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RAND has opened an office in the San Francisco Bay Area to foster collaboration with the region’s leaders and researchers working to solve today’s complex problems—issues including technological change and innovation, social inequality, water resource management, and transportation.

“RAND’s research and analysis in technology, science, and economic policy intersect directly with the innovation emerging from the San Francisco Bay Area,” said Michael D. Rich, president and CEO of RAND. “RAND’s new office should help strengthen awareness within the Bay Area community of our long-standing commitment to using evidence and data to help policy and decisionmakers enhance well-being in the region and beyond.”

RAND brings a unique set of tools to address these policy concerns: big-data analytics, gaming, and methods to help people make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist, is leading the new office and will be convening public- and private-sector stakeholders to discuss important issues. “We want to partner with the region’s technology and innovation communities, to link our research and their expertise to make better policies and improve people’s lives,” she said.

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I do not think, at least at first, that any brain interfaces for the masses will be anything other than organic. Possibly a synthetic virus that can be inserted and removed without the invasion of instruments. Those things we might have to deal with either way are summarized here.

How closely will we live with the technology we use in the future? How will it change us? And how close is “close”? Ghost in the Shell imagines a futuristic, hi-tech but grimy and ghetto-ridden Japanese metropolis populated by people, robots, and technologically-enhanced human cyborgs.

Beyond the superhuman strength, resilience, and X-ray vision provided by bodily enhancements, one of the most transformative aspects of this world is the idea of brain augmentation, that as cyborgs we might have two brains rather than one. Our biological brain—the “ghost” in the “shell”—would interface via neural implants to powerful embedded computers that would give us lightning-fast reactions and heightened powers of reasoning, learning and memory.

First written as a Manga comic series in 1989 during the early days of the internet, Ghost in the Shell’s creator, Japanese artist Masamune Shirow, foresaw that this brain-computer interface would overcome the fundamental limitation of the human condition: that our minds are trapped inside our heads. In Shirow’s transhuman future our minds would be free to roam, relaying thoughts and imaginings to other networked brains, entering via the cloud into distant devices and sensors, even “deep diving” the mind of another in order to understand and share their experiences.

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Interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing in the investment quarter.

Mainstream interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing.

“Investment in the development of rejuvenation therapies represents an enormous opportunity for profit; these are products for which every adult human being much over the age of 30 is a potential customer at some price point. That is larger than near every existing industry, either within or outside the field of medicine, even given that customers will only purchase such a therapy once every few years, for clearance of metabolic waste, or even just once, for treatments like the SENS approach of allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes. Among the first successful companies in this space, some will grow to become among the largest in the world: I’d wager that the Ford or Microsoft of rejuvenation will be a lot larger than the actual Ford of automobiles or Microsoft of personal computing.”

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The key to this all working is the design of the nanostructures. If you just have a laser in free space, the particle will just oscillate back and forth, pushing it one way and then the other. It won’t ever gain in total energy. So you need some kind of structure that channels or modulates the fields in such a way that the particle will travel along mainly the peaks of the electromagnetic wave and not into the troughs so that it gets kicks but not deceleration.

In all of the experiments done so far, England explains that the particles are basically filling the whole wave, occupying and seeing both the peaks and troughs. This results in some particles being accelerated while others get decelerated.

“In the future, as one of the next experimental steps what we want is to bunch the particles to make very short little packets of particles that are spaced at exactly the right distance between the peaks so that they will ride only on the peaks,” says England. “So you can think of it as like… ocean waves, and you want your surfers to be positioned only on the peaks of the waves and not in the troughs.”

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The US wants to stay in front of China with hypersonic weapons able to travel at five-times the speed of sound and destroy targets with a “kinetic energy” warhead.

Air Force weapons developers expect to operate hypersonic intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance drones by the 2040s, once scientific progress with autonomy and propulsion technology matures to a new level.

The advent of using a recoverable drone platform able to travel at high altitudes, faster than Mach 5, will follow the emergence of hypersonic weapons likely to be operational in the mid-2020s, according to the Air Force Chief Scientist Geoffrey Zacharias.

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For the first time ever, a single flexible fiber no bigger than a human hair has successfully delivered a combination of optical, electrical, and chemical signals back and forth into the brain, putting into practice an idea first proposed two years ago. With some tweaking to further improve its biocompatibility, the new approach could provide a dramatically improved way to learn about the functions and interconnections of different brain regions.

The new fibers were developed through a collaboration among material scientists, chemists, biologists, and other specialists. The results are reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, in a paper by Seongjun Park, an MIT graduate student; Polina Anikeeva, the Class of 1942 Career Development Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Yoel Fink, a professor in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Gloria Choi, the Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and 10 others at MIT and elsewhere.

The fibers are designed to mimic the softness and flexibility of brain tissue. This could make it possible to leave implants in place and have them retain their functions over much longer periods than is currently possible with typical stiff, metallic fibers, thus enabling much more extensive data collection. For example, in tests with lab mice, the researchers were able to inject viral vectors that carried genes called opsins, which sensitize neurons to light, through one of two fluid channels in the fiber. They waited for the opsins to take effect, then sent a pulse of light through the optical waveguide in the center, and recorded the resulting neuronal activity, using six electrodes to pinpoint specific reactions. All of this was done through a single flexible fiber just 200 micrometers across — comparable to the width of a human hair.

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Artificial intelligence has reached peak hype. News outlets report that companies have replaced workers with IBM Watson and that algorithms are beating doctors at diagnoses. New AI startups pop up everyday, claiming to solve all your personal and business problems with machine learning.

Ordinary objects like juicers and Wi-Fi routers suddenly advertise themselves as “powered by AI.” Not only can smart standing desks remember your height settings, they can also order you lunch.

Much of the AI hubbub is generated by reporters who’ve never trained a neural network and by startups or those hoping to be acqui-hired for engineering talent despite not having solved any real business problems. No wonder there are so many misconceptions about what AI can and cannot do.

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Thanks for your interest!

Thanks to SAP Italia for making this video available, the original video is at https://youtu.be/PLS5wGAM3R8 You can download all my slides at www.gerdcloud.net; direct link to the slides used here is gerd.fm/sapitaliagerd

In this talk, I address the opportunities and challenges of exponential transformation, the coming convergence of man and machine, the changes coming to society, work and jobs, the 10 megashifts, and what it takes to lead into this future responsible and openly.

If you enjoy my videos and talks, please take a look at my new book “Technology vs Humanity” http://www.techvshuman.com or buy it via Amazon http://gerd.fm/globalTVHamazon

Gerd Leonhard Futurist, Humanist, Author / Keynote Speaker.
CEO of The Futures Agency
Zürich / Switzerland
http://www.futuristgerd.com or www.gerdleonhard.de
Download all of my videos and PDFs at http://www.gerdcloud.net

About my new book: are you ready for the greatest changes in recent human history? Futurism meets humanism in Gerd Leonhard’s ground-breaking new work of critical observation, discussing the multiple Megashifts that will radically alter not just our society and economy but our values and our biology. Wherever you stand on the scale between technomania and nostalgia for a lost world, this is a book to challenge, provoke, warn and inspire.

Continue reading “Futurist Speaker Gerd Leonhard at SAP Executive Summit 2017: Exponential technological ®evolutions” | >