Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: business – Page 243

The exponential potential of longevity technologies.

Jim Mellon became a billionaire by pouncing on a wide variety of opportunities, from the dawn of business privatization in Russia to uranium mining in Africa and real estate in Germany. But all of that might eventually look small, he says, compared to the money to be made in the next decade or so from biotechnologies that will increase human longevity well past 100.

The British investor is so enthusiastic about these technologies that he co-authored a 2017 book about them, Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity, and launched a company, Juvenescence Ltd., to capitalize on them. “Juvenescence” is a real word — it’s the state of being youthful. Says Mellon, who is 61: “I’m hoping that this stuff works on me as well as on my portfolio.”

Juvenescence Ltd., which has raised $62.5 million from Mellon and some partners, has invested in or is close to confirming investments in nine biotech companies. He won’t discuss most of them. But one of the deals was an 11 percent stake in Insilico Medicine, a company applying machine-learning techniques to drug discovery. Insilico Medicine and Mellon’s company also formed a joint venture called Juvenescence AI to investigate the therapeutic properties of specific compounds. Mellon is particularly optimistic that this venture can develop a “senolytic” drug that helps the body clear out cells that have stopped dividing and can damage other cells.

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  • There has been a 14X increase in the number of active AI startups since 2000. Crunchbase, VentureSource, and Sand Hill Econometrics were also used for completing this analysis with AI startups in Crunchbase cross-referenced to venture-backed companies in the VentureSource database. Any venture-backed companies from the Crunchbase list that were identified in the VentureSource database were included.

  • The share of jobs requiring AI skills has grown 4.5X since 2013., The growth of the share of US jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform was calculated by first identifying AI-related jobs using titles and keywords in descriptions. Job growth is a calculated as a multiple of the share of jobs on the Indeed platform that required AI skills in the U.S. starting in January 2013. The study also calculated the growth of the share of jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform, by country. Despite the rapid growth of the Canada and UK. AI job markets, Indeed.com reports they are respectively still 5% and 27% of the absolute size of the US AI job market.

  • Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are the three most in-demand skills on Monster.com. Just two years ago NLP had been predicted to be the most in-demand skill for application developers creating new AI apps. In addition to skills creating AI apps, machine learning techniques, Python, Java, C++, experience with open source development environments, Spark, MATLAB, and Hadoop are the most in-demand skills. Based on an analysis of Monster.com entries as of today, the median salary is $127,000 in the U.S. for Data Scientists, Senior Data Scientists, Artificial Intelligence Consultants and Machine Learning Managers.

  • Error rates for image labeling have fallen from 28.5% to below 2.5% since 2010. AI’s inflection point for Object Detection task of the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (LSVRC) Competition occurred in 2014. On this specific test, AI is now more accurate than human These findings are from the competition data from the leaderboards for each LSVRC competition hosted on the ImageNet website.

  • Global revenues from AI for enterprise applications is projected to grow from $1.62B in 2018 to $31.2B in 2025 attaining a 52.59% CAGR in the forecast period. Image recognition and tagging, patient data processing, localization and mapping, predictive maintenance, use of algorithms and machine learning to predict and thwart security threats, intelligent recruitment, and HR systems are a few of the many enterprise application use cases predicted to fuel the projected rapid growth of AI in the enterprise. Source: Statista.

  • 84% of enterprises believe investing in AI will lead to greater competitive advantages. 75% believe that AI will open up new businesses while also providing competitors new ways to gain access to their markets. 63% believe the pressure to reduce costs will require the use of AI. Source: Statista.

  • 87% of current AI adopters said they were using or considering using AI for sales forecasting and for improving e-mail marketing. 61% of all respondents said that they currently used or were planning to use AI for sales forecasting. The following graphic compares adoption rates of current AI adopters versus all respondents. Source: Statista.

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Some individuals worry they will discover things about their DNA that will be frightening — namely, the risks they run of contracting various diseases — and not know how to move forward with the information. Professional scientific skeptics contend the information may not even be as accurate as claimed, and lead people to make questionable health decisions. But there’s another type of risk that consumers aren’t focusing on as much, and it’s a big one: privacy. There is nothing more private than your personal genetic information, and sending away for a personal genome kit means sharing your DNA with the testing companies. What do they do with it, beyond providing consumers with genetic and health assessments?

Consumer DNA genetic testing kits are a booming business, and the biggest risk isn’t necessarily uncovering a health scare; it’s what these companies may do, or be forced to do, with your genetic data.

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One night, as I was putting my daughter to bed and waiting for her to fall asleep, I tried to think of some new markets for space utilization.

We often hear about attempts to find industrial uses for microgravity for growing crystals, for purification of electronic materials (which is an actual thing with ACME Advanced Materials: http://www.a2-m.com/), maybe growth of certain metal foams, etc. However, in space, you’re in both a hard vacuum and not physically resting on anything, so you can spin up something, and it will simply keep on spinning (stably, if you spin it around the correct axis) nearly indefinitely without any additional energy input and no wear on bearings or anything. So in fact, you can get basically any gravity level you want, including HYPERgravity, nearly for free.

What are the applications of this?

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Autonomous deliveries and drones

UPS execs insist that the UPS driver is a core element to its success and the face of the company, but they have tested the use of drone deliveries for some applications including dropping essential supplies in Rwanda and demonstrating how medicine could be delivered to islands. In rural areas, where drones have open air to execute deliveries and the distance between stops makes it challenging for the drivers to be efficient, drones launched from the roofs of UPS trucks offer a solid solution to cut costs and improve service. Drones could also be deployed in UPS sorting facilities and warehouses to get items on high shelves or in remote areas.

The technology used by UPS generates a cache of data that opens up even more opportunities to become more efficient, improve the customer experience, innovate delivery solutions, and more. From optimizing the UPS network to driving operational improvements, big data and artificial intelligence are at the core of UPS’s business performance.

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During Hurricane Katrina and other severe storms that have hit New Orleans, power outages, flooding and wind damage combined to cut off people from clean drinking water, food, medical care, shelter, prescriptions and other vital services.

In a year-long project, researchers at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories teamed up with the City of New Orleans to analyze ways to increase community resilience and improve the availability of critical lifeline services during and after severe weather.

The team used historical hurricane scenarios to model how storms cause localized flooding, disrupt the electrical system and cut off parts of the community from lifeline services. Sandia researchers then developed a tool to analyze and identify existing clusters of businesses and community resources in areas less prone to inundation—such as gas stations, grocery stores and pharmacies that could be outfitted with microgrids to boost resilience.

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We were interested to learn that Juvenescence Limited, a biotech and development company involved in the development of therapies that target the aging processes, has successfully raised $50 million in a series A financing round.

Jim Mellon, the chairman of Juvenescence Limited, said, “We are delighted with the progress we have made and the faith that investors have placed in us to build a world-class company, one that we hope will lead the field in longevity science for the benefit of humanity as well as yield superb returns for our shareholders. Our company ethos is to advance the science that will add years of healthy life to every human being, and that is exactly what we are executing on at record speed.”

Juvenescence has raised $63 million from various international investors since its creation in October 2016 and is now moving forward with a number of key projects. The company is comprised of a number of industry leaders in business as well as a solid scientific team led by Dr. Declan Doogan and Dr. Annalisa Jenkins.

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In a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism — and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy. Appearing as a hologram live from Tel Aviv, Harari warns that the greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient and capable of control. “The enemies of liberal democracy hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy,” Harari says. “It is the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure they don’t become weapons.” (Followed by a brief conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson)

Check out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.

Follow TED on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TEDTalks
Like TED on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TED

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