Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,087

Synthetic biology’s Lego kit: Brought to you

The human body is an incredible machine. It is impossible to determine which is the essential body part for sustaining life — because there is no single indispensable part. If your heart stops beating, you will die. If your lungs stop working, your brain — and thus all of your cells — will eventually die. Without a stomach or intestines you cannot acquire nutrients and you will die. All parts are critical for optimal function, for sustaining life.

Synthetic biology as a field is no different. There are those that supply DNA — arguably the critical building block for every single synthetic biology application. There are those that automate and scale components of the design-build-test cycle to enable innovation to effect change in meaningful timelines. But when all of those parts come together with a single goal, the power of synthetic biology reaches new levels.

Such potential is exactly what Arzeda — through a collaboration with TeselaGen, Twist Bioscience, and Labcyte — has brought to us. Each company, a giant in its own right, provides an essential, needed component to an elegant, efficient workflow that can best be described as a “DNA assembly line” for more rapid, efficient protein design and production. The companies’ products work seamlessly: Twist produces the DNA fragments needed to make protein-expressing plasmids, Labcyte’s acoustic liquid handler (the Echo 525) facilitates rapid DNA assembly, and TeselaGen’s DNA assembly design and laboratory automation software connects the two, designing plasmids and ordering the necessary sequences from Twist while generating worklists for the Echo to execute.

A Molecule Designed By AI Exhibits ‘Druglike’ Qualities

Why the rush? It now costs $2.6 billion, by one estimate, to get a new drug to market, and pipelines are only getting slower and more expensive. There’s hope—and hype—that AI could help chip away at that figure by reducing the time and labor before a drug starts clinical trials. The idea is that the same techniques used to generate realistic deepfakes and deftly play Go might be able to decipher the complex rules of drug design and generate molecules from scratch.

Insilico Medicine is among several startups trying to harness artificial intelligence to speed to development of drugs.

Scientists Invent “Sewing Machine” to Implant Brain Electrodes

A group of DARPA-funded scientists associated with Elon Musk say they’ve invented a new way to “rapidly implant” brain electrodes into rats — and their “sewing machine” implantation system could facilitate the creation of a mind-reading brain-computer interface, as first reported by Bloomberg.

“Although more research is needed to refine the overall interface system and better integrate its components, these developments may ultimately open the possibility of bundling next-generation robotics, AI software, and electronics to create alternatives to present-day neurosurgical techniques,” DARPA biotech director Justin Sanchez told Bloomberg.

Samsung’s take on the world of 2069

Samsung is looking forward to what life might be like in the year 2069. The new report, called Samsung KX50: The Future in Focus, draws on the opinions of six of Britain’s leading academics and futurists to look at a range of new technologies that will affect people’s everyday lives.

Trying to predict the future is a dodgy business that has a notoriously low success rate. If the world of 2019 was anything like past predictions, we should have flying cars, personal jet packs, robot butlers, 100 percent atomic power producing limitless energy, little bottles containing nanobots that can grow cars on the front lawn, colonies on the Moon and Mars – and all in a society that hasn’t changed much since 1960, except it’s a bit nicer.

The physics of epilepsy, drones to monitor Chernobyl, and the ‘model-independent’ approach to particle physics

Could physics help people with epilepsy? That’s the question tackled by Louis Nemzer, a physicist at Nova Southeastern University, in the September 2019 issue of Physics World magazine, which is out now in print and digital formats.

He thinks that machine learning and real-time monitoring of the brain could give people with epilepsy live information about how much at risk they are of an imminent seizure – and is even developing a smartphone app to help them in daily life.

Elsewhere in the issue, Peter Martin and Tom Scott from the University of Bristol describe how they’ve used drones to map radiation levels at the Chernobyl plant, which you can also read on this website from 2 September, while Kate Brown from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examines the health impact of Chernobyl fall-out.

The problem with wanting to reverse aging that no one talks about

In its most hubristic and unquestioning form, bolstered by unapologetic and brash advanced capitalist logics, transhumanism poses myriad threats: from automation unemployment to the end of democracy, to the risk that humans will branch into different species, making questions of inequality infinitely more urgent. Even if immortality arrives it will be accompanied by crimes, wars, and accidents—as Cantona states.

Technology is on the brink of making it possible to live forever—but should we?

Artifical-Death (maintaining a signal from the living person using MVT aware circuits) is possible using current technology

There are good technical reasons why prototypes use the ancient game of Zenet as the interface. Although I do not rule out alternative approaches using the underlying designs and principles, there are unique reasons to choose Zenet — the only method recorded in ancient Egypt whereby the dead and living could communicate. Notwithstanding my background in neural net and hybrid AI in game software development, especially active divination systems; Zenet is the most elegant solution to bridge the worlds (between living and dead) since the rules and objectives vary slightly between the two, and smooth transition between these perspectives can occur in real-time. An objection to Cryogenics is the dead take energy and resources from the living. By making the Zenet boxes solar powered this will not impact on resources of the living, and also will provide a more authentic experience of sun rise and solar changes, important in solar theology of Ra and in Zenet. The game concerns movement of the solar b(ark). On a pragmatic note — the range of awareness can extend just to events and moves in the Zenet game. Even this task is far from trivial using silicon technology, and I don’t envisage anything like “full resurrection” or retention of current memories and so on as feasible for some time.