Lifeboat Foundation

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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By Josh Greenbaum — Wired

If you’re looking for a way to gauge how the 3D printing market will evolve, look no further than the dawn of two other revolutionizing technologies – the desktop printing market and the VHS standard. And be prepared for a decidedly off-color story.

While many of us have fond memories of watching a favorite movie when it first came out on VHS, or admiring the first three-color party invitation we printed on a laser printer, the fact remains that innocent pursuits were not the sole reason either of these technologies took off. And we shouldn’t expect 3D printing to be any different.
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Graham Templeton — Motherboard

The robot stares down at the sickly old woman from its perch above her home care bed. She winces in pain and tries yet again to devise a string of commands that might trick the machine into handing her the small orange bottle just a few tantalizing feet away. But the robot is a specialized care machine on loan from the hospital. It regards her impartially from behind a friendly plastic face, assessing her needs while ignoring her wants.

If only she’d had a child, she thinks for the thousandth time, maybe then there’d be someone left to help her kill herself.

Hypothetical scenarios such as this inspired a small team of Canadian and Italian researchers to form the ​Open Roboethics Initiative (ORi). Based primarily out of the University of British Columbia (UBC), the organization is just over two years old. The idea is not that robotics experts know the correct path for a robot to take at every robo-ethical crossroad—but rather, that robotics experts do not.

“Ethics is an emergent property of a society,” said ORi board member and UBC professor Mike Van der Loos. “It needs to be studied to be understood.” Read more

Quoted: “Blockchains are thus an intriguing model for coordinating the full transactional load of any large-scale system, whether the whole of different forms of human activity (social systems) or any other system too like a brain. In a brain there are quadrillions of transactions that could perhaps be handled in the universal transactional system architecture of a blockchain, like with Blockchain Thinking models.”

Read the IEET brief here > http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/swan20150217

By Kyle Wiens — Wired

I spent last weekend elbow-deep in engine grease, hands tangled in the steel guts of my wife’s Mazda 3. It’s a good little car, but lately its bellyachings have sent me out to the driveway to tinker under the hood.

I regularly hurl invectives at the internal combustion engine—but the truth is, I live for this kind of stuff. I come away from each bout caked in engine crud and sated by the sound of a purring engine. For me, tinkering and repairing are primal human instincts: part of the drive to explore the materials at hand, to make them better, and to make them whole again.

Cars, especially, have a profound legacy of tinkering. Hobbyists have always modded them, rearranged their guts, and reframed their exteriors. Which is why it’s mind-boggling to me that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just had to ask permission from the Copyright Office for tinkerers to modify and repair their own cars.
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CROSS-FUNCTIONAL AWAKEN, YET CONDITIONALIZED CONSCIOUSNESS AS PER NON-GIRLIE U.S. HARD ROCKET SCIENTISTS!

(Excerpted from the White Swan Book)

Sequential and Progressive Tidbits as Follows:

Continue reading “CROSS-FUNCTIONAL AWAKEN, YET CONDITIONALIZED CONSCIOUSNESS AS PER NON-GIRLIE U.S. HARD ROCKET SCIENTISTS! By Mr. Andres Agostini” »

I have admired Lockheed Martin’s SkunkWorks for a long, long time.

FORTUNATELY AND TO THIS PURPOSE, A LOCKHEED MARTIN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHER AND ENGINEER WROTE:

” … Many businesses think today’s world is complicated and with technology rapidly changing, trying to figure out all the correct things to do is impossible, that it is better to just do what can be done, and adjust things when the result happens to be what is not expected. This is simply gambling where the odds for success and the liability of failure are getting worse by the day. The truth is the world is not complicated, just complex, and with complexity increasing at the same time technology is rapidly changing, the combination of the two conditions only seems complicated. The difference between complexity and complication is complexity can be logically addressed and accounted for such that proper risk management can then be applied and when the quality of the technology is assured early in the planning, analysis and design of the technical solution instead of only assuring it late in the development cycle, the integrated combination of these two scientifically validated methodologies can be used to reliably predict the expected outcomes. There is nobody better at applying the integrated combination of risk management and quality assurance than Mr. Andres Agostini or is there anybody that has more real world experience in doing so, and this includes solving some of the most wicked problems of some of the largest businesses throughout the world. If you are just gambling things work out, then I highly recommend you stop doing business dangerously and seek the assistance of Andres, the master of risk management and quality assurance, as well as reliability and continuous process improvement …”

ABSOLUTE END.

Continue reading “Lockheed Martin's SkunkWorks!” »

Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”

Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/

Quoted: “Tony Williams, the founder of the British-based legal consulting firm, said that law firms will see nearly all their process work handled by artificial intelligence robots. The robotic undertaking will revolutionize the industry, “completely upending the traditional associate leverage model.” And: “The report predicts that the artificial intelligence technology will replace all the work involving processing information, along with a wide variety of overturned policies.”

Read the article here > https://hacked.com/legal-consulting-firm-believes-artificial…yers-2030/