Lifeboat Foundation

On 25 September 2019, Steve Fuller gave a Codex Talk at the Royal Society of London, commemorating the ‘world’s top 50 innovators’ on the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci authored the ‘Codex’ in question, which is a notebook of his thoughts, including a drawing of ‘Vitