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In Brief

  • Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, thinks the human species is headed for an evolutionary transformation.
  • The evolution of life has slowly unfolded over 3.5 billion years; but its pace has rapidly increased in recent years. Diamandis believes this heralds the next, exciting stages of human evolution.

In the next 30 years, humanity is in for a transformation the likes of which we’ve never seen before—and XPRIZE Foundation founder and chairman Peter Diamandis believes that this will give birth to a new species. Diamandis admits that this might sound too far out there for most people. He is convinced, however, that we are evolving towards what he calls “meta-intelligence,” and today’s exponential rate of growth is one clear indication.

In an essay for Singularity Hub, Diamandis outlines the transformative stages in the multi-billion year pageant of evolution, and takes note of what the recent increasing “temperature” of evolution—a consequence of human activity—may mean for the future. The story, in a nutshell, is this—early prokaryotic life appears about 3.5 billion years ago (bya), representing perhaps a symbiosis of separate metabolic and replicative mechanisms of “life;” at 2.5 bya, eukaryotes emerge as composite organisms incorporating biological “technology” (other living things) within themselves; at 1.5 bya, multicellular metazoans appear as eukaryotes are yoked together in cooperative colonies; and at 400 million years ago, vertebrate fish species emerge onto land to begin life’s adventure beyond the seas.

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“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to die.” — Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Artificial intelligence has fascinated mankind for more than half a century, with the first public mention of computer intelligence recorded during a London lecture by Alan Turing in 1947. More recently, the public has been exposed to headlines that have increasingly contained references to the growing power of AI, whether that’s been AlphaGo’s defeat of legendary Go player Lee Se-dol, Microsoft’s racist AI bot named Tay or any other number of new developments in the machine learning field. Once a plot device for science-fiction tales, AI is becoming real — and human beings are going to have to define their relationship with it sooner rather than later.

Peter Diamandis, co-founder and vice-chairman at Human Longevity, Inc., touches on that relationship in a post he authored on LinkedIn, titled “The next sexual revolution will be digitized.” Diamandis points to recent reports showing that the Japanese are increasingly abandoning sex and relationships, while a growing subset of men report that they prefer to have virtual girlfriends over real ones.

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Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world’s first commercial astronaut.

The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world’s largest governments had done before.

Peter Diamandis was the son of hardworking immigrants who wanted their science prodigy to make the family proud and become a doctor. But from the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, his singular goal was to get to space. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private space flight industry himself.

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What would happen in the world if we could find renegade thinkers, give them the right dose of inspiration, and reinforce the audacity, passion and perseverance needed to pursue their biggest ideas?

How to Make a Spaceship is exactly the inspiration the next generation of audacious thinkers needs. (For more on the book, click through these tabs!)

As author Julian Guthrie said, “I hope this story is an inspiration. I hope that when you get to the end of this story, you set down the book and feel like you can go out and do something impossible in your own life.”


The challenge to inspire the world with the ideas of Peter H. Diamandis

HOW TO MAKE A SPACESHIP

No shock to me.


Diamandis claimed that we are gearing towards a future possible of “interface mind-machine, where in human brain’s consciousness could be uploaded to computer and then transferred to a new body—probably a cultured in the lab. He estimates that it will just take 20–30 years to be realized.

The reality of extended life longevity to almost immortality is actually not too hard to believe these days. After all science and technology never failed to amuse us to make the once impossible possible.

TagsHealth, alternative health, life longevity, Nanotechnology, Medical Science, medical nanotechnology.

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Today, Founder and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation Peter Diamandis kicked off Singularity University’s first ever Global Summit here in tech capital, San Francisco.

The energy is pulsing (what else would you expect in Silicon Valley?), and so is Diamandis’ presence on stage as he tells the room,

“We’re about to enter a time where we can tackle global problems in a way like we never have before.”

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I’m 55 years old. I’m shooting for a multihundred-year lifespan. That’s my goal. If you don’t shoot for it, you’re not going to hit it, right?”

I guess he’ll want to speak to George Church.

The author of this titles it “to 150” yet Peter here says multi hundred, and included a pic of Venter who has said he doesn’t think people should live past 120.


How to Live to 150

Peter Diamandis is leading the charge to crack our genetic code in search of a brighter (much longer) future.

Sam Eifling

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Good write up by Peter on Neil Jacobstein’s perspective on AI. Peter never disappoints in his articles.


Singularity University is part business incubator and part think tank founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil in 2008 in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Among the topics that have risen in prominence in the curriculum of the University is artificial intelligence.

Neil Jacobstein is a former President of Singularity University, and currently he chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View California. We recently spoke, and the conversation covered his thoughts on how AI can be used to augment current human capability, strategies technology executives should use to think about AI, the role the government should play in helping mitigate the potential job losses from AI, his perspectives on the dangers of artificial intelligence that have been expressed by major thought leaders, advice on how to train workers to be prepared for the coming wave of AI, and a variety of other topics.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the sixth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, and Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)

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