Intelligent Machines
Nvidia’s deep-learning chips may give medicine a shot in the arm.
The company sees medicine as the next big market for its machine-learning hardware.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2582
Why Aging Is a Disease
Posted in biotech/medical, economics, ethics, policy, robotics/AI, space, transhumanism
The first of my major #Libertarian policy articles for my California gubernatorial run, which broadens the foundational “non-aggression principle” to so-called negative natural phenomena. “In my opinion, and to most #transhumanist libertarians, death and aging are enemies of the people and of liberty (perhaps the greatest ones), similar to foreign invaders running up our shores.” A coordinated defense agianst them is philosophically warranted.
Many societies and social movements operate under a foundational philosophy that often can be summed up in a few words. Most famously, in much of the Western world, is the Golden Rule: Do onto others as you want them to do to you. In libertarianism, the backbone of the political philosophy is the non-aggression principle (NAP). It argues it’s immoral for anyone to use force against another person or their property except in cases of self-defense.
A challenge has recently been posed to the non-aggression principle. The thorny question libertarian transhumanists are increasingly asking in the 21st century is: Are so-called natural acts or occurrences immoral if they cause people to suffer? After all, taken to a logical philosophical extreme, cancer, aging, and giant asteroids arbitrarily crashing into the planet are all aggressive, forceful acts that harm the lives of humans.
Traditional libertarians throw these issues aside, citing natural phenomena as unable to be morally forceful. This thinking is supported by most people in Western culture, many of whom are religious and fundamentally believe only God is aware and in total control of the universe. However, transhumanists —many who are secular like myself—don’t care about religious metaphysics and whether the universe is moral. (It might be, with or without an almighty God.) What transhumanists really care about are ways for our parents to age less, to make sure our kids don’t die from leukemia, and to save the thousands of species that vanish from Earth every year due to rising temperatures and the human-induced forces.
Today, Elon Musk stated that updates regarding his neural lace, which is meant to augment the human mind, are coming next month. In October, Bryan Johnson announced a $100 million investment to put computers in our brains. And so, a race is on to hack human intelligence.
The age of the machine is well underway, and there is a very good chance that humanity will be left behind. Artificial intelligence is beating us at poker. It is beating us at Go. It is saving lives by identifying diseases when human doctors fail. It is running our grocery stores. It is driving our cars. AI is even making other AI.
Soon, very soon, our computers will surpass us in every skill imaginable.
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If an overhyped vegetable existed before marketers coined the term superfood — and long before Oprah Winfrey chatted up acai berries with Dr. Oz — look no further than spinach. (Here’s to Popeye, eating the stuff by the can to inflate his biceps.) Spinach alone, of course, won’t pump anyone up. But it does have a few physical properties of the type that excite biomedical engineers. Spinach grows a network of veins, for instance, that thread through its leaves in a way similar to blood vessels through a human heart.
These leafy veins allowed researchers at Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute to give a new meaning to heart-healthy spinach. The tissue engineers, as they reported recently in the journal Biomaterials, stripped green spinach leaves of their cells. The spinach turned translucent. The scientists seeded the gaps that the plant cells left behind with human heart tissue. Heart cells, in clusters, beat for up to three weeks in this unusual environment.
The inspiration for the human-plant fusion came over lunch — and, yes, the leafy greens were involved — when WPI bioengineers Glenn Gaudette and Joshua Gershlak began to brainstorm new ways to tackle a deadly medical problem: the lack of donor organs. Of the more than 100,000 people on the donor list, nearly two dozen people die each day while waiting for an organ transplant.
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Researchers have developed a line immortal stem cells that allow them to generate an unlimited supply of artificial red blood cells on demand.
If these artificial blood cells pass clinical trials, they’ll be far more efficient for medical use than current red blood cell products, which have to be generated from donor blood — and would be a huge deal for patients with rare blood types, who often struggle to find matching blood donors.
The idea isn’t for these immortal stem cells to replace blood donation altogether — when it comes to regular blood transfusions, donated blood still does the trick.
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This is big: Is the Singularity a step closer?
Tesla Inc founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk has launched a company called Neuralink Corp through which computers could merge with human brains, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Neuralink is pursuing what Musk calls the “neural lace” technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts, the Journal reported. (on.wsj.com/2naUATf)
Musk has not made an official announcement, but Neuralink was registered in California as a “medical research” company last July, and he plans on funding the company mostly by himself, a person briefed on the plans told the Journal.
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