Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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David Brin: “Our midweek posting resumes the ongoing saga of transparency and freedom, and how (surprise?) each year’s declared “secure” system gets stripped bare, in the next. Now it’s Yahoo and Equifax and Billions of records. Millions of sincere people can see an Orwellian nightmare looming. Yet, the common reflex is to call for more shadows and walls! For us to HIDE from elites! It won’t work. It cannot work. It will never work. But there is an alternative. The very same trick that got us our freedom and wealth, in the first place.”

“We will not preserve freedom by hiding. Nor will it ever be possible to conceal info from elites. Moreover, that is not how we got the freedom that we already have.”

“We will remain free by aggressively applying these tools upon all elites. It is the only way we ever got freedom and it is the only way we can retain it.”

The reason why people will always have a hard time believing in the idea of reciprocity in transparency is that it that knowing the elite’s misbehavior is completely useless unless you have some way to punish them. Or to put it in this little dialogue: Elite: I can know everything about you, peon, including your treasonous thoughts. Peon: I also know everything about you, including your treasonous actions. Elite: That’s cute. I also have a death squad. What you gonna do about it, insect? Peon: Oh… Forgot about the death squad. Without some way for mister peon to counter act the traditional strengths of elites, ie: money, power, lackeys, brute force, he is going to be very reticent to give up his one advantage of stealth.

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The link between inflammation, cellular senescence, aging, and cancer is a complex relationship, but a new study sheds light on how these four interact.

The light and dark side of inflammation and cellular senescence

Cellular senescence is a protective mechanism that helps us to stay healthy and avoid cancer by removing damaged and aged cells from the cell cycle while preventing them from creating damaged copies of themselves. Senescent cells are disposed of via a self-destruct process known as apoptosis.

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How much faster can you build a sneaker, exactly? A lot, it turns out. Wired UK has paid a visit to Adidas, which is hauling shoe manufacturing from labor-intensive Chinese plants into the aptly named Speed Factories in America and Germany.

Using tricks like robotic knitting, advanced plastic forming, and 3D printing (which is provided by Carbon, one of our 50 Smartest Companies of 2017) Adidas plans to make even custom sneakers 90 times faster than it can right now. It plans to crank out 1 million pairs of shoes a year from two Speed Factories—one in Atlanta, Georgia, the other in Bavaria, Germany—by the end of 2017.

Such innovation, it hopes, will allow it to remain competitive with Nike and Under Armor, which currently dominate the sportswear world.

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New film, New Ideas New Inventions. Billions in Change 2 shows how simple life-changing inventions provide clean water, electricity, and improve the lives of farmers. See how these inventions will enable the unlucky half of the world to improve their lives.

For more information go to BillionsInChange.com

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By scanning the brains of healthy volunteers, researchers at the National Institutes of Health saw the first, long-sought evidence that our brains may drain some waste out through lymphatic vessels, the body’s sewer system. The results further suggest the vessels could act as a pipeline between the brain and the immune system.

Dr. Daniel S. Reich, Ph.D., M.D., discusses how his team discovered that our brains may drain waste through lymphatic vessels, the body’s sewer system.

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Pioneered by Erik Verlinde, the idea is that gravity emerges from a more fundamental phenomenon in the Universe, and that phenomenon is entropy.

“Sound waves emerge from molecular interactions; atoms emerge from quarks, gluons and electrons and the strong and electromagnetic interactions; planetary systems emerge from gravitation in General Relativity. But in the idea of entropic gravity — as well as some other scenarios (like qbits) — gravitation or even space and time themselves might emerge from other entities in a similar fashion. There are well-known, close relationships between the equations that govern thermodynamics and the ones that govern gravitation. It’s known that the laws of thermodynamics emerge from the more fundamental field of statistical mechanics, but is there something out there more fundamental from which gravity emerges? That’s the idea of entropic gravity.”

Entropic gravity, also known as emergent gravity, is a theory in modern physics that describes gravity as an entropic force—a force with macro-scale homogeneity but which is subject to quantum-level disorder—and not a fundamental interaction. The theory, based on string theory, black hole physics, and quantum information theory, describes gravity as an emergent phenomenon that springs from the quantum entanglement of small bits of spacetime information. As such, entropic gravity is said to abide by the second law of thermodynamics under which the entropy of a physical system tends to increase over time.

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The research community is beginning to understand that motivations are not a human “artifact” of consciousness, but part of the essential glue that binds consciousness together. Without motivations we have nothing that holds us to this vessel, ensuring that we continue to eat, pay our rent, and do other things necessary for our survival. Conscious machines will for this reason have motivations as well. Otherwise they simply just wouldn’t function. This is an important point because talk of the singularity often brings up visions of a single integrated “machine” that will inevitably enslave humanity. A better question is:

“Will AI be used to gain immense advantage for a single party (whether that party is the AI itself or the human that controls it), or will AI be used to maximize benefit for us all?”

Even if the AIs have interfaces that allow them to share information more rapidly than humans can through reading or watching media, separate AIs will have separate motivations from a single centralized AI. Given that a signature of consciousness is motivation, any consciousness will obviously be motivated to secure all the resources it needs to ensure its survival. In some cases, the most efficient way to secure resources is sharing. In other cases, it’s through competition. AIs might share resources, but they might also compete.

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