Trade wars and a global economic slowdown are creating more opportunities for companies looking for better, cheaper automated options.
A first: paralyzed man uses brain signals to control a robot exoskeleton.
Doctors who conducted the trial said though the device was years away from being publicly available, it had the potential to improve patients’ quality of life and autonomy.
The patient, identified only as Thibault, 28, from Lyon, said the technology had given him a new lease of life. Four years ago his life was permanently changed when he fell 40ft (12 metres) from a balcony, severing his spinal cord and leaving him paralysed from the shoulders down.
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At the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019 Conference in New York City, we had the opportunity to interview Dr. Justin Rebo from the drug discovery biotech company BioAge.
BioAge is developing a drug discovery platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover targets that have the potential to promote healthy lifespan (healthspan) by slowing down aging and the ill health that it brings.
As the vice president of in-vivo biology at BioAge, Dr. Rebo leads the company’s internal in-vivo platform to find and assess the viability of new druggable targets for aging diseases and biomedical regeneration. With considerable business as well as academic experience in the aging field under his belt, Justin joined the BioAge team in 2018.
Stuart Russell’s latest book examines how artificial intelligence could spin out of control. David Leslie critiques it.
DARPA expects to have a new commercial partner lined up for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites spacecraft by the end of the year.
If you thought Cambridge Analytica had scary tech, wait until you see this. A new form of AI modelling promises accurate simulation of the behaviour of entire cities, countries and one day perhaps, the world.
The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently commented that humans can escape being outmoded by AI by “having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence.”1 To this end, he’s founded a company, Neuralink. One of its first aims is to develop “neural lace,” an injectable mesh that connects the brain directly to computers. Neural lace and other AI-based enhancements are supposed to allow data from your brain to travel wirelessly to one’s digital devices or to the cloud, where massive computing power is available.
For many transhumanists, uploading is key to the mind-machine merger.
Perhaps these sorts of enhancements will turn out to be beneficial, but to see if this is the case, we will need to move beyond all the hype. Policymakers, the public, and even AI researchers themselves need a better idea of what is at stake. For instance, if AI cannot be conscious, then if you substituted a microchip for the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, you would end your life as a conscious being. You’d become what philosophers call a “zombie”—a nonconscious simulacrum of your earlier self. Further, even ifmicrochips could replace parts of the brain responsible for consciousness without zombifying you, radical enhancement is still a major risk. After too many changes, the person who remains may not even be you. Each human who enhances may, unbeknownst to them, end their life in the process.
We all know that dogs are a man’s best friend, but has the world really come to this?
On a particularly blustery day in New York City, I found myself (as one with the income bracket of a writer sporadically does) on the Upper East Side, amidst tribes of cooler-than-thou high school students, dedicated dog walkers and women wearing hats that looked like a Shar-Pei had potentially suffered in the making of it.
Nonetheless, I braved the chilly air and found solace in the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the design institution that is part of the Smithsonian. Upon entering, visitors are greeted with a magic wand-looking pen tool, that serves as an interactive notekeeper for items you are interested in. “How innovative.” Perfect for a museum about innovation, am I right? With my magic wand in hand, I entered the Narnia of objects, with the first stop being an exhibition titled “Access and Ability.” Featuring “artifacts” designed for people with disabilities, I was surprised to find among the various innovations, a very cute-looking puppy that I instinctively wanted to pet. But I did not, for fear of being arrested, a la Ocean’s 12.
