Lifeboat Foundation

My new article from Vice Motherboard on liberty and privacy. This is one of my most ambitious philosophical works yet: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx5y5/liberty-mi…th-privacy #Libertarian

If tech is surveilling us constantly, we need the ability to use it to watch the watchers.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.

Continue reading “Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy” »

Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

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The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.

Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.

In this challenging and crowded market, new competitors are emerging all the time. Moving further into software brings manufacturers up against specialised information technology companies, and there is a shifting landscape of competition and co-operation between different groups that a decade ago could have safely ignored each other.

The likes of GE and Siemens are investing billions in the ‘industrial internet’ but will face competition from IT groups and start-ups.

• Disney researchers have developed innovative technology that will allow people to charge their devices in a truly wireless fashion
• If this technology could be commercially adopted, it could revolutionize the way that we use and create everything from smartphones to AI robots

It seems like almost everything has gone wireless. Yet somehow, when it comes to charging electronic devices, we still have to deal with cords. Sure wireless charging exists, but only for small devices like your smartphone. And even then, it’s not convenient as you might hope. To actually power a device, a phone must maintain contact with a charging pad, which means it can’t be used while charging. This seems to be even a bigger hassle than dealing with cords and cables.

Results from the Micius satellite test quantum entanglement, pointing the way toward hack-proof global communications—and a new space race.

• By Lee Billings on June 15, 2017

Meanwhile there was a Big New Development. The Internet and digital technology came of age. And here’s the thing. Digital artefacts – whether they’re an algorithm, a website, an app or a coding language – are always and everywhere potential public goods. Once produced digital artefacts are essentially costless to replicate which raises the question of whether they can or should be made freely available to all.

Digital public goods in the age of the data revolution.

An argument is raging on internet whether Wonder Woman is white or a person of color. Here are the facts.

Fun in fiction. Perhaps not so much in reality.

The human mind is already pretty open to manipulation—just ask anyone who works in advertising. But neural implant technology could potentially open up a direct digital link to our innermost thoughts that could be exploited by hackers.

In recent months, companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Kernel, and Facebook have unveiled plans to create devices that will provide a two-way interface between human brains and machines.

Continue reading “Neural Implant Tech Raises the Specter of Brainjacking” »