Giant fans start capturing CO2 from the air as the world’s first commercial carbon capture plant goes live.
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Set on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, the third annual Blockchain Summit, hosted by BitFury, a leading full service Blockchain company, and Bill Tai, a venture investor and technologist, has come to a close. This event was an intimate, if perfectly balanced, gathering of technology, policy, investment and business leaders from around the world and across sectors. Topics ranged from the public policy implications of what is being heralded as a foundational technology, to new emerging business models that can ride on the very rails that enabled the global bonanza of digital currencies like Bitcoin. A key question that underpinned the Summit is if Blockchain could not have existed without the Internet, what could not exist without Blockchain?
Blockchain technology can undoubtedly change industries, especially those that labor under often byzantine, opaque and friction-laden business models. While many of the early pioneers are focusing on finance and insurance, the opportunities for this radical technology may very well reorder society as we know it. The remarkable case of Estonia, for example, shows a country reinventing itself into a future-proof digital state, where citizen services are rendered nearly instantaneously and to people all over the world. Similarly, promising work inspired by the famed Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, on improving land registries is being carried out by BitFury in a host of countries. With land and property being the two largest assets people will own — and the principal vehicle of value creation and wealth transfer — an unalterable, secure and transparent registration process should give the world comfort and elected leaders longevity.
What drives this unique technology is the power of distributed singularity, from which Blockchain’s identity pioneers like Dr. Mariana Dahan, who launched the World Identity Network on Necker Island, and Vinny Lingham of Civic, draw their inspiration. Blockchain operates on the basis of a distributed ledger (or database) system, inexorably marching forward recording and time-stamping transactions or records. While some may herald Bitcoin as Blockchain’s “killer app,” it is easy to maintain that the killer app is not the digital currencies that ride on Blockchain’s rails, but rather the rail system altogether. Two trains can ride on rails. But a high-speed maglev train is a decidedly faster mode of transport than a steam engine. Just as the maglev makes little or no contact with the rails enabling low-friction transport, the Blockchain can greatly reduce the friction in how the world transfers and records value.
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The intelligence value argument and effects on regulating autonomous artificial intelligence.
~ David J Kelley
Newton Lee in partnership with Springer is working on an upcoming book covering transhumanist topics, one of the chapters covers IVA (Intelligence Value Argument) which is summary of the chapter titled: “The Intelligence Value Argument and Effects on Regulating Autonomous Artificial Intelligence” which I wrote and am including only the first part of that chapter on IVA.
Abstract: This paper is focused on the Intelligence Value Argument or IVA and the ethics of how that applies to autonomous systems and how such systems might be governed by the extension of current regulation. IVA is based on some static core definitions of ‘Intelligence’ as defined by the measured ability to understand, use and generate knowledge, or information independently all of which are a function of sapience and sentience. The IVA logic places the value of any individual human and their potential for Intelligence and the value of other systems to the degree that they are self-aware or ‘intelligent’ as a priority. Further, the paper lays out the case for how the current legal framework could be extended to address issues with autonomous systems to varying degrees depending on the IVA threshold as applied to autonomous systems.
Introduction
In this chapter, I articulate the case using the Intelligence Value Argument (IVA) that, “ethically”, a fully Sapient and Sentient Intelligence is of equal value regardless of the underlying substrate which it operates on meaning a single fully Sapient and Sentient software system has the same moral agency [10] as an equally Sapient and Sentient human being. We define ‘ethical’ according to dictionary.com as pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principals of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct. Moral agency is, according to Wikipedia; is “an individual’s ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is “a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong.” Such value judgments need to be based on potential for Intelligence as defined here.
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Meet the Robin Hood of Science
Posted in science
Figured this deserved its own post:
The other day i had this idea for wind farms on the far Northern end of Canada, where it is basically a treeless desert, and have those running along the whole coast up there. I remember Japan was working on some wind power system where if it got hit by a typhoon it would supposedly produce 50 years worth of power. The main issues would be the cost of the wind systems, i don’t even know if they are commercially available yet, secondly hooking them up to the power grid and trying to run it into the greater North American power grid, i don’t know if the power grid stretches from up there down to the main grid. The plus to this as opposed to solar is this could be running up there 24÷7÷365. Cost to do something like this, to start, probably in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 million dollars US, and would require a ton of connections.
Typhoons are generally associated with mass destruction, but a Japanese engineer has developed a wind turbine that can harness the tremendous power of these storms and turn it into useful energy. If he’s right, a single typhoon could power Japan for 50 years.
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John Searle one of the world’s great philosophers of mind and language, has spent fifty years stimulating thinking around the world. What he says about consciousness as a biological phenomenon will challenge you! Cogitation, Consciousness & The Brain.
I’m going to talk about consciousness. Why consciousness? Well, it’s a curiously neglected subject, both in our scientific and our philosophical culture. Now why is that curious? Well, it is the most important aspect of our lives for a very simple, logical reason, namely, it’s a necessary condition on anything being important in our lives that we’re conscious.
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In this talk during the first International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid in 2017 (http://longevitycryopreservationsummi…), prepared in collaboration with Keith Comito, LEAF/Lifespan.io President, longevity advocate Elena Milova reviews sociological studies of public attitudes towards the concept of life extension and corresponding technologies
Posted in cryonics, education, geopolitics, life extension, neuroscience, transhumanism
She goes on to detail which expressions and messages can increase public acceptance and which have proven to be counterproductive. Related cognitive biases are also briefly discussed.
Elena is a LEAF/Lifespan.io Director of the Board and the head of its Outreach/Fundraising committee, and has been a longevity activist and advocate since 2013. Since then she has organized educational events to make new evidence-based methods of healthy life extension more popular, and is member of the Russian transhumanist movement.
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Executive summary
Posted in futurism
