Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), an international conference that brings together designers, developers, manufacturers, and distributors of consumer electronics products. CES reaches across global markets, connects the industry, and enables consumer innovations to grow and thrive. It was quite an amazing experience, full of new e-readers, 3D TVs, holographic displays, multi-touch screens, and some of the hottest new tech gadgets around.

Still, I couldn’t help but be most proud of this glorious yellow Albert Einstein t-shirt that I nabbed at the Promise Technology booth.  It was well worth the 20 minutes of technical jargon I had to endure while listening to a pitch for the company’s new Smartstor Zero network storage device.

Thanks, Mike Treder, for sharing this. Mike’s the managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. I’m a big fan of Mike’s writings, although some may think we are not of the same species. Almost everything about us can be described as polar opposite. He’s even a damn Yankees fan! But we do share our zest for opening doors to public participation, particularly in matters of technology policy.

Mike will be speaking at an upcoming seminar titled Biopolitics of Popular Culture, as will David Brin (author of The Postman) who wrote this piece for SciCheer last year.

If you register TODAY, you can cash in on the early bird discount.

Here’s the program description I copied from IEET’s website:

Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.

Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? [Note from SciCheer: See interview with Ray Kurzweil for nonfiction example of someone who wants to live a much longer than normal life.]  What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?

During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television.