WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The White House will hold a meeting on Monday on U.S. government efforts to boost quantum information science, with administration officials, leading companies including Alphabet Inc ( GOOGL.O ), IBM Corp ( IBM.N ), JPMorgan Chase & Co ( JPM.N ) and academic experts taking part.
Electric drones booked through smartphones pick people up from office rooftops, shortening travel time by hours, reducing the need for parking and clearing smog from the air.
This vision of the future is driving the Japanese government’s “flying car” project. Major carrier All Nippon Airways, electronics company NEC Corp. and more than a dozen other companies and academic experts hope to have a road map for the plan ready by the year’s end.
“This is such a totally new sector Japan has a good chance for not falling behind,” said Fumiaki Ebihara, the government official in charge of the project.
Continue reading “Japan eager to be on board vertical-takeoff ‘flying cars’” »
The east coast is currently flooded. Why don’t we have pipelines for pumping water around the country where it is needed? We do it for oil and gas, and you know if it leaks it would not be a toxic mess.
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack last week suggested the government would look at changing the law to allow water to be taken from the environment and given to farmers struggling with the drought.
This is a bad idea for several reasons. First, the environment needs water in dry years as well as wet ones. Second, unilaterally intervening in the way water is distributed between users undermines the water market, which is now worth billions of dollars. And, third, in dry years the environment gets a smaller allocation too, so there simply isn’t enough water to make this worthwhile.
Japan’s government is facing serious fiscal challenges, but its main science ministry appears hopeful that the nation is ready to once again back basic research in a big way. The Ministry of Education (MEXT) on 31 August announced an ambitious budget request that would allow Japan to compete for the world’s fastest supercomputer, build a replacement x-ray space observatory, and push ahead with a massive new particle detector.
Proposed successor to Super-Kamiokande, exascale computer and x-ray satellite win backing.
In the vicissitudes of life, our recent and living generations moved from the hard times of a hundred years ago to the exponential good times of today. Now a few hundred key pioneers have positioned the world in front of the opportunities of Transhumanism and its main tenet, indefinite life extension. Will we unite the world on these issues and capitalize or waste it and let the weeds reclaim our “wheel”, the magnum opus of our generations? I challenge all would-be leaders and followers to honor our ancestors’ long tradition of pioneering the next stages of our future. Everything about you was crafted and honed for this and there is no other time. Find the blazers of our emerging values and paths, your philosophers of the future, out there at the forefronts on this epic new transhuman voyage of freedoms and discoveries and follow them. All leaders who haven’t already, I implore you to fully embrace your roles, triple down and raise your flags even higher. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book preluding this philosophy of the future, which serves as the structure for this paper and is quoted here throughout.
“[Conditioning to hard times] is thus established, unaffected by the vicissitudes of generations; the constant struggle with uniform unfavourable conditions is, as already remarked, the cause of a type becoming stable and hard. Finally, however, a happy state of things results, the enormous tension is relaxed; there are perhaps no more enemies among the neighbouring peoples, and the means of life, even of the enjoyment of life, are present in superabundance. With one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline severs: it is no longer regarded as necessary, as a condition of existence—if it would continue, it can only do so as a form of luxury, as an archaizing taste. Variations, whether they be deviations (into the higher, finer, and rarer), or deteriorations and monstrosities, appear suddenly on the scene in the greatest exuberance and splendour; the individual dares to be individual and detach himself. At this turning-point of history there manifest themselves, side by side, and often mixed and entangled together, a magnificent, manifold, virgin-forest-like up-growth and up-striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the rivalry of growth, and an extraordinary decay and self-destruction, owing to the savagely opposing and seemingly exploding aptitudes, which strive with one another ‘for sun and light,’ and can no longer assign any limit, restraint, or forbearance for themselves by means of the hitherto existing morality. It was this morality itself which piled up the strength so enormously, which bent the bow in so threatening a manner:—it is now ‘out of date,’ it is getting ‘out of date.’ ” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Our elders came from the great depression and world war. Then they had to watch what they called “morals”, but which were actually just coping mechanisms particular to their vicissitude of time, as Nietzsche gets at in various places, become increasingly disregarded. That happened faster than ever because, little did they know, the bell curve of exponential advancements in fields across the board were upon them. The variations of excellence and monstrosities proliferated like no other time and were supercharged for an abundant harvest by the buds of enlightenment and technology that had been poking their heads out of the fertile intellectual fields of civilization from the smatterings of good times they were able to come upon throughout the century. A lot of it was stored as compounding action potential. It went off like rifles in the 50s and 60s, with so much force that the bullets are still flying today, and the shots of individual aptitude have been firing ever since. Like he is saying, it’s a jungle of individual morals competing in the survival of the fittest, so you must find ways, that hard times naturally make, to get all these independent construction workers of the best ideas behind the same projects in order to tap that energy for the big stages and human potentials.
