Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen — and What to Do, the first book published by the Lifeboat Foundation, has been awarded the “Peer Reviewed & Approved for Science” seal of approval by the Washington Academy of Sciences.

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  We now have quotes by Ray Kurzweil on our Quotes page. Ray Kurzweil has donated more than $10,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation.

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  Watch robot quadrotors perform the James Bond theme on our Videos page.

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  Carolyn L. Burke, CEO of Integrity Incorporated, joins our Robotics/AI Board.

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  Kerstin Dautenhahn joins our Robotics/AI Board. She coedited Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioral, Social, and Communicative Dimensions.

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  The RPG Eclipse Phase includes the “Singularity Foundation” and “Lifeboat Institute” as player factions. Learn more about this game!

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  Shivon Zilis joins our Neuroscience Board and Robotics/AI Board. Shivon is the Director of Operations at Neuralink, Board Member and Advisor at OpenAI, and Founding Fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab Incubator.

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  Our José Luis Cordeiro has authored the special report A New Renaissance. This report discusses how our current pandemic may lead to a new Renaissance just as The Black Death led to the original Renaissance.

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  Our AIShield program is designed to protect against unfriendly AI (Artificial Intelligence).
   
  Why the first AGI is unlikely to be Friendly AI: Even if it was somehow possible with our primitive tools to design self-awareness into an AI, it is worth noting that the vast majority of AI under development is not being designed to be Friendly AI so we need to be prepared for the first AGI to not be inherently “friendly”.

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  Read Warning Signs for Tomorrow by Anders Sandberg.

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  Read Sir Arthur C. Clarke in 3001: Don’t Panic! which contains the Arthur C. Clarke interview by our José Luis Cordeiro.
   
  Arthur C. Clarke’s final novel, The Last Theorem, coauthored with our Frederik Pohl, was just released!

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  Become famous! Submit contributions to the Lifeboat Foundation endorsed Journals of Personal Cyberconsciousness and Geoethical Nanotechnology.

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  Our LifePreserver program is designed to bring you the latest information about aging research and the progress towards treating age-related diseases. This program also aims to bring you practical information about the steps you can take now to slow the aging process and delay the onset of age-related disease.

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth.
   
  Before the advent of anesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy — a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today. The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations.
   
  So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganized resistance.