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To-do lists are a great way to plan your week, and it turns out they're also not a bad tool for futurists either. We've put together 20 to-do list items that anyone can use to stop environmental disaster, speed the invention of artificial intelligence, jumpstart a moon colony, and help everyone become posthuman. Usually it seems like ordinary people can't contribute to massive projects that require scientific minds as well as philosophers and other specialists. But there are actually a lot of things you can do. Over the past week we've posted four separate to-do lists for futurists, and now we bring them all together so you can print them out, tuck them in your pocket, and start checking items off to change the world. More »
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Pundits from Bill McKibben to Susan Greenfield have written scare manifestos about the horrors of a posthuman future where everybody has souped-up DNA and can change their sexes like changing clothes. But here at io9, we are all about the posthuman future: we want to download data directly into our brains, grow a new set of arms (and then take them off again), get cybernetic implants that let us feel electro-magnetic fields, and house nano-colonies in our guts that keep us cancer-free. Plus, we want to have emotional relationships with robots that go beyond hurling our cell phones across the room and crooning to our spastic Linux boxes. If you want to be posthuman too, or transhuman or cyborgian, you'll be waiting a long time. But we've got five things you can put on your to-do list today to make all of us more posthuman by this time next year. More »
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The next stage of human expansion will probably be into space, and the best place to start will be with a moon colony. Sure it's not as cool as Mars, but it's close by, which means easy rescue from Earth if things go wrong and a thriving tourism industry to support early colonization efforts. Maybe we can even build a space elevator to help people get there and back really quickly. Obviously we'd all love to visit the moon colony tomorrow, but it's not likely to exist for another 30 years at least. What can you put on your to-do list now to make sure the moon colony gets built faster? More »
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One of the most popular futurist hobbyhorses is the idea that artificially intelligent machines will soon become ubiquitous and change the world forever. This is an old dream, which may have started with Isaac Asimov's idea that superintelligent computers would take over the geo-political management of Earth (see the final story in I, Robot) and create a more rational world. Early computer geeks like Alan Turing imagined that AI would simply be a perfected human brain, sentient but far more powerful and capable of solving problems humans can't. Most scientists and futurists agree that true AI has the potential to create a better world, but what can you put on your to-do list today that will help make AI a reality in fifty years? Actually, there's quite a lot. More »
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