This is our window in time here, as I often say, to get projects like life extension, transhumanism, space exploration, and some other things done. The people of the past didn’t have this opportunity and the chance here isn’t available forever because death will close us off from it or bad times will set back in. A great gate in Plato’s cave has opened, the eternal guard lions of death have left their posts and we don’t know how long until they come back or the gate closes. It is devastating watching those who have been hypnotized by the cave, by the death trance, sitting there with a wide-open door and the clock ticking down. The climb must be made, now is the time, there is no other. Team up and follow the leaders on these new emerging circumstances and moral imperatives or everyone will die as the marvels of space and boundless technology tumble from our hands. We rouse them to action slowly but surely, though all as one, more gets done.
Continue reading “Notes from Nietzsche and some Correlations with Transhumanism” »
The digital transformation of society has brought many immediate benefits: it’s created new jobs and services, boosted efficiency and promoted innovation. But when it comes to improving the way we govern, the story is not that simple.
It seems reasonable to imagine introducing digital information and communication technologies into public sector organisations – known as “digital government” or “e-government” – would have a beneficial impact on the way public services are delivered. For instance, by enabling people to claim rebates for medical bills via a government website.
When implemented well, e-government can reduce the cost of delivering government and public services, and ensure better contact with citizens – especially in remote or less densely populated areas. It can also contribute to greater transparency and accountability in public decisions, stimulate the emergence of local e-cultures, and strengthen democracy.
I know 100 leaders in longevity area. All of them will be invited to the Longevity Impact Forum, to create sort of Alibaba of longevity. We can beat government agencies and big companies because of our spirit!
“Underdog” entrepreneur Jack Ma is now famous for his record setting IPO when he took his e-commerce company, Alibaba, public. But not many people know he started Alibaba in his one-room apartment with 17 friends. Watch where all the magic of Alibaba started and be sure to check out Jack Ma’s amazing life.
A career’s worth of intelligence work for the U.S. Government has taught me one key lesson: national security is a lot like playing a game of chess. You have to anticipate your opponent’s every move in order to remain one step ahead.
Disclosing your strategy will be used against you. But if you recognize certain opportunities, you can win the match.
When I headed the government’s highly sensitive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), I worked with a team to assess whether a particular chess piece — in this case in the form of an unfamiliar aerial technology — was a threat to our side of the chess board.
Many countries including China, Russia, South Korea, India, Japan, and Europe Nations have all outlined significant lunar plans. To mention a few, the Moon Village concept got an endorsement from the Secretary General of the China National Space Administration, Yulong Tian. He outlined plans for a series of robotic missions to the moon, including China’s first sample return mission, Chang-e. The Director General of the Russian state space corporation, Roscosmos, talked about participating in any Moon Village effort. Smaller space agencies, such as Ukraine, share a similar desire to carry out lunar missions. President Trump signed the Space Policy Directive-1 in December 2017 and NASA has big plans for the Moon, with the recent Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G) initiative. Space activities are not limited to government initiatives; many of them are being pursued in partnership with civil society and the private sector. Several private missions to the Moon are planned in Japan with ispace, India with Team Indus, Israel with SpaceIL, United States with companies such as OffWorld and Moon Express, Germany with PT Scientists, and Luxembourg with CisLunar Industries.
Private industry is developing business plans to profit by creating new services and products that eventually will become the Moon Market. There is already good cooperation between private and government industries in each country; however, there is no global platform allowing cooperation between industry and government around the world. There is also a need to engage non-space industries by communicating the potential of the Moon Market. The Moon Village Association (MVA), a non-governmental organization (NGO) created in 2017 and based in Vienna, is dedicated to this mission:
“It provides a forum for the development of the Moon Village for industry, government, space agencies, international organizations, NGOs and the public at large.”
While the White House report got modest news coverage and a mildly enthusiastic response from the AI community, this was barely a hiccup in comparison to China’s clarion call. When the CCP speaks, everyone listens.
Within a year, Chinese VC investors were pouring record sums into AI startups, surpassing the US to make up 48 percent of AI venture funding globally. Over the past decade, Chinese government spending on STEM research has grown by double digits year on year.
And China’s political system is set up such that local officials are incentivized to outcompete others for leadership in CCP initiatives, each striving to lure in AI companies and entrepreneurs with generous subsidies and advantageous policies.
