transhumanism

The technologies that may be dead-ends for efforts to construct a self-aware artificial mind could easily be of great value as non-conscious assistants to human minds.

Formal education in science and engineering centers on teaching facts and problem-solving skills in a series of narrow topics.

It is true that a few topics, although narrow in content, have such broad application that they are themselves integrative: These include (at a bare minimum) substantial chunks of mathematics and the basics of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, with the basics of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics close behind.

By knowing the outlines of a field, I mean knowing the answers, to some reasonable approximation, to questions like these: What are the physical phenomena? What are their magnitudes? What are their preconditions? How well are they understood? How well can they be modeled? What do they make possible? What do they forbid?

The Scivestor Emerging Technologies Workshop