A new thriller starring Ben Kingsley and Ryan Reynolds explores the idea of transferring consciousness from one body to another. Unlike Freaky Friday, or the myriad of other family movies and comedies that have explored the idea, this one actually explores the science of the process.
In the movie Self/less, a rich business man (Kingsley) is dying of cancer. However, he is able to prolong his “self” by transferring his consciousness from one body to another. In the movie, this medical procedure is called “shedding.”
You may be wondering how such a far out concept can actually have any science to it. I wondered the same thing, so I asked a neuroscientist.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a screening and press conference for the movie Chappie. It is a great movie about a police robot named Chappie that is downloaded with a program that makes him self-aware.
At the press conference, Neill Blomkamp, the director, script writer, and the guy who came up with the idea for the movie, said he wasn’t sure if humanity could ever produce the type of artificial intelligence (AI) in Chappie. I was curious if that was possible myself.
In order to answer that question, I was able to interview the founder and director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at Caltech and the University of Arizona, Dr. Wolfgang Fink. He is working on building an autonomous ” planetary field geologist” robot for NASA.
Your friendly neighborhood cyborg cop, RoboCop, is back. You may have already seen the new movie remake of the 1987 classic. Thinking back on the original movie, as a kid, I felt it offered a depressing version of the future, scary tech in the hands of bad people. Now as an adult, it makes me further wonder. Are we ready to handle the technology offered up in the movie? We better be, because now 27 years later, it’s nearly here.
I got the chance to talk to filmmaker and futurist Jason Silva about these topics. He suggests that not only should we not be afraid of our bold new world, but we may all already be cyborgs.
NASA astronaut Michael Massimino has logged over 30 hours of spacewalking during two missions on the space shuttle to service the Hubble Space Telescope. He has performed four spacewalks, the longest of which was around eight hours. I was lucky enough to get to talk to him about Gravity, a new movie starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney about two astronauts and a spacewalk gone badly.
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Copyright 2013 Alejandro T. Rojas.
