Posted in health, neuroscience
Jaime Tartar tells us about how the brain interprets what is stressful, how it determines our behavioral and physiological response to stressors, and how it can be damaged by stress. She will discuss how the body’s reaction to acute stress has protective and adaptive effects in the short run while chronic stress can lead to poor health consequences such as decreased memory performance and depression.
Posted in media & arts, robotics/AI
As your body ages, increasing amounts of your cells enter a state of cellular senescence. These cells no longer divide or support the tissues of which they are a part, and they emit a cocktail of harmful chemical signals that encourage other nearby cells to also enter the same senescent state.
The presence of senescent cells contributes to decreasing tissue function, increases chronic inflammation, and can even raise the risk of cancer and other age-related diseases.
Senescent cells normally destroy themselves via a programmed process called apoptosis and are removed by the immune system; however, the immune system declines with age, and increasing numbers of these senescent cells escape this disposal process and accumulate.
This video was created by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, as a piece in the Great Transhumanist Game orchestrated by Professor Angel Marchev, Sr., Ph.D., of the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria.
What would it mean to win in the Great Transhumanist Game? Mr. Stolyarov answers that winning would be inaugurating the next great era of human civilization, and living to see it.
See the second installment of this video series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5n2uproRm4
Learn more about the U.S. Transhumanist Party: http://transhumanist-party.org/constitution/
Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside: https://goo.gl/forms/IpUjooEZjnfOFUMi2
Become a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party: https://goo.gl/forms/430kp31F0D6VmXFc2
This is the second video created by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, as a piece in the Great Transhumanist Game orchestrated by Professor Angel Marchev, Sr., Ph.D., of the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Now that we know what it would mean to win the Great Transhumanist Game, how do we get from here to there? Mr. Stolyarov discusses the importance of knowing which game one is playing, and whose, and abstaining from playing the wrong, counterproductive political or insurrectionary games.
See the first installment of this video series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjQUv9QA-nc
Learn more about the U.S. Transhumanist Party: http://transhumanist-party.org/constitution/
Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside: https://goo.gl/forms/IpUjooEZjnfOFUMi2
Become a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party: https://goo.gl/forms/430kp31F0D6VmXFc2
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.
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.
