Lifeboat Foundation

An early moment in the new documentary Do You Trust This Computer? is actually a shot from the Terminator franchise. Human skulls and bones rest among dust and ashes as the robotic soldiers of Skynet march through the remains of an apocalyptic war. What happens between humans and robots in the Terminator films, or other sci-fi movies like The Matrix, War Games, and Ex Machina, might feel like the far away future, but Do You Trust This Computer? suggests that that’s not the case. In fact, the doc implies that we’re much closer to sentient robots walking the Earth than we think – only they may not look exactly like we’ve always imagined, and we are woefully unprepared for the consequences of their consciousness.

Directed by Chris Paine, Do You Trust This Computer? (now playing in New York and available on VOD) explores the role of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives. The film features interviews with some of today’s top AI experts, theorists, professors, and scientists, such as Elon Musk, Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan, and futurist Ray Kurtzwiel. While some people — predominantly those on the side of tech and invention companies — think that AI can help better humanity, most of the others interviewed suggest that we’re on the cusp of something potentially world-ending. As such, the doc offers up a vision of the real near-future that is as fascinating as it is terrifying.

So, what exactly do we have to be so afraid of? After all, there’s plenty of potential good that can come from advancements in AI. Self-driving cars could potentially prevent crashes and save millions of lives around the world; robotics in the medical field can find ailments faster; surgical machines can go where human hands cannot. But automation can also lead to major job loss, the film suggests. Much like the industrial revolution put many humans out of work, so too will robotics. Just take Baxter, an industrial robot, who costs the same amount as one minimum wage worker would in a year, but lasts much longer and can do the work of three people, since he doesn’t need to eat, sleep, or take breaks. Everyone from long-haul drivers and taxi drivers to data entry workers to those in white-collar industries like business, journalism, and medicine will be affected.

Continue reading “This New Tech Documentary Says We’re Totally Unprepared For The Upcoming Robot Apocalypse” »

: You’ve called Hans Rosling’s Factfulness “one of the most important books I’ve ever read.” What makes it so significant?

Gates: Hans believed the world was making remarkable progress, and he wanted everyone to know about it. Factfulness is his final effort to help people identify areas where things are getting better and spread that improvement. It explains more clearly than almost anything else I’ve read why it’s so difficult for people to perceive progress. He offers clear, actionable advice for how to overcome our innate biases and see the world more factfully. This is one of the most educational books I’ve ever read, and I think everyone can benefit from Hans’ insights.

If the world really is improving at a faster rate than people think, why does it matter whether people have incorrect notions about it?

We can’t turn back the clock, but neither is job insecurity inevitable. Just as the postwar period managed to make industrialization benefit industrial workers, we need to create new norms, institutions and policies that make digitization benefit today’s workers. Pundits have offered many paths forward — “portable” benefits, universal basic income, worker reclassification — but regardless of the option, the important thing to remember is that we do have a choice.

When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom. We are taught that technological innovation drove social change and radically reshaped the world of work.

Likewise, when we talk about today’s economy, we focus on smartphones, artificial intelligence, apps. Here, too, the inexorable march of technology is thought to be responsible for disrupting traditional work, phasing out the employee with a regular wage or salary and phasing in independent contractors, consultants, temps and freelancers — the so-called gig economy.

Continue reading “It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs” »

Doctor? Who?

New York University said Thursday that it will cover tuition for all its medical students regardless of their financial situation, a first among the nation’s major medical schools and an attempt to expand career options for graduates who won’t be saddled with six-figure debt [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: School officials worry that rising tuition and soaring loan balances are pushing new doctors into high-paying fields and contributing to a shortage of researchers and primary care physicians. Medical schools nationwide have been conducting aggressive fundraising campaigns to compete for top prospects, alleviate the debt burden and give graduates more career choices. NYU raised more than $450 million of the roughly $600 million it estimates it will need to fund the tuition package in perpetuity, including $100 million from Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone and his wife, Elaine. The school will provide full-tuition scholarships for 92 first-year students — another 10 are already covered through M.D./PhD programs — as well as 350 students already partway through the M.D.-only degree program.

I have a very important and scary story to share I wrote. Give it a read. It’s published the Napa Valley Register (the main paper of a community where my wine business is newly located). The article is about one of the most common and unexpected ways people around the world die. I almost did.

I recently completed a European speaking tour discussing transhumanism, a social movement whose primary goal is to live as long as possible through science.

Ironically, I’ll probably remember the month-long tour most for a specific 60 seconds—when I almost choked to death on thick, leathery bread in a German restaurant. This may be surprising, but the fourth-leading cause of unintentional death in America is asphyxiation from choking on food, according to the National Safety Council.

Continue reading “I almost died from a leading American killer: Choking on food” »

As our organization grows and we are doing more and more things, there is an ever greater need for specialist knowledge and guidance to help inform our decisions as a company. We rely on the advice and expertize of both our scientific and business advisors and we have added to them this week with two new experts joining us.

We are delighted to announce that Steven A. Garan has joined our scientific advisory board. Steven is the Director of Bioinformatics at the Center for Research & Education on Aging (CREA) and serves on its advisory board, and he is a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. While at the University of California, Berkeley, he played a major role in the invention and the development of the Automated Imaging Microscope System (AIMS), and he collaborated for many years with a group from Paola S. Timiras’ lab, researching the role that caloric restriction plays in maintaining estrogen receptor-alpha and IGH-1 receptor immunoreactivity in various nuclei of the mouse hypothalamus.

Steven was also the director of the Aging Research Center and is a leading scientist in the field of aging research. His numerous publications include articles on systems biology, the effects of caloric restriction on the mouse hypothalamus, and the AIMS. He is best known for coining the word “Phenomics”, which was defined in “Phenomics: a new direction for the study of neuroendocrine aging”, an abstract published in the journal Experimental Gerontology.

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Ph.D. is a German metahumanist philosopher, Nietzsche scholar, philosopher of music, and an authority in the field of ethics of emerging technologies.

Stefan teaches philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome and is director and cofounder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), Research Fellow at the Ewha Institute for the Humanities at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, and Visiting Fellow at the Ethics Centre of the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, where he was also Visiting Professor during the Summer of 2016. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Posthuman Studies.

Continue reading “Professor Stefan Lorenz Sorgner” »

https://paper.li/e-1437691924…

The term “transhumanism” was coined by Aldous Huxley’s brother, Julian, the evolutionary biologist and First Director-General of UNESCO founded 1954 London, now in Paris, Julian Huxley (1887–1975): “I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.” (“Transhumanism.” Julian Huxley. In New Bottles for New Wine, pp 13–17. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). https://www.newstatesman.com/2017/10/heritage-wars-politics-…out-unesco

The idea was developed by futurist FM 2030 was formerly known as F M Esfandiary, who taught in NY from 1966. “The contemporary meaning of the term “transhumanism” was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught “new concepts of the human” at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews “transitional” to posthumanity as “transhuman”. The Transhuman phase began with the Industrial Revolution, and in the Anthopocene era of today, many of us (especially in the West) have already progressed beyond the human (agricultural) stage, past the ‘transhuman’ Industrial era, to enjoy our current C21st posthuman post-industrial lifestyles.

Continue reading “Welcome to Posthuman wiki” »