Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10027

On any given day, Zoubaida Salman instructs a classroom of 15-year-olds at the Sur Baher Girls School in East Jerusalem, where she has served as the science teacher and Environment and Health Coordinator for the past 22 years. One of the most important lessons comes from their backyard: water is scarce and precious in this region.

Water shortages can lead to major sanitation issues at schools, so students have to play an active role in managing it. At Sur Baher, the most significant use of is for flushing toilets, which stop working if there is not enough water. If the water runs out, school administrators must buy it from the city. In other regions, the schools even close because of .

A team of scientists with the NASA DEVELOP program is helping address these water shortages by collaborating with a nonprofit called Water Resources Action Project(WRAP). WRAP designs and constructs systems for schools in the Middle East to capture rainfall during the five-month rainy season for use later. Selecting a geographically promising area is time-consuming and tedious work though for the small, volunteer-based team. The NASA DEVELOP team is using to help WRAP more easily identify suitable locations for the rainwater harvesting systems.

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https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

Descartes once described the human body as a “fleshy machine” and today’s transhumanists would likely agree.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom writes that as we seek to peer farther into posthumanity our ability to concretely imagine what it might be like trails offend that the very essence of posthumanity is to be able to have thoughts and experiences that we cannot readily think or experience with our current capacities.

Today’s advances in science and technology will profoundly change what we understand as human. According to transhumanist philosophy humanity until this point has been a story of development for the survival and reproduction, but today thanks to advances in science we are entering a new phase where human beings are masters of their destiny. Therefore the Transhumanist movement envisions a future full of possibilities by broadening our potential as species by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.

Continue reading “The Augmented Posthuman Body” | >

The German start-up company ELiSE creates the DNA of a technical part. Based on the DNA, automated design processes are used to find the best solution which considers all predefined constraints and which is produced by additive manufacturing. Meet ELiSE at ESA’s Start-ups Zone powered by ESA space solutions at IAC 2018.

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AI is massively transforming our world, but there’s one thing it cannot do: love. In a visionary talk, computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee details how the US and China are driving a deep learning revolution — and shares a blueprint for how humans can thrive in the age of AI by harnessing compassion and creativity. “AI is serendipity,” Lee says. “It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human.”

Check out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.

Follow TED on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TEDTalks

Continue reading “How AI can save our humanity | Kai-Fu Lee” | >

DARPA is funding development of high resolution brain interfaces. At the same time there are two companies who have breakthrough technology for higher resolution brain interfaces. The two companies are Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Mary Lou Jepsen’s Openwater red light scanner. The Neuralink and Openwater systems will be described after the DARPA project and its goals.

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I don’t remember what it feels like to live without pain. At 15, I began feeling aching, stabbing, and burning sensations in my lower back and down my legs. Swallowing a few Aleve didn’t help—in fact, nothing did. If I sit or stand for any period of time, or lift something heavy or fall, I pay for it, sometimes for weeks or months. I’ve slept on the kitchen linoleum, because the carpet felt too soft to stand.

For 17 years, I went to doctor after doctor, undergoing scans, physical therapy, and just about every “alternative” treatment that promised relief. Despite some amazing doctors and the expensive tests at their disposal, they could never see anything wrong, so I never got a diagnosis.

That is, until a couple of years ago, when a routine CAT scan finally caught a structural problem with my spine. Because of that, I qualified to have a spinal cord stimulator, an electronic device used to treat chronic pain, implanted into my back. Although I was scared to go under the knife, I was more than willing to become a cyborg in order to find even partial relief. And this type of therapy might also be able to help some of the 100 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain.

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