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A duty to die at 75 by law?! No need to cure one disease because anyway you will die from another after 65?! A new article uncovers the dangers of going to ‘healthy’ and not longer lifespan:


2) A duty to die becomes greater as you grow older. As we age, we will be giving up less by giving up our lives, if only because we will sacrifice fewer remaining years of life and a smaller portion of our life plans… To have reached the age of, say, seventy-five or eighty years without being ready to die is itself a moral failing, the sign of a life out of touch with life’s basic realities.

3) A duty to die is more likely when you have already lived a full and rich life. You have already had a full share of the good things life offers.

Most bioethicists who denigrate the equal importance of the lives of the elderly and/or who promote age-based health-care-rationing schemes are not as explicit or impolitic in their advocacy as Hardwig. But changing the “primary goal of medicine” to “healthspan” — if involuntary or based on policy — would come perilously close to justifying that same utilitarian end.

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If both countries can make these shifts in perspective, then what might look like a zero-sum battle for A.I. supremacy between China and the United States will begin to resemble something totally different: an opportunity to learn across cultures and collectively advance the global project of building A.I. that improves human lives.


Visionary research is no longer the most important element of progress.

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At the same time as the hardware for SpaceX’s first BFR spaceship is entering the early stages of manufacturing, the company’s South Texas test facility is slowly taking shape after more than 18 months of what can be fairly described as hibernation.

The likeliest location for a near-future spaceship test stand or pad has also experienced a comparatively vast influx of construction workers and general activity that began earlier this month September, nearly two and half years after SpaceX began preparing the unstable coastal wetland with the addition of several hundred tons of soil.

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Researchers at Syracuse University, working with collaborators at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison, have developed a new technique for measuring the state of quantum bits, or qubits, in a quantum computer.

Their findings are the subject of an article in Science magazine, which elaborates on the experimental efforts involved with creating such a technique.

The Plourde Group—led by Britton Plourde, professor of physics in Syracuse’s College of Arts and Sciences (A&S)—specializes in the fabrication of superconducting devices and their measurement at low temperatures.

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