In my mind, UBI (universal basic income) and democracy are incompatible, at least in the forms we know them. The UBI idea is part of many utopias and it’s a beautiful thing. To have your basic needs as a human right, the same way as you have health care in…

My first (intuitive) response to somebody asking me about the meaning of life is that I don’t understand the question. Why does life suppose to have meaning? The question is more a declaration of a need for purpose and less a real curiosity about your position. The traditional term meaning…

What is consciousness? Is it possible to have an artificial one? How can we say that we are looking at one? If we accept that someone (or something) has one, how do we treat it? If consciousness is a spectrum (continuous feature) where is the acceptance threshold? …

Is your own existence (as an experience) your measure of real-world existence? If it is not, what is? Can you imagine something impossible and new, something which hasn’t been used already by fiction or media (film, tv, etc)? …

“The American dream”, “The land of the free”, “Equal opportunities” are powerful myths. They work well because they are based on intrinsic (from my liberal perspective) human values as freedom, opportunity and tolerance, and because of the all-mighty propaganda machine behind them. As with most myths, they are based on…

Couple a of days ago I was rewatching the movie “Wall-E”. I like it a lot, mostly for its thought-provoking quality. The most curious thing was the robot Wall-E was more relatable than humans, he (it) has a personality, character, stamina and he is full of quirks. He reacts emotionally…

Human intuition is a powerful tool, sometimes indistinguishable from our rational process (as being part of it). An observant person would notice some caveats: even at times, it can surprise us, intuition is mostly conservative. It depends on the person and their relevant history. intuition has a strong correlation with…

I love what-if thought experiments. Maybe because I’m a sci-fi fan, maybe because science often is about extreme and/or pure conditions (yes I’m a researcher). The first example that pops up is the trolley problem (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). Self-driving cars must have some default behavior which one to kill/protect: the driver…