Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2165

Japan leads the world in advanced robotics. Many of its firms see great potential in “carerobos” that look after the elderly. Over a quarter of the population is over 65, the highest proportion of any country in the OECD. Care workers are in desperately short supply, and many Japanese have a cultural affinity with robots.

AT SHINTOMI nursing home in Tokyo, men and women sit in a circle following exercise instructions before singing along to a famous children’s song, “Yuyake Koyake” (“The Glowing Sunset”).

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DARPA has a new surveillance program in the works, and it doesn’t involve training human agents or AI operators. Instead, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense wants to genetically engineer plant-based sensors as battlefield spy tech.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the think-tank that’s under the U.S. Department of Defense, recently announced that it’s working on a new project that could change how pertinent information is gathered on the battlefield. The project, dubbed the Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) program, examines the possibility of turning plants into next-generation surveillance technology.

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In this new Business Insider article, my ideas on peak labor and Universal Basic Income are pitted against MIT scientist Andrew McAfee. I’m excited to see my government shrinking Federal Land Dividend proposal getting out there. Story by journalist Dylan Love: http://www.businessinsider.com/will-universal-basic-income-s…?r=UK&IR=T #transhumanism #libertarian

Does free money change nothing or everything?

Universal basic income (UBI) is the hottest idea in social security since Franklin Roosevelt signed the New Deal in 1935, and it is fairly understood as free money given to citizens by their government. Though the idea traces its roots back to the 16th century as a “cure for theft,” UBI has gained new consideration and momentum these days, as high-profile techno-doomsayers like SpaceX founder Elon Musk point to it as an economic solution for big problems predicted to arrive soon.

The future is coming, Musk and his ilk warn, and it’s bringing increased automation and intelligent technologies with it that will eventually overtake the human capacity for work. All-capable robots will cause widespread human unemployment, goes the thinking, plaguing our income and livelihood for generations.

Continue reading “The jury’s still out on whether universal basic income will save us from job-stealing robots” | >

Innovation Group looked at three fundamental pillars of humanity and how they will evolve over the coming 10–15 years: our bodies, our thought, and our behavior. After identifying the driving forces that will transform these fundamental pillars, we extracted key themes emerging from their convergence. Ultimately our goal was to determine the ways in which the changing nature of humanity and transhumanism would affect individuals, society, businesses, and government.

A few of the trends that emerged from this study include the following seven trends. We hope they will spark discussion and innovation at your organizations.

Companies today are strategizing about future investments and technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, or growth around new business models. While many of these trends will make for solid investments for the next 5–10 years, fewer companies are considering the revolutionary convergence of disparate trends pulled from technology, behavioral and societal changes, and medical advances to understand how they will converge to transform society. This transformation will be messy, complex, and sometimes scary, but signals already point to a future of humanity that will blur our identities into “transhumanism.”

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Another case of idiot MD’s who think they know everything not wanting to test for CJD, and getting mad when something they dont know existed contaminating instruments and spreading diseases.

AI doctors soon please.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common human prion disease, can be transmitted via neurosurgical instruments or corneal or dura mater transplants contaminated by infectious prions. Some epidemiological studies have associated sCJD risk with surgeries that involve the skin, but whether the skin of sCJD patients contains prion infectivity is not known. Orrú et al. now report detectable prion seeding activity and infectivity in skin from sCJD patients, although at much lower levels compared to brain tissues from sCJD patients. These data suggest that there may be a potential for iatrogenic sCJD transmission through skin.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common human prion disease, is transmissible through iatrogenic routes due to abundant infectious prions [misfolded forms of the prion protein (PrPSc)] in the central nervous system (CNS). Some epidemiological studies have associated sCJD risk with non-CNS surgeries. We explored the potential prion seeding activity and infectivity of skin from sCJD patients. Autopsy or biopsy skin samples from 38 patients [21 sCJD, 2 variant CJD (vCJD), and 15 non-CJD] were analyzed by Western blotting and real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC) for PrPSc. Skin samples from two patients were further examined for prion infectivity by bioassay using two lines of humanized transgenic mice. Western blotting revealed dermal PrPSc in one of five deceased sCJD patients and one of two vCJD patients.

Continue reading “Prion seeding activity and infectivity in skin samples from patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease” | >

Government of England pledges to roll out Level 5 Self Driving cars by 2021. And, they estimate 1 million people being left unemployed. Gives an idea of what will happen with automation of the Transportation Industry in the US.

UK chancellor says driverless vehicles will revolutionise people’s lives but says for some it will be ‘very challenging’.

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I saw hundreds of homes in one subdivision destroyed (8900 homes were destroyed in total in the fires). We must seek out better technological solutions to stop wildfires in California. Lives are at risk and hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. The state is getting drier, and innovative technologies—especially drone surveillance—can help spot fires before they get too large to easily contain. AI can also tell us, based on weather conditions, where fire protection resources and first responders should be stationed. Quickly putting out fires that do occur is the key to protecting the state.

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The UN attempt to regulate AI is doomed to failure. If the USA doesnt veto, and i’m sure it would, China and Russia will.

UN efforts to limit or regulate military AI may be failing before they even begin.

Arms control advocates had reason for hope when scores of countries met at the United Nations in Geneva last week to discuss the future of lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS. Unlike previous meetings, this one involved a Group of Governmental Experts, a big bump in diplomatic formality and consequence, and those experts had a mandate to better define lethal autonomy in weapons. But hopes for even a small first step toward restricting “killer robots” were dashed as the meeting unfolded. Russia announced that it would adhere to no international ban, moratorium or regulation on such weapons. Complicating the issue, the meeting was run in a way that made any meaningful progress toward defining (and thus eventually regulating) LAWS nearly impossible. Multiple attendees pointed out that that played directly toward Russia’s interests.

Russia’s Nov. 10 statement amounts to a lawyerly attempt to undermine any progress toward a ban. It argues that defining “lethal autonomous robots” is too hard, not yet necessary, and a threat to legitimate technology development.

Continue reading “Russia to the United Nations: Don’t Try to Stop Us From Building Killer Robots” | >

Most people probably aren’t aware of this, but the 2016 U.S. Presidential election included a candidate who had a radio-frequency identification chip implanted in his hand. No, it wasn’t Donald J. Trump. It was Zoltan Istvan, a nominee representing the Silicon Valley-based Transhumanist Party and his body-worn chip unlocked his front door, provided computer password access and sent an auto-text that said: “Win in 2016!”

The transhumanist movement – employing technology and radical science to modify humans – offers a glimpse into the marriage of machines and people, the focus of a recent paper released by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT). With cybernetic implants already available to consumers, the prospect for techno-human transmutation – cyborgs – is not as far away as many may think.

“We are moving towards automation, we are moving towards machine learning,” said Parham Eftekhari (pictured), co-founder and senior fellow at ICIT. “We’re seeing it impact a lot of our society.”

Eftekhari stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) at CyberConnect 2017 in New York City. They discussed ICIT’s recent cybersecurity research and the potential for increased government regulation. ( Disclosure below.)

Continue reading “Why cyborg creators must self-govern security, privacy efforts” | >