Robert M. Geraci

A new Star Wars film premieres this week, accompanied by the kind of social ferment usually reserved for presidential elections—or in the case of this year, papal visits. Beyond George Lucas’ classic…

This year, 2014, is the 40 th anniversary of the game Dungeons & Dragons, the pen-and-paper role-playing game that not only launched an industry but provoked a wide-ranging cultural shift. In…

Scientists like roboticist Hans Moravec and inventor Ray Kurzweil advocate uploading our minds into robots or virtual reality so that we can live forever. They believe that our minds can be replicated outside of our brains if we simply copy the pattern of neuro-chemical activity taking place in our bodies. That pattern, rather than the brains in which the pattern takes shape, “is” the personality. If it can be transferred to a digital medium, it can be made immortal. Surpassingly intelligent robots—our Mind Children, according to Moravec—will populate the universe, converting physical reality into a cosmic interweb of thinking machines.