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A lot of transhumanism friends have asked me to write about Bernie Sanders, so here are my thoughts:
The transhumanism movement has been dramatically growing in size—and most of that growth is from millennials and youth joining. Transhumanists want to use science and technology to radically improve the human race, and the onslaught of new gear and gadgets to do that—like virtual reality, robots, and chip implants —are giving them plenty of ammunition to do that.
But what has caught many people off guard—including myself who probably best fits into the category: left-leaning Libertarian—is the amount of support transhumanists are giving to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Historically, transhumanism (and its de facto home: Silicon Valley) has been Libertarian-minded —with a hands-off attitude towards the government, religion, and basically any authority trying to tell them what to do or how to innovate. But with the demographics of the transhumanism movement sharply changing from older academics and technologists to young people—especially those in college—the push towards more leftist and progressive-leaning ideas is strong. For many young transhumanists, they believe they have found an ideal in Sanders.
While I like the charisma of Sanders and his long standing devotion to the people—and that is enough for me to say he’d be a good president for change—the reality is capitalism is still a hallmark of the American way. For the next four and maybe even eight years, capitalism won’t be going anywhere. Afterward, though, within 10–25 years, when robots, software, and AI really start dismantling capitalism as we know it (see my latest TechCrunch article and thoughts on a Universal Basic Income), it will be a totally different story.
Like it or not, millennials and youth obsess over this type of economy stuff—especially machines taking jobs. They know future employment statistics better than many 30-year veteran business executives running publicly traded companies. The dangerous truth is many young people know they likely won’t have jobs in the future. And neither will most of the executives for that matter, since they too can (and will) be replaced by super intelligent machines programmed to make sound mathematical business decisions.
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LONDON The world’s first life-saving gene therapy for children, developed by Italian scientists and GlaxoSmithKline, has been recommended for approval in Europe, boosting the pioneering technology to fix faulty genes.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Friday it had endorsed the therapy, called Strimvelis, for a tiny number of children with ADA Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (ADA-SCID) for whom no matching bone marrow donor is available.
Around 15 children a year are born in Europe with the ultra-rare genetic disorder, which leaves them unable to make a type of white blood cell. They rarely survive beyond two years unless their immune function is restored with a suitable bone marrow transplant.
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Blast from the past. Someone in an astrobiology group seemed to question the validity of the question in my recent story on 5 Questions For E.T. about whether the universe is artificial. Here’s my response:
In the dog days of summer, when a gush of hot air from a Fifth Avenue subway grate can feel as real as it gets, take heart that the downtown traffic nipping at your heels may just be part of a cosmic-scale computer simulation.
The idea that the cosmos and everything in it could be a super-advanced civilization’s version of Xbox first came to the fore a little over a decade ago.
In a Philosophical Quarterly paper, philosophy professor Nick Bostrom at Oxford University in the U.K., posits that what we observe as our universe may in fact be a very advanced simulation designed by our distant progeny.
However, Rob Ott, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who did work on the system—Deep Learning Interface for Accounting (DELIA)—notes that it simply held all of the missing money, some $40,120.16, in a “rainy day” account. “I don’t think you can attribute malice,” he says. “I’m sure DELIA was going to give the money back.”
Technologists shocked by program’s ability to set its own priorities—such as getting rich.
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The inventors of liquid metal batteries give their original creation an upgrade using calcium, an abundant and inexpensive element.
With his latest upgrade to liquid metal batteries, there’s no better (and indeed, more apt!) way to describe MIT Professor and materials engineer Donald Sadoway than to say that he just keeps going and going and going…
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In a video presented at IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s annual conference, Chinese engineering students guide a living cockroach along S-shaped and Z-shaped paths using brain-to-brain interface: a bluetooth electroencephalogram (EEG) headset, translated and wirelessly sent to an electronic backpack receiver attached to the cockroach. The electrical impulses then stimulated the antennae nerves of the cockroach through a microelectrode implanted into its head. Watch the video released:
(Announced 16 June 2015 but only just came to our attention. And no, this is not April Fools post.)
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HONG KONG (Reuters) — Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day.
Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home.
The fruit of his labors of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than $50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programed verbal commands spoken into a microphone.
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