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Category: robotics/AI

We’ve updated our list of the best longevity experts on Twitter/X and added 8 new accounts, including Dr. Morgan Levine, Dr. Brad Stanfield, and the research journal Nature Aging!

Best known for his popular longevity YouTube channel, Stanfield is a medical doctor with an interest in longevity science. Like some other folks on this list of longevity influencers, Stanfield can be a bit iconoclastic, challenging orthodoxy on things like resveratrol and fisetin.

Just like in his well-sourced videos, Stanfield’s Twitter feed is heavy with links to research papers and studies on longevity-related topics, from recent mouse studies out of the Interventions Testing Program, to threads on diet based on new trials. The downside is in his Twitter feed you don’t get to hear that sweet Kiwi accent you get from his videos.

Followers: 24,000

Founder and CEO of AI drug discovery Insilico Medicine (which has raised over $400 million under his leadership), Alex Zhavoronkov seems to be everywhere in longevity circles. From serving on the board of Peter Diamandis’s X-Prize Foundation (which recently announced its longevity X-Prize), to founding biological age testing company Deep Longevity, to somehow having the time to publish over 170 peer-reviewed studies.

Continue reading “21 Best Longevity Experts and Influencers on Twitter/X” | >

I’m excited to share my latest Opinion article on AI at The Hill, a top political site/paper read by the White House and Congress:

Regardless what politicians promise, this age of AI and robots will also affect the size and growth rates of the U.S. government. Federal and state government may not immediately take up with automation and AI to the extent the private sector does, but eventually the stark rationality of lower overhead expenses—and thus lower taxes for citizens—will prevail.

This is a good thing. A smaller, nimble, more efficient government will benefit the majority of people.

Zoltan Istvan writes and speaks on transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and the future. He is the author of “The Transhumanist Wager,” and is the subject of the forthcoming biography by Dr. Ben Murnane and Changemakers Books titled, “Transhuman Citizen: Zoltan Istvan’s Hunt for Immortality.”

Continue reading “AI can stop government from growing, and that’s a good thing” | >

To create the breakthrough model, researchers integrated two cutting-edge #AI techniques for the first time in the fields of #bioinformatics and #Cheminformatics : the well-known “Encoder-Decoder Transformer architecture” and “Reinforcement Learning via Monte Carlo Tree Search” (RL-MCTS).

Generative artificial intelligence platforms, from ChatGPT to Midjourney, grabbed headlines in 2023. But GenAI can do more than create collaged images and help write emails—it can also design new drugs to treat disease.

Today, scientists use advanced technology to design new synthetic drug compounds with the right properties and characteristics, also known as “de novo drug design.” However, current methods can be labor-, time-, and cost-intensive.

Inspired by ChatGPT’s popularity and wondering if this approach could speed up the drug design process, scientists in the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University in Orange, California, decided to create their own GenAI model, detailed in a new paper, “De Novo Drug Design using Transformer-based Machine Translation and Reinforcement Learning of Adaptive Monte-Carlo Tree Search,” appearing in the journal Pharmaceuticals.

Continue reading “Scientists code ChatGPT to design new medicine” | >

Futuristic advancements in AI and healthcare stole the limelight at the tech extravaganza Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024. However, battery technology is the game-changer at the heart of these innovations, enabling greater power efficiency. Importantly, electric vehicles are where this technology is being applied most intensely. Today’s EVs can travel around 700km on a single charge, while researchers are aiming for a 1,000km battery range.

Researchers are fervently exploring the use of silicon, known for its high storage capacity, as the anode material in lithium-ion batteries for EVs. However, despite its potential, bringing silicon into practical use remains a puzzle that researchers are still working hard to piece together.

Enter Professor Soojin Park, PhD candidate Minjun Je, and Dr. Hye Bin Son from the Department of Chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). They have cracked the code, developing a pocket-friendly and rock-solid next-generation high-energy-density Li-ion battery system using micro silicon particles and gel polymer electrolytes.

Read more | >

“The way we teach critical thinking will change with AI,” said Dr. Stephen Aguilar. “Students will need to judge when, how and for what purpose they will use generative AI. Their ethical perspectives will drive those decisions.”

Can AI be integrated into the classroom? This is what a recent study titled “AI in K-12 Classrooms: Ethical Considerations and Lessons Learned” hopes to address and is one of three studies published in the “Critical Thinking and Ethics in the Age of Generative AI in Education” report by the USC Center for Generative AI and Society. The purpose of the study is to examine the ethics behind how teachers should use AI in the classroom and holds the potential for academics, researchers, and institutional leaders to better understand the implications of AI for academic purposes.

“The way we teach critical thinking will change with AI,” said Dr. Stephen Aguilar, who is the associate director for the USC Center for Generative AI and Society and one of the authors of the study. “Students will need to judge when, how and for what purpose they will use generative AI. Their ethical perspectives will drive those decisions.”

The study conducted a survey of 248 K-12 teachers with an average of 11 years teaching experience from a myriad of academic backgrounds, including public, private, and charter schools. The teachers were instructed to rate their impressions of using generative AI, such as ChatGPT, for their classroom instruction. In the end, the researchers discovered the results varied between men and women, with women teachers holding a preference for rule-based (deontological) approaches to using AI in the classroom.

Continue reading “Ethics and AI in Education: Self-Efficacy, Anxiety, and Ethical Judgments” | >

“We’d witness advances like mind-uploading,” B.T. said, and described the process by which the knowledge, analytic skills, intelligence, and personality of a person could be uploaded to a computer chip. “Once uploaded, that chip could be fused with a quantum computer that couples biological with artificial intelligence. If you did this, you’d create a human mind that has a level of computational, predictive, analytic, and psychic skill incomprehensibly higher than any existing human mind. You’d have the mind of God. That online intelligence could then create real effects in the physical world. God’s mind is one thing, but what makes God God is that He cometh to earth —”

When B.T. said earth, he made a sweeping gesture, like a faux preacher, and in his excitement, he knocked over Lily’s glass of wine. A waiter promptly appeared with a handful of napkins, sopping up the mess. B.T. waited for the waiter to leave.

“Don’t give me that look.”

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