Posted in drones, robotics/AI
Today, Elon Musk stated that updates regarding his neural lace, which is meant to augment the human mind, are coming next month. In October, Bryan Johnson announced a $100 million investment to put computers in our brains. And so, a race is on to hack human intelligence.
The age of the machine is well underway, and there is a very good chance that humanity will be left behind. Artificial intelligence is beating us at poker. It is beating us at Go. It is saving lives by identifying diseases when human doctors fail. It is running our grocery stores. It is driving our cars. AI is even making other AI.
Soon, very soon, our computers will surpass us in every skill imaginable.
If an overhyped vegetable existed before marketers coined the term superfood — and long before Oprah Winfrey chatted up acai berries with Dr. Oz — look no further than spinach. (Here’s to Popeye, eating the stuff by the can to inflate his biceps.) Spinach alone, of course, won’t pump anyone up. But it does have a few physical properties of the type that excite biomedical engineers. Spinach grows a network of veins, for instance, that thread through its leaves in a way similar to blood vessels through a human heart.
These leafy veins allowed researchers at Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute to give a new meaning to heart-healthy spinach. The tissue engineers, as they reported recently in the journal Biomaterials, stripped green spinach leaves of their cells. The spinach turned translucent. The scientists seeded the gaps that the plant cells left behind with human heart tissue. Heart cells, in clusters, beat for up to three weeks in this unusual environment.
The inspiration for the human-plant fusion came over lunch — and, yes, the leafy greens were involved — when WPI bioengineers Glenn Gaudette and Joshua Gershlak began to brainstorm new ways to tackle a deadly medical problem: the lack of donor organs. Of the more than 100,000 people on the donor list, nearly two dozen people die each day while waiting for an organ transplant.
Researchers have developed a line immortal stem cells that allow them to generate an unlimited supply of artificial red blood cells on demand.
If these artificial blood cells pass clinical trials, they’ll be far more efficient for medical use than current red blood cell products, which have to be generated from donor blood — and would be a huge deal for patients with rare blood types, who often struggle to find matching blood donors.
The idea isn’t for these immortal stem cells to replace blood donation altogether — when it comes to regular blood transfusions, donated blood still does the trick.
History has shown us that only violence or huge disasters tend to reduce inequality. Which is frightening on it’s own.
The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century By Walter Scheidel. Princeton University Press; 504 pages; $35 and £27.95.
AS A supplier of momentary relief, the Great Depression seems an unlikely candidate. But when it turns up on page 363 of Walter Scheidel’s “The Great Leveler” it feels oddly welcome. For once—and it is only once, for no other recession in American history boasts the same achievement—real wages rise and the incomes of the most affluent fall to a degree that has a “powerful impact on economic inequality”. Yes, it brought widespread suffering and dreadful misery. But it did not bring death to millions, and in that it stands out.
In case you missed it, Elon Musk is rather concerned about the fate of humanity, given the extreme advancements being made in artificial intelligence (AI). Ultimately, he fears that our AI will, one day, overtake us. When this happens, he claims that humans will likely become second class citizens (or slaves, or something even worse).
Now, reports have surfaced which assert that he is backing a brain-computer interface venture that was founded to allow humans to keep up with the advancements made in machines. The interface is intended to work by augmenting that which makes us human: our brains.
The find comes from The Wall Street Journal. According to them, the company – which is called Neuralink – is still in the earliest stages of development. To that end, it has no public presence at all.
Empresário Elon Musk tem uma nova empresa — sim, outra — focada no desenvolvimento das capacidades do cérebro através do aumento tecnológico. O Neuralink, vai trabalhar em tecnologia de interface computador-cérebro como meio de ajudar os seres humanos a acompanhar o desenvolvimento acelerado de inteligência artificial.
This is big: Is the Singularity a step closer?
Tesla Inc founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk has launched a company called Neuralink Corp through which computers could merge with human brains, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Neuralink is pursuing what Musk calls the “neural lace” technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts, the Journal reported. (on.wsj.com/2naUATf)
Musk has not made an official announcement, but Neuralink was registered in California as a “medical research” company last July, and he plans on funding the company mostly by himself, a person briefed on the plans told the Journal.
