“Dark fantasies, however, distract attention from more urgent questions. How will AI affect employment, especially higher-paying work? When will robot writers and artists alter the way humans consume creative content? Who will be held accountable for accidents when humans are no longer in the decision or action loop? Instead of ‘wolf’ criers of the Musk sort, humans need a serious discussion about new norms and practices that will shape and govern AI.” Read more
This is a rewritten story I’m publishing for the first time on The Huffington Post. It’s part of my goal to get other communities involved with supporting transhumanism:
The Pentagon is working on technology that will allow it to engineer a new organism within a day of it being found in the wild.
Researchers are combining human cells and polymers to make a very trippy contraption for medical testing.
Mentally count the windows in your home. Did you close your eyes? Visualize your house’s layout in your head? I did, when I tried this task. But some people, researchers have discovered, seem to be incapable of producing and holding such images in their mind’s eye. (They’re also perfectly capable of answering the window question.)
“OS FERMENTATION events have included installations, workshops, prints, and tastings. The installation includes digital prints created by custom electronics and software that allow microbes to take their own “selfies” and add image manipulation effects to their images based on the shifting pH levels, oxygen, and color values of the fermentation process.”
“Even using conservative estimates, the researchers found that the rate of extinction in the last 115 years is as high as 50 times what it would be under normal circumstances.” Read more
If NASA has its way, the human race won’t be going the way of the dinosaurs any time soon.
The space agency is teaming up with the National Nuclear Security Administration to work on a planetary defense plan to deflect a potential doomsday asteroid so it doesn’t strike Earth, according to The New York Times.