures. More importantly, it is directly assisting the DNA and brain studies while the neuro theorist studies is improving the AI construction (Redwood Center is definitely my watch right now). Things are convoluting, colliding. Its exciting and scary to live in this day and age.