“People are increasingly living past 100. That means some big changes for the future of work”
My new story for Vice Motherboard on the future of political campaining:
Lest we think future elections are all about the candidates, perhaps the largest possibility on the horizon could come from digital direct democracy—the concept where citizens participate in real time input in the government. I gently advocate for a fourth branch of government, in which the people can vote on issues that matter to them and their decrees could have real legal consequence on Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency.
Of course, that’s only if government even exists anymore. It’s possible the coming age of artificial intelligence and robots may replace the need for politicians. At least human ones. Some experts think superintelligent AI might be here in 10 to 15 years, so why not have a robot president that is totally altruistic and not susceptible to lobbyists and personal desires? This machine leader would simply always calculate the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, and go with that. No more Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, or whatever else we are.
Continue reading “Wild Transhumanist Campaign Tech We’ll See in Future Presidential Elections” »
Physicists from the Russian Quantum Center (RQC), MIPT, the Lebedev Physical Institute, and L’Institut d’Optique (Palaiseau, France) have devised a method for creating a special quantum entangled state. This state enables producing a high-precision ruler capable of measuring large distances to an accuracy of billionths of a metre. The results of the study have been published in Nature Communications (“Loss-tolerant state engineering for quantum-enhanced metrology via the reverse Hong–Ou–Mandel effect”).
“This technique will enable us to use quantum effects to increase the accuracy of measuring the distance between observers that are separated from one another by a medium with losses. In this type of medium, quantum features of light are easily destroyed,” says Alexander Lvovsky, a co-author of the paper, the head of the RQC scientific team that conducted the research, and a professor of the University of Calgary.
Continue reading “Physicists create a high-precision ‘quantum ruler’” »
Mobile phones have become commonplace. Modern communication devices like mobile phones need to exchange huge amounts of information. However, what is hidden underneath the elegantly shaped plastic casings is quickly forgotten: Complex signal processors constantly fighting against noise and steadily adapting themselves to changing environment.
But noise and changing environmental conditions do not only affect electrical circuits. In synthetic biology scientists are facing similar problems. However, in synthetic biology a methodology to deal with noise does not exist yet. Prof. Mustafa Khammash and Christoph Zechner of the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering have studied how conventional signal processors can be translated into biochemical processes — built and operated inside living cells.
A major limitation in engineering biological circuits is that host cells — even if they are genetically identical — are never the same. For instance, cell A might be in a different cell-cycle stage or have more ribosomes available than cell B. Therefore, the same synthetic circuit may behave very differently in each of these two cells. In extreme cases, only a small fraction of cells might show the correct behavior, while the remaining cells act unpredictably. This is referred to as context-dependency.
Sharing in case anyone is interested Prof. Scott Aaronson’s Computational discussion on “Complexity and Fundamental Physics”.
Summer continues, and the public lecture series on physics continues a pace at the Aspen Center for Physics with Dr. Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh talking today on the “Dark Side of the Universe”.
The talk is part of one of the three workshops currently taking place:
World renown physicist Michio Kaku states God is real. Kaku’s own words “After conducting tests on what he calls “primitive semi–radius tachyons”, Kaku came to a remarkable conclusion: “the only explanation for his results is that there must be a God.”
“This is an old idea, that the universe is intentionally designed so there must be a God,” Professor Aviezer told Breaking Israel News. “William Paley, an 18th-century Christian theologian, gave the watchmaker argument. If you find a watch in forest, then you can assume there is a watchmaker, because complicated things do not occur by themselves. In the same way, the universe proves the existence of its maker.”
However, “This argument is wrong,” stated the professor. “Complicated items do form by themselves. Crystals and chemical reactions are the most complicated things and they happen by themselves. My favorite example is snowflakes, which each form uniquely by themselves. But that is not proof there is a God.”
Continue reading “Has a Prominent Physicist Proved the Existence of God?” »
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Australian National University have developed new technology that aims to make the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) even more sensitive to faint ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
Scientists at Advanced LIGO announced the first-ever observation of gravitational waves earlier this year, a century after Albert Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity. Studying gravitational waves can reveal important information about cataclysmic astrophysical events involving black holes and neutron stars.
In The Optica l Society’s journal for high impact research, Optica, the researchers report on improvements to what is called a squeezed vacuum source. Although not part of the original Advanced LIGO design, injecting the new squeezed vacuum source into the LIGO detector could help double its sensitivity. This would allow detection of gravitational waves that are far weaker or that originate from farther away than is possible now.
