Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism. He is the author of five national best-selling books, including “The Singularity is Near” and “How to Create a Mind.”

Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was found to suffer from a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease). Kurzweil then found a doctor (Terry Grossman, M.D.) who shares his non-conventional beliefs to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine, and various other methods to attempt to live longer. Kurzweil was ingesting “250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea” every day and drinking several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to “reprogram” his biochemistry. Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 90.

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Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil — A Revolutionary Future” | >

How is Artificial Intelligence actually thinking? Even their creators often don’t really fully understand. But if AI becomes more and more important you should at least have an idea of how algorithms get to results. And they think totally different to how human beings do, says Sara M. Watson, tech critic and writer at the Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong. How can literature and journalism help to find a new perspective on AI?

“The biggest problem AI has is that even the engineers can’t really explain certain outcomes or certain decisions that go through an artificially intelligent system.”

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Article out by Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine that discusses #transhumanism and #libertarianism:

Kai Weiss, a researcher at the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria, swiftly denounced the piece. “Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution,” he wrote.

Clearly there is some disagreement.

Weiss is correct that Istvan doesn’t expend much intellectual effort linking transhumanism with libertarian thinking. Istvan largely assumes that people seeking to flourish should have the freedom to enhance their bodies and minds and those of their children without much government interference. So what abominable transhumanist technologies does Weiss denounce?

Continue reading “Transhumanism and Libertarianism Are Entirely Compatible” | >

Announcement of CRISPR technology, which allows precise editing of the human genome, has been heralded as the future of individualized medicine, and a decried as a slippery slope to engineering individual human qualities. Of course, humans already know how to manipulate animal genomes through selective breeding, but there has been no appetite to try on humans what is the norm for dogs. That’s a good thing, says Dawkins. The results could well be dangerous. Does technology as a whole represent a threat to human welfare if it continues to evolve at its current rate? Not so fast, warns Dawkins. Comparing biological evolution to technological progress is an analogy at best. His newest book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.

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Transcript: I think it’s — I’m a believer in the precautionary principle as I’ve just said, and I think we have to worry about possible consequences of things that we do, and the ability to edit our own genomes is one thing we ought to worry about. I’m not sure it’s so much an ethical problem as a more practical problem. What would the consequences be? Would the consequences be bad? And they might be.

I think it’s worth noticing that long before CRISPR long before it became capable of editing our genomes in anyway we have been editing the genomes of domestic animals and plants by artificial selection, not artificial mutation, which is what we’re now talking about, but artificial selection. When you think that a Pekingese is a wolf, a modified wolf, a genetically modified wolf—modified not by directly manipulating genes but by choosing for breeding individuals who have certain characteristics, for example, a small stubbed nose, et cetera, and making a wolf turn into a Pekingese. And we’ve been doing that very successfully with domestic animals like dogs, cows, domestic plants like maize for a long time, we’ve never done that to humans or hardly at all.

Continue reading “The Dangers of CRISPR, Designer Babies, and Artificial Genetic Mutation” | >

Our Andromeda interstellar probe article has been featured in MlT Technology Review :

Business Impact.

Femto-spacecraft could travel to alpha centauri.

Earth’s nearest exoplanet twin orbits a star about four light years from here. Now scientists say it’s possible to visit this system in our lifetimes by propelling a tiny spacecraft on the tip of a laser beam.

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    Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on Friday at a meeting of students in Yaroslavl, Russia about the development of artificial intelligence (AI). In a rather ominous sounding warning, the leader stated that “the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.”

    Many of those working in the field see AI as a tool for making humanity better, while others foresee it as a harbinger of doom for the human species. Not many high profile people — especially the leader of the largest nation on Earth — have come forward to blatantly express the potential of AI to be a tool of immense power for a nation to wield.

    President Putin went on to say that “it would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position,” implying that Russia’s breakthroughs would ideally be shared with other nations.

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    A Stanford team has launched a new challenge on the Eterna computer game. Players will design a CRISPR-controlling molecule, and with it open the possibility of new research and therapies.

    A team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine has launched a new challenge for the online computer game Eterna in which players are being asked to design an RNA molecule capable of acting as an on/off switch for the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9.

    Molecular biologists will then build and test the actual molecules, based on the most promising designs provided by the players.

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    Chinese electronics giant Huawei on Saturday unveiled its first mobile personal assistant with artificial intelligence in Berlin, in hopes it will rival the dominance of Samsung’s Bixby and Apple’s Siri.

    “Smartphones are smart but they are not intelligent enough,” Richard Yu, of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, said at this year’s IFA electronics fair.

    The mobile assistant, called Kirin 970, will systematically respond to three questions—” the most important combination,” Yu said: Where is the user? Who are they and what are they doing?

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