Reader

“here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?”
― Matt Harvey

“Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron, often considered the first software engineer, dreamed about doing calculations by machine. This pair was a century ahead of their time. They developed concepts such as stored programs, self-modifying code, addressable memory, conditional branching, and com-puter programming, all of which were foundations for modern compu-ting.”
― Rico Roho, Primer for Alien Contact

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans.

A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?”

Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach”
― GaryLFrancione