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National Electric Vehicle Sweden, which purchased Saab’s assets back in 2012, is using CES Asia to show its vision of autonomous commuting. Owning a car is out in this particular mobility vision, and vehicles not only pick you up and drop you off autonomously, they change their interiors around your needs and whims. So you enjoy a personalized ride and can make the most of every moment.

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This is one of the first articles I’ve seen specifically on #Judiasm and #transhumaism, with input by rabbis. Naturally the article is cautious, but interesting too.


Transhumanism, an intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities, a concept once limited to the realm of science-fiction, is now becoming more of a reality than ever before. The once outlier philosophy is quickly becoming mainstream, an accepted part of the social conscience that is the new religion for the anti-religious, including its own Messianic vision.

There are many aspects to the transhumanism philosophy, often abbreviated as H+ or h+, including physical longevity through medical breakthroughs and/or merging mankind with machines. Many transhumanists advocate transferring the sum total of a person’s knowledge and experiences into a computer and recreating the individual as a form of artificial intelligence ( AI ) in order to extend an individual’s life.

In its most extreme form, transhumanism advocates limiting human population. This extreme philosophy is criticized for being eugenicist master-race ideology and infringing on basic reproductive rights.

Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman, director of Ohr Chadash Torah Institute, noted that as in any social reform, the driving intention behind the movement is the key element, the factor that decides whether it will be a positive or negative influence on human history.

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The team, made up of highly educated academics, lawyers, scholars and philosophers, form the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER, commonly referred to as “caesar”) and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. At times of global threat, the experts meet to assess the biggest threats facing Earth and what can be done to save civilisation from the impending apocalypse.

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An extensive new analysis by Deloitte estimates that over 100,000 jobs will be lost to technological automation within the next two decades. Increasing technological advances have helped replace menial roles in the office and do repetitive tasks.

To paraphrase the Bard’s famous quote: “The first thing we do, let’s replace all the lawyers with automated algorithms.”

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Lyrebird, a deep learning tech startup based in Montreal, is developing technology that allows anyone to produce surprisingly realistic-sounding speech with the voice of any individual. Lyrebird’s demo generates speech, including varied intonation, in the voices of Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. For now, the impersonations are impressive, but also possess a fuzzy, robotic quality that allows even an untrained ear to easily recognize the voice as computer-generated. Still, the technology is making rapid progress.


Opinion: The world of truth is about to be upended by AI technologies.

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Lockheed Martin is using turbine rocket combined cycle (TRCC) to build a mach 6–10 hypersonic plane. The TRCC is an engine that switches between turbofan, ramjet and scramjets for subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flight. The TRCC engine will be tested on a fighter-sized flight testbed by 2020. They would then try to develop a Mach 6, unmanned spyplane by 2030 that would perform the same role as the old SR-71 Blackbird. The hypersonic spyplane would enter highly contested and defended airspace at altitudes of 18 and 62 miles, using its speed to outrun enemy defenses. Hypersonic planes could fire hypersonic missiles. It would join the B-21 stealth bomber in the US air force future global strike arsenal.

Raytheon is also developing anti-hypersonic missile defenses.

Air-breathing hypersonic weapons and boost glide weapons are very difficult to engage, as both fly depressed trajectories that dispense with the high, arc-like, and most importantly predictable trajectories of traditional ballistic missiles.

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“The dominant paradigm is that these [sensor] devices are dumb,” said senior researcher with Microsoft Research India, Manik Varma.

Now, Varma’s team in India and Microsoft researchers in Redmond, Washington, (the entire project is led by lead researcher Ofer Dekel) have figured out how to compress neural networks, the synapses of Machine Learning, down from 32 bits to, sometimes, a single bit and run them on a $10 Raspberry Pi, a low-powered, credit-card-sized computer with a handful of ports and no screen. It’s really just an open-source motherboard that can be deployed anywhere. The company announced the research in a blog post on Thursday.

Microsoft’s work is part of a growing trend of moving Machine Learning closer to devices and end users.

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