Posted in biotech/medical, cyborgs, robotics/AI, transhumanism
Team OB just won the Robotics for Good Award in Dubai. Over 1,600 technologies for good applied and after competing against the top 10 best assistive technologies the judges chose our bionic hands! Now we have the funding to push our hands through the final stages of medical testing and finally get them to everyone who needs one. 
Smartphones are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses, thanks to add-ons and apps that make their ubiquitous small screens into medical devices, researchers say.
“If you look at the camera, the flash, the microphone… they all are getting better and better,” said Shwetak Patel, engineering professor at the University of Washington.
“In fact the capabilities on those phones are as great as some of the specialized devices,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting this week.
Taxation and redistribution.
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.
“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
Gates made the remark during an interview with Quartz. He said robot taxes could help fund projects like caring for the elderly or working with children in school. Quartz reported that European Union lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robots in the past. The law was rejected.
Church mentioned human trials in 2 years a few months ago. this is the first I have seen him say that in 10 years the reversal of aging will be a reality. That’ll make me 55. Hurry.
While discussing creating a hybrid elephant — wooly mammoth using CRISPR genome editing, Harvard’s George Church predicted that reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years.
Nextbigfuture suspects that this could mean clearly reversing aging in mice cells as a proof in principle in ten years. But evidence suggests Church does mean full and significant aging reversal in humans within ten years. In March of 2016 Church said, aging should be thought of as a program that might be reversed, noting, “If we could take one of my skin cells and turn it into an embryo-like cell and turn it back into a skin cell it has reset almost all of the developmental indications of age. We have 65 gene therapies that are being test in mice and larger animals. If they go well we will go straight into human trials. That could be as little as two years…
For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.
In the future, if you’re going blind, these sight restoration technologies may be used to remediate your vision loss.
Three major ideas are covered. 1) Implanting arrays of tiny 3-color LEDs under a failed retina to stimulate still-okay cells, and 2) using gene therapy to express a novel photoreceptor, borrowed from algae, to restore a form of sight to failed cells. These can be done together. Lots of studies in mice, primates, and humans. Some coverage is also given to 3) directly implanting electronics in the brain to send complete images to vision centers, but this is still at an early stage.
None of this is anywhere near total restoration. The patients can make out a few words for the first time. And unlike normal vision, the range of light intensity levels remains very narrow. But obviously it’s much better than nothing and will get better over time.
As a point of humor, he tells the story of one of his blind patients who totally redesigned one of his experiments for him.
Potentially describing how general artificial intelligence will look like.
Since scientists started building and training neural networks, Transfer Learning has been the main bottleneck. Transfer Learning is the ability of an AI to learn from different tasks and apply its pre-learned knowledge to a completely new task. It is implicit that with this precedent knowledge, the AI will perform better and train faster than de novo neural networks on the new task.
DeepMind is on the path of solving this with PathNet. PathNet is a network of neural networks, trained using both stochastic gradient descent and a genetic selection method.
For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.