The author's new essay collection, "Dead and Alive," addresses debates on representation in literature, feminism, and how our phones have radicalized us. Since Zadie Smith published her début novel, " White Teeth," twenty-five years ago, she has been a bold and original voice in literature. But those who aren't familiar with Smith's work outside of fiction are missing out. As an essayist, in and other publications, Smith writes with great nuance about culture, technology, gentrification, politics. "There's really not a topic that wouldn't benefit from her insight," David Remnick says. He spoke with Smith about her new collection of essays, " Dead and Alive ."

The United Nations Human Rights Council recently adopted a draft resolution entitled Neurotechnology and Human Rights. It's aimed at protecting humanity from devices that can "record, interfere with, or modify brain activity." To describe the risks, the resolution uses euphemistic phrases like cognitive engineering, mental privacy, and cognitive liberty, but what we're really talking about is mind control. I applaud the UN for taking up the issue of mind control, but neurotechnology is not our greatest threat on this front. That's because it involves sophisticated hardware ranging from "brain implants" to wearable devices that can detect and transmit signals through the skull.

Soon, we won't need to use the Help function. The computer will sense that we have a problem and come to the rescue by itself. This is one of the possible implications of new research at University of Copenhagen and University of Helsinki. "We can make a computer edit images entirely based on thoughts generated by human subjects. The computer has absolutely no prior information about which features it is supposed to edit or how. Nobody has ever done this before," says Associate Professor Tuukka Ruotsalo, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen.

The nanotechnology is the science, engineering and technology that are developed to nano-scale, around 1 to 100 nanometers. One of nanotechnology main applications is the nanobots, machines that can construct and handle objects at an atomic level and that are capable of moving through the circulatory system.1 The nanotechnology has become a billionaire industry and since it has multiple potential applications in human beings, there is a great interest in human experimentation. However, the nanotechnology acts at atomic level and for that reason the experimentation in humans is high risk, which causes an evident lack of volunteers. Therefore, the transnational nanotechnology companies would be resorting to criminal methods to get human experimentation subjects; thus, they would be using violence, swindle, extortion and organized crime.2–4 Recent researches reveal evidences that the technological transnational companies, in illicit association with USA, European Community and China governments and the corrupt Latin American governments, have created an organization that is developing mainly in Latin America a secret, forced and illicit neuroscientific human experimentation with invasive neurotechnology, brain nanobots, microchips and implants to execute neuroscientific projects,2–5 which can have even led scientists to win Medicine Nobel Prizes6 based on this illicit human experimentation at the expense of Latin Americans' health.

Cory Doctorow, 49, is a British-Canadian blogger, science fiction author and tech activist. He has held various academic posts and is a visiting professor of the Open University. His latest novel, Attack Surface, was published earlier this month. The protagonist in your new novel tries to offset her job at a tech company where she is working for a repressive regime by helping some of its targets evade detection. Do you think many Silicon Valley employees feel uneasy about their work?

DARPA, European Human Brain Project, and Pentagon advisor Dr. James Giordano describes neuronanorobotic Brain to computer interface mind control weapons for remote monitoring and manipulation of brains neural circuitry. This allows an individuals consciousness to be cloned onto their very own digital avatar in a Sentient World Simulation on a supercomputer. A direct link between a targeted individual and their digital avatar exists so that everything done in the real world occurs in the computer simulation. By manipulating the digital avatar in the computer simulation a persons thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, and behavior are manipulated in the real world. This is remote mind control.

Racing drones has become fairly common place in engineering departments at universities, but students from the University of Florida took it to a new level by controlling the flying robots with their minds. The students controlled the drones using technology called brain-computer interface, Juan Gilbert, endowed professor and chair of UF's computer and information science and engineering program, explained in a video posted Friday. When people are hooked up to BCI technology, it gives them the ability to control an external device with their mind -- sort of like mastering the force or telekinesis. It's actually the same technology that gave a paralyzed man the ability to walk again. The students wore electroencephalogram (EEG) headbands that are able to measure electrical impulses from the brain.

If you ask Alexa what chemtrails are, you might be surprised by what she says. The voice assistant has been spouting a government conspiracy theory as an explanation for the oft-debated condensation trails. Alexa has been recorded telling users: 'Chemtrails are trails left by aircraft [that] are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials'. Amazon says it has taken steps to fix the issue since the error was first discovered by Mashable. Amazon's Alexa voice assistant has been telling users that chemtrails are part of a government-issued conspiracy theory.

Sensor-equipped headbands could leverage neurological data to allow users to open and operate apps with their thoughts, no gestures required. Hands-free, brain-controlled virtual environments are coming, as startups work to "hack" the human mind and use brain data to control prosthetic limbs, keyboards, and other machines. Now, a new patent from Microsoft (granted January 8th) highlights a device that would decode EEG readings to allow users to launch and operate certain apps using their minds. Download this presentation from the CB Insights Innovation Summit to see the technologies, business models and distribution innovations that you should watch for in the next 5 to 10 years. Users would "train" the device to recognize how their neuro signals respond when they focus on a certain object, and algorithms would learn from their brains' behavior.

For robots to do what we want, they need to understand us. Too often, this means having to meet them halfway: teaching them the intricacies of human language, for example, or giving them explicit commands for very specific tasks. But what if we could develop robots that were a more natural extension of us and that could actually do whatever we are thinking? A team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University is working on this problem, creating a feedback system that lets people correct robot mistakes instantly with nothing more than their brains. Using data from an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor that records brain activity, the system can detect if a person notices an error as a robot performs an object-sorting task.