Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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While accidents have happened, one of the most appealing things about autonomous vehicles is their capacity to make our roads a safer place. Now, insurance companies are starting to offer financial incentives to promote adoption.

Britain’s largest automobile insurance company, Direct Line, has announced a 5 percent discount for customers who activate Autopilot functionality in their Tesla. It follows in the footsteps of Root, a startup that offers a similar promotion across nine states in the US.

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What is a body other than the vessel for your consciousness? Does the one you’re using right now really matter all that much? Why not, when your current body gets all old and run down, don’t you just get a new, young, beautiful, and healthy one? That’s the pitch in the first trailer for Netflix’s new dystopian sci-fi series Altered Carbon, which takes the form of an advertisement for Psychasec.

“Centuries ago, mankind discovered a way to transfer consciousness into a new body making death a mere inconvenience,” says the commercial. “Since then we’ve been providing an unparalleled pedigree of human sleeves to only the most discerning clientele. Psychasec: Live forever in the body you deserve.”

Based on Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 award-winning cyberpunk novel, Altered Carbon is set hundreds of years in the future when the super rich can repeatedly trade out their bodies (called “sleeves”) to live forever. The new Netflix series follows a soldier/P.I. named Takeshi Kovacs (played by both Will Yun Lee and Joel Kinnman) who wakes up centuries later in a new body to solve the murder of a billionaire.

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It worked. Working with mice, they were able to reverse the disease symptoms of kidney disease, type 1 diabetes, and a form of muscular dystrophy. In the mouse with kidney disease, for example, they turned on two genes associated with kidney function and saw the kidney function improved.

The unassumingly named CRISPR/Cas9 is a technology that stands to remake the world as we know it. By allowing scientists to more easily than ever cut and paste all those As, Cs, Ts, and Gs that encode all the world’s living things, for one thing, it could one day cure many devastating diseases.

All that power, though, comes with one pretty sizable caveat: Sometimes CRISPR doesn’t work quite like we expect it to. While the scientific establishment is still embroiled in a debate over just how serious the problem is, CRISPR sometimes causes off-target effects. And for scientists doing gene editing on human patients, those mutations could wind up inadvertently causing problems like tumors or genetic disease. Yikes.

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The robots are coming for your … chess game.

Google’s AI, AlphaZero, developed a “superhuman performance” in chess in just four hours.

Essentially, the AI absorbed humanity’s entire history of chess in one-sixth of a day — and then figured out how to beat anyone or anything.

After being programmed with the rules of the game (not the strategy) AlphaZero played 100 games against Stockfish, the world champion chess program. AlphaZero won 25 playing as white (which has first-mover advantage) and three games playing as black. The last 72 games were a draw with AlphaZero recording no losses and Stockfish recording no wins.

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Awesome!

A few months after demonstrating its dominance over the game of Go, DeepMind’s AlphaZero AI has trounced the world’s top-ranked chess engine—and it did so without any prior knowledge of the game and after just four hours of self-training.

AlphaZero is now the most dominant chess playing entity on the planet. In a one-on-one tournament against Stockfish 8, the reigning computer chess champion, the DeepMind-built system didn’t lose a single game, winning or drawing all of the 100 matches played.

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