Lifeboat Foundation

Technology » Forum Email Print Ban Killer Robots before They Become Weapons of Mass Destruction By Peter Asaro | August 7, 2015 Vladislav Ociacia/Thinkstock SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Last week the Future of Life Institute released a letter signed by some 1,500 artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and technology researchers. Among them were celebrities of science and the technology industry—Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—along with public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett. The letter called for an international ban on offensive autonomous weapons, which could target and fire weapons without meaningful human control.

This week is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together killing over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It took 10 years before the physicist Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with nine other prominent scientists and intellectuals, issued a letter calling for global action to address the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. They were motivated by the atomic devastation in Japan but also by the escalating arms race of the Cold War that was rapidly and vastly increasing the number, destructive capability, and efficient delivery of nuclear arms, draining vast resources and putting humanity at risk of total destruction. They also note in their letter that those who knew the most about the effects of such weapons were the most concerned and pessimistic about their continued development and use.

The Future of Life Institute letter is significant for the same reason: It is signed by a large group of those who know the most about AI and robotics, with some 1,500 signatures at its release on July 28 and more than 17,000 today. Signatories include many current and former presidents, fellows and members of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society; editors of leading AI and robotics journals; and key players in leading artificial-intelligence companies such as Google DeepMind and IBM’s Watson team. As Max Tegmark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and a founder of the Future of Life Institute, told Motherboard, “This is the AI experts who are building the technology who are speaking up and saying they don’t want anything to do with this.”

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A human rejuvenation trial is set to go ahead in October, in which victims
of Alzheimer’s disease will be given a transfusion of young blood.

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“Increased Internet connectivity among cars, appliances, major infrastructure and everyday devices has opened the door to new threats of digital terrorism, say experts at the international digital security conference Black Hat.”

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Responding to this nugget from Engadget:

Tokyo’s district court has ruled that it’s not possible for people to own bitcoin, and therefore they cannot sue for compensation in the wake of Mt. Gox’s collapse.

The ruling comes days after the head of the world’s largest bitcoin exchange was arrested on charges of fraud. Judge Masumi Kurachi felt that bitcoins do not possess “tangible qualities” to constitute owned property. Mt. Gox held thousands of individual accounts, and so there’s plenty of angry customers looking for compensation.

Continue reading “Japanese Court: Bitcoin Cannot be Owned” »

Study uncovers a role for a protein that works as a master regulator of regeneration in the skin.

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My new Huff Post Op-Ed on the Immortality Bus and transhumanism: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/why-a-presidenti…28826.html And if you haven’t donated something to the Indiegogo campaign for the bus, please consider doing so, as there’s only four days left and we’re currently short $9000. Anyone from any country can donate. Please also share the campaign. Thanks! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/immortality-bus-with-pres…406#/story

On my tour called the “Immortality Bus,” I’m hoping to share with others that we should support a society and culture that is strongly pro-science and pro-longevity. My team and I plan to have embedded journalists aboard the bus, documenting our trip and enlivening the conversation.

Unfortunately, many people in America and around the world — especially those who believe in afterlives — are neutral or even oppose stopping biological death and aging with science. They feel it challenges what is natural in the human species. Transhumanists call these people “deathists,” those who believe and accept that death is a desirable fate.

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via The Spudd.

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It can be all too easy to drift through life on automatic, forever putting things off, but statistics and data can give a physicality to things we barely notice or consider most of the time. These diagrams might just give you an entirely new perspective on your life.

Read the full article at The Longevity Reporter: http://www.longevityreporter.org/blog/2015/7/16/think-80-yea…hink-again.

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