Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Robot racing series Roborace finally pulled the wraps off its first real self-driving racecar. The British company behind the series showed off the “Robocar” for the first time ever in public during a press conference at Mobile World Congress today.

The cars of Roborace — the early design of which was revealed one year ago — were designed by Daniel Simon, the man behind the light cycles in Tron: Legacy. “I’ve worked on a lot of cool stuff — Tron, Bugatti, Star Wars — but this takes the cake,” Simon said on stage.

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An answer to concerns about rejuvenation-induced overpopulation from a logistical point of view.

Why do we worry about overpopulation? What’s so bad about it? Well, several things. We could have too many people with respect to the space available on Earth; too many people and not enough jobs for everyone; too many people and not sufficient resources; too many people polluting the environment beyond what it can take.

All these potential problems need to be discussed. Thus, in this article I’m going to play accountant a little bit. You can read the whole article, or jump to the section that concerns you the most.

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Slate book columnist Mark O’Connell’s new book To Be a Machine, which is specifically about #transhumanism, is out tomorrow. So there’s a ton of reviews out in major media. The last chapter in the book is about my work. Here are 3 reviews just out on the book. ALSO, I highly encourage you to BUY the book to help transhumanism grow. Mark’s book is the first book specifically on the movement with this kind of international attention, and the better the book does the first week, the more people will know about transhumanism: http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/25/14730958/transhumanism-mar…biohackers &

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-rev…e34127614/ &

Mark O’Connell Doesn’t Want to Be a Cyborg: The Millions Interview

The strangest place writer Mark O’Connell has ever been to is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation — where dead bodies are preserved in tanks filled with nitrogen, in case they can be revived with future technology. “There was a floor with the stainless steel cylinders and all these bodies contained within them and corpses and severed heads,” he tells The Verge. “That imagery is something that I will take with me to a grave, whether that’s a refrigerated cylinder or an actual grave.”

O’Connell, 37, visited Alcor while writing To Be a Machine, which comes out February 28th. The nonfiction book delves into the world of transhumanists, or people who want to transcend the limits of the human body using technology. Transhumanists want to be stronger and faster; they want to be cyborgs. And they want to solve the problem of death, whether by freezing their bodies through cryonics or uploading their consciousnesses. Transhumanists have been around since at least the 1980s, but have become more visible in the past decade as technology advances have made these ideas seem more feasible and less like sci-fi.

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Anyone who’s seen Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son give a keynote speech will know he rarely sticks to the standard industry conference playbook.

And his turn on the stage at Mobile World Congress this morning was no different, with Son making like Eldon Tyrell and telling delegates about his personal belief in a looming computing Singularity that he’s convinced will see superintelligent robots arriving en masse within the next 30 years, surpassing the human population in number and brainpower.

“I totally believe this concept,” he said, of the Singularity. “In next 30 years this will become a reality.”

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Keep duplicates in case the id isn’t returned.

In New York City, Customs and Border Protection agents met passengers as they exited a flight from San Francisco Wednesday, demanding to check their IDs. A staffer for VICE News who was aboard the flight captured photos of the incident, saying passengers were told they couldn’t disembark without showing their documents. The CBP later said its agents were assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement in seeking a person ordered removed by an immigration judge.

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Since the early seventies, scientists have been developing brain-machine interfaces; the main application being the use of neural prosthesis in paralyzed patients or amputees. A prosthetic limb directly controlled by brain activity can partially recover the lost motor function. This is achieved by decoding neuronal activity recorded with electrodes and translating it into robotic movements. Such systems however have limited precision due to the absence of sensory feedback from the artificial limb. Neuroscientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, asked whether it was possible to transmit this missing sensation back to the brain by stimulating neural activity in the cortex. They discovered that not only was it possible to create an artificial sensation of neuroprosthetic movements, but that the underlying learning process occurs very rapidly. These findings, published in the scientific journal Neuron, were obtained by resorting to modern imaging and optical stimulation tools, offering an innovative alternative to the classical electrode approach.

Motor function is at the heart of all behavior and allows us to interact with the world. Therefore, replacing a lost limb with a robotic prosthesis is the subject of much research, yet successful outcomes are rare. Why is that? Until this moment, brain-machine interfaces are operated by relying largely on visual perception: the robotic arm is controlled by looking at it. The direct flow of information between the brain and the machine remains thus unidirectional. However, movement perception is not only based on vision but mostly on proprioception, the sensation of where the limb is located in space. “We have therefore asked whether it was possible to establish a bidirectional communication in a brain-machine interface: to simultaneously read out neural activity, translate it into prosthetic movement and reinject sensory feedback of this movement back in the brain”, explains Daniel Huber, professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences of the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE.

Providing artificial sensations of prosthetic movements.

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