Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: law – Page 75

There’s no doubt that Dr. Ilia Stambler’s Longevity promotion: multidisciplinary perspective is a great book for the advocate and keen supporter of healthy life extension. Check out our review by Nicola Bagalà.

There’s no doubt that Dr. Ilia Stambler’s Longevity promotion: multidisciplinary perspective is a thorough book that all kinds of advocates of healthy longevity may find very useful. The book reads pretty much like a collection of academics papers, each dealing with a different aspect of the matter, including science, history, social and moral implications, legislation, and advocacy. Just like you would expect from an academic work, each section of this book is complete with exhaustive sources that will indubitably prove helpful should you wish to dig deeper into the topic being discussed.

The first section of the book focuses on advocacy, discussing typical concerns raised in the context of life extension, outreach material, and initiatives, and it offers suggestions for effective policies to promote aging and longevity research. The latter part of this section was one of the hardest for me to read since policies and legislation are not at all my strongest suit, but I do believe that professional lobbyists and advocates who have legal and regulatory backgrounds and wish to take action will find numerous ideas in it.

The longevity history section discusses the progression of longevity science during the last century. It was surprising to learn that quite a few well-established scientific disciplines of today, such as endocrinology, owe their existence to early efforts to create rejuvenation treatments. This section discusses other aspects as well, such as the holism vs reductionism controversy in the history of longevity research and the legacy of Elie Metchnikoff, a pioneering immunologist and microbiologist who can safely be regarded as the father of gerontology and made no mystery of his conviction that aging should be considered a disease and treated as such.

Continue reading “Book Review: Longevity Promotion a Multidisciplinary Perspective” | >

Drawing a roadmap to combat the spread of deserts worldwide. It’s the mission of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in the Inner Mongolian city of Erdos. The host country, China, was praised for a law it passed in 2002 — the world’s first integrated law dedicated to combating desert expansion. With this goal in mind, China has carried out several projects that have been successful, including at one desert in northern China. CGTN’s Frances Kuo reports.

Read more

Interesting story in The Guardian today. Quotes from multiple transhumanists, including myself:

Intranet service? Check. Autonomous motorcycle? Check. Driverless car technology? Check. Obviously the next logical project for a successful Silicon Valley engineer is to set up an AI-worshipping religious organization.

Anthony Levandowski, who is at the center of a legal battle between Uber and Google’s Waymo, has established a nonprofit religious corporation called Way of the Future, according to state filings first uncovered by Wired’s Backchannel. Way of the Future’s startling mission: “To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”

Read more

Thankfully, no one’s out there systematically murdering lawyers. But advances in artificial intelligence may diminish their role in the legal system or even, in some cases, replace them altogether. Here’s what we stand to gain—and what we should fear—from these technologies.

How legal representation could come to resemble TurboTax.

Read more

Current international shipping law states that ocean-going vessels must be properly crewed, so fully autonomous, unmanned ships aren’t allowed in international waters. As such, the Yara Birkeland will have to operate close to the Norweigan coast at all times, carrying out regular short journeys between three ports in the south of the country.

But change is afoot in the maritime sector, and earlier this year the UN’s International Maritime Organisation (IMO) began discussions that could allow unmanned ships to operate across oceans. This raises the prospect of crewless “ghost” ships crisscrossing the ocean, with the potential for cheaper shipping with fewer accidents.

Several Japanese shipping firms, for example, are reportedly investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the technology. And British firm Rolls-Royce demonstrated the world’s first remote-controlled unmanned commercial ship earlier this year.

Read more

During the recent Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid, LEAF board member Paul Spiegel discussed the social ramifications of increased lifespans thanks to emerging technologies. He spoke of the need for society to adapt to deal with longer lives. We invite you to watch the talk he gave and also to read an interview providing deeper insight on the necessary changes in the pension system.

But first, a few words about Paul. Paul graduated cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979 and from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1983. He has attended Harvard Law School, the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and International Christian University in Tokyo.

Trained in international business law, he worked on Wall Street, on Montgomery Street, and in Tokyo before entering private practice in IP, business, and entertainment law in San Francisco.

Read more

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — President Donald Trump’s administration is set to unveil revised self-driving vehicle guidelines next week in Michigan, responding to automakers’ calls for elimination of legal barriers to putting autonomous vehicles on the road, sources briefed on the matter said on Tuesday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was expected to unveil the revised guidelines next Tuesday at a self-driving vehicle testing facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, four people briefed on the matter said.

A spokesman for Chao did not immediately comment. The White House Office of Management and Budget approved the undisclosed Transportation Department changes to the guidelines on Aug. 31, according a posting on a government website.

Read more

(Natural News) Space has become a veritable goldmine of natural resources for many companies, yet can anyone lay claim to them? That’s the question legal experts claim will become relevant in the future as firm turn to the stars for precious metals and minerals, and it’s one that also needs to be answered as soon as possible to avoid hostility between competing firms and countries.

Barry Kellman, law professor of space governance at DePaul University in Chicago, explained: “There is a huge debate on whether companies can simply travel to space and extract its resources. There is no way to answer the question until someone does it.”

According to one international treaty, this need not even be an issue. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, formally known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, has served as the main standard for sharing space. As per the 1967 treaty, no single country can claim “national appropriation” of celestial bodies “by occupation or by other means”. (Related: MINING just one large asteroid could COLLAPSE the world economy due to surge of new supply for valuable metals.)

Read more

You can go to school for space mining.

GOLDEN, Colo. — The Colorado School of Mines plans to launch a new graduate program that could help people inhabit other planets some day.

The school is working to launch the space resources graduate program that will teach students how to explore, extract and use resources not only on Earth but also on the moon, Mars, asteroids and more.

The school said the classes will focus on scientific, technical, economic, policy and legal aspects of the field.

Continue reading “Colorado School of Mines plans to launch space mining graduate program” | >

The intelligence value argument and effects on regulating autonomous artificial intelligence.

~ David J Kelley

Newton Lee in partnership with Springer is working on an upcoming book covering transhumanist topics, one of the chapters covers IVA (Intelligence Value Argument) which is summary of the chapter titled: “The Intelligence Value Argument and Effects on Regulating Autonomous Artificial Intelligence” which I wrote and am including only the first part of that chapter on IVA.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the Intelligence Value Argument or IVA and the ethics of how that applies to autonomous systems and how such systems might be governed by the extension of current regulation. IVA is based on some static core definitions of ‘Intelligence’ as defined by the measured ability to understand, use and generate knowledge, or information independently all of which are a function of sapience and sentience. The IVA logic places the value of any individual human and their potential for Intelligence and the value of other systems to the degree that they are self-aware or ‘intelligent’ as a priority. Further, the paper lays out the case for how the current legal framework could be extended to address issues with autonomous systems to varying degrees depending on the IVA threshold as applied to autonomous systems.

Introduction

In this chapter, I articulate the case using the Intelligence Value Argument (IVA) that, “ethically”, a fully Sapient and Sentient Intelligence is of equal value regardless of the underlying substrate which it operates on meaning a single fully Sapient and Sentient software system has the same moral agency [10] as an equally Sapient and Sentient human being. We define ‘ethical’ according to dictionary.com as pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principals of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct. Moral agency is, according to Wikipedia; is “an individual’s ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is “a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong.” Such value judgments need to be based on potential for Intelligence as defined here.

Read more