“Should it ever occur, an encounter with interplanetary life will surely reorder our own society in ways that this new SFI initiative suggests that we ought to consider right now.”
Warfare and technology make the perfect partners of destruction. Military innovations from wooden catapults to nuclear bombs have been transforming the way war is waged since prehistoric humans carved arrows from stones some 10,000 years ago.
The visions of futurists don’t always match the experiences of military personnel, but the battlefields of the future will bear little resemblance to the war zones of today.
The future of technology in warfare: From AI robots to VR torture.
Geopolitical developments have raised fears of another world war. Technological advances mean it should at least be over quickly.
The world’s most populous nation suffers from a shortage of medical practitioners, with the World Health Organisation estimating there are only 1.5 physicians available for every 1,000 people, compared with 2.4 in the US and 2.8 in the UK. That has led to deteriorating work conditions for doctors and radiologists who constantly work overtime to process huge amounts of patient data. As a consequence, the error rate is high.
Alibaba Health unveiled this week its first artificial intelligence service for disease diagnosis, offering hope that advanced technology will alleviate the workload of mainland Chinese physicians in a nation suffering from an acute shortage of doctors.
The AI solution, called Doctor You, can be used for medical image diagnosis of CT scans to identify inflammatory cells in human organs, which can be an early indicator of cancer.
“It will soon serve as an assistant to physicians at a number of hospitals in the country,” said Ke Yan, a vice president with Ali Health, adding that the technology could lower error rates and improve efficiency.
My work is featured in Reason today via a review on book Radicals, which opens with a controversial chapter on my transhumanist presidential run: http://reason.com/blog/2017/07/12/theres-no-harm-in-fantasizing-about-a-be #transhumanism
In Radicals Chasing Utopia, transhumanist enthusiasm gets a bad rap.
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AI is being used for much more than many realize. In fact, particle physicists are currently pushing the limits of our understanding of the universe with the help of these technologies.
Many might associate current artificial intelligence (AI) abilities with advanced gameplay, medical developments, and even driving. But AI is already reaching far beyond even these realms. In fact, AI is now helping particle physicists to discover new subatomic particles.
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Keith Comito introduces the Lifespan Heroes, a campaign to help support scientific progress, journalism and advocacy at the LEAF Foundation.
By becoming a Heroes patron you are helping us to create more content, exclusive interviews, the latest biotech news, livestream events and more.
Check out the campaign here: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/join-us-become-a-lifespan-hero/
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Interesting results in mice but don’t jump on the bandwagon yet.
Fisetin is a naturally occurring plant polyphenol from the flavonoid group, similar to quercetin. It is present in many plants, where it acts as a colouring agent. It is also found in many fruits and vegetables, such as strawberries, apples, persimmons, onions, and cucumbers.
It has also been found to be a senolytic compound able to clear senescent cells, at least it does in vitro studies in a petri dish[1]. The clearance of dysfunctional senescent cells is one of the repair based approaches proposed by the SENS Research Foundation to prevent or reverse age-related diseases.
Before you jump on the bandwagon
A new therapy for brain cancer.
A new type of cell that can seek and destroy brain cancer and then dispose of themselves has just been successfully tested in mice. The cells are able to home in on brain tumors and reduce them to between 2 to 5% of their original size[1].
This new approach could potentially give doctors a new weapon against aggressive cancers like brain cancer (glioblastoma), which normally kills in 12–15 months.
Interestingly, it only took the researchers four days to create and deploy these cells in the mice, which is an amazing accomplishment.