Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: business – Page 244

Biohackers Are Implanting Everything From Magnets to Sex Toys

Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.

Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.

Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”

Research house Gartner Inc. identified do-it-yourself biohacking as one of five technology trends—others include artificial intelligence and blockchain—with the potential to disrupt businesses. The human augmentation market, which includes implants as well as bionic limbs and fledgling computer-brain connections, will grow more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion, by 2025, as industries as diverse as health care, defense, sports, and manufacturing adopt such technologies, researcher OG Analysis predicts. “We’re only at the beginning of this trend,” says Oliver Bendel, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland who specializes in machine ethics.

We asked psychologists why so many rich people think the apocalypse is coming

Much, much better they say 🤔.

Many of the world’s richest seem to earnestly believe that some kind of apocalyptic “event” is coming, and have prepared accordingly. You might have read about this before — such as in the New Yorker’s deep dive back in January 2017 — but billionaire doomsday preppers are back in the news again thanks to a new viral article penned by professor and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. In it, Rushkoff gives some insight on the grave manner in which some of the business elite are going about preparing for a doomsday, which he learned first-hand after receiving an invitation to speak with some one-percenters.

Rushkoff says that what was supposed to be a wholesome discussion about the “future of technology” quickly turned into a consulting session on an impending apocalypse.

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Tesla Software Could Completely Shake Up the Auto Industry

Tesla is shaking up the automotive industry. But which of Tesla’s products and features are doing the disrupting, and who will be affected? A recent article by Benedict Evans delves into the details of this automotive disruption with comparisons to similar shake ups in the tech industry.

Evans uses the disruptive wave that Apple unleashed on Palm, Nokia, and other makers of previous-generation cell phones as an analogy. “When Nokia’s people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling,” he writes. “When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling.”

But can Tesla be considered the Apple of the auto industry, and if so, what would that mean? Disruption occurs when a new technology or concept changes the basis of competition in a field. However, not every new technology turns out to be disruptive. “Some things do not change the basis of competition enough, and for some things the incumbents are able to learn and absorb the new concept instead,” writes Evans, noting that business professor Clay Christensen calls this “sustaining innovation” as opposed to “disruptive innovation”.

The mind-blowing world of tomorrow’s smart materials

For businesses that want to maintain or increase their bottom line, this means re-engineering the fundamentals of their supply chain by developing or adopting new material solutions that achieve a lot more with a lot less.

“The smart companies, manufacturers and brands are the ones who are starting to invest in sustainable material innovation,” says Caroline Till, co-author of Radical Matter: Rethinking Materials for a Sustainable Future, adding, “There’s a thirst from consumers for this.” It’s clear that tomorrow’s leaders will be those who are brave enough to invest in this research today.

For The Future Laboratory’s new Material Far Futures report, we’ve compiled the most transformative case studies in material innovation into the 10 paradigms that we believe will disrupt industry in the coming decades, each with original visualisations from Studio Brasch. From fabrics that generate power through motion and new forms of kinetic architecture to bio-engineering’s impact on luxury fashion, the materials of tomorrow will be smarter, stronger, more dynamic and, crucially, less ecologically damaging.

A Man Of 3 Worlds: The Russian-American Billionaire Giving Millions To U.S. and U.K. Universities

Len Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born and Russian-raised billionaire businessman with a net worth of $17.9 billion, says he has given away $500 million to charity so far, mostly to world-renowned universities like Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and Yale. When asked why he favors donating to higher education institutions, he explains shrewdly that for him, conducting philanthropy is like running a business.

Len Blavatnik, who made his first billions in Russia, credits much of his success to his academic parents and to his education. He’s given hundreds of millions to universities mostly in America and England.

MCA & DfT awarded £1million to boost autonomous shipping industry

The funding, awarded by the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s Regulators’ Pioneer Fund, will be used to pioneer new ways of regulating the autonomous and smart shipping industries to help them deliver innovative new technologies to the traditional maritime sector.

The global autonomous shipping industry is predicted to grow into a $136 billion behemoth by 2030, with UK businesses already playing a key role. The funding will see the creation of the Maritime Autonomy Regulation Lab, where regulators from the MCA and DfT can work with academia and support industry to promote on-water testing and flagship projects and help the UK grow its presence in the global marketplace.

Did China hack US motherboards?; Industrial-base report, previewed; New tool to fight fake news; ‘Light footprints’ mean shaky intel; And a bit more

China put tiny spy chips on many U.S. servers. That’s the word from Bloomberg Businessweek, whose cover story published Thursday asserts that Beijing persuaded Chinese hardware manufacturers to install a surveillance chip, half the size of a grain of rice, on the motherboards of hundreds of thousands of data servers sold around the world by a U.S. company called Supermicro, including to Amazon and Apple.

Are You Sure Eighty Years Are Enough?

Sometimes, people say that around 80 years of life will be enough for them, but have they thought it through?

When asked how long they want to live, people often say no more than ten years above their country’s average lifespan. This, mind you, is in a world where aging is still inevitable; people know they won’t be in top shape during those ten extra years, and yet, perhaps hoping they might be an exception to that rule, they still wish they could get that little extra time. Even when told that they will live these extra years in complete health, the most common choice is the current maximum recorded human lifespan, which is roughly 120 years.

If we assume that no rejuvenation therapies are available to extend the time you spend in youthful health, then it is somewhat understandable if you don’t feel up for a very long life, because the odds are that its final decades will be increasingly miserable ; however, if rejuvenation therapies were available, and you could be fully healthy for an indefinite time, why stop at 120 years? Life extension advocates have probably all had their fair share of conversations with people who insist that 80-odd years will be more than enough for them, health or no health—worse still, some don’t care about preserving their health precisely because they think that 80 years is a sufficiently long time to live.

How long one wants to live is only his or her business; just like no one should have the right to force other people to live no longer than the current maximum (an imposition that would indirectly result from a hypothetical ban on life extension therapies), no one should have the right to force anyone else to live longer than 80 years, if that’s what he or she wishes for whatever reason. Indeed, it’s not the right to die when you see fit that’s at issue here; the question is whether people who claim that 80 years are enough have seriously thought the matter through before making their minds up or are simply parroting what others typically say out of social pressure.

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