Lifeboat Foundation

What do you hope to find in a relationship? Security or freedom? Adventure or Intimacy? Do you want the connections in your life to serve as aides on your personal journey or do you want to feel you belong to a larger endeavor?

The future is often discussed in regard to technology, but when we look towards our personal futures we tend to think not of gizmos but of relationships. We think of the connections we want to build and experience, and the things that we wish to give the world in return. We think about how the world could be a better place for ourselves as well as those around us. The change we envision is not technological; rather it reflects what we value. In this film, therapist and author Esther Perel argues that the patterns in which we connect, and the conventions that guide how we couple present a window into what our culture really values.

When Perel looks at the ways in which we connect in early the 21st century she sees contradictions. The rapid technological and social shifts of the previous centuries have created conflicts not only within our cultures but also in the hopes and desires of the individual. She finds us looking with one eye to the secure and charted path that the norms of the past seem to offer us. With the other eye we look to the opportunities and fluid freedoms that now seem open to us. Can we coherently (and satisfactorily) reconcile these desires?

Continue reading “Couples, Culture and Sex: Who is Esther Perel?” »

The idea is simple. First, they take an arm from a dead rat and put it through a process of decellularization using detergents. This leaves behind a white scaffold. The scaffold is key because no artificial reconstructions come close to replicating the intricacies of a natural one.

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Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Why the LHC must be shut down

Continue reading “CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!” »

Vicki Turk & Brian Anderson | Motherboard
“That’s another basic thing that the doom-and-gloom, death-is-preferable-to-the-future crowd seem to misunderstand. The world won’t just stay the same, with everyone trudging along in a state of boredom; it’ll keep changing. There’ll be new stuff to do because we’ll keep making new stuff. We’ll get those jetpacks we were promised, and that’s just the start.” Read more

Kari Paul | Motherboard

”​When a human being is killed by an autonomous machine, who takes the blame? Human rights non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch says it is virtually impossible to tell, and that presents unprecedented danger in the future of warfare. The group released a report today showing how difficult it will be to hold commanders, operators, programmers or manufacturers legally responsible for crimes committed by autonomous machines under current legislature.” Read more

By Sarah Kessler — Fast Company
On Thursday morning, a handful of anti-gun-violence activists realized there is an app in the Google Play Store with their names on it—literally. The app, Gunfree Geo Marker, features a map pinpointing the home and work addresses of politicians, gun control organization employees, and “random anti-gun trolls” who “push the anti-gun agenda in any way, shape or form.”

Clicking on a person’s name in the menu reveals their address on a Google map, along with the app creator’s reasons for including that person in the app.Read more

By Darlene Damm - SigularityHub

The ethics of robot cars has been a hot topic recently. In particular, if a robot car encounters a situation where it is forced to hit one person or another—which should it choose and how does it make that choice? It’s a modern version of the trolley problem, which many have studied in introductory philosophy classes.

Imagine a robot car is driving along when two people run out onto the road, and the car cannot avoid hitting one or the other. Assume neither person can get away, and the car cannot detect them in advance. Various thinkers have suggested how to make an ethical decision about who the car should hit:

• The robot car could run code to make a random decision.

• The robot car could hand off control to a human passenger.

• The robot car could make a decision based on a set of pre-programmed values by the car’s designers or a set of values programmed by the owner.

The last of these deserves a little more detail. What would these values be like?

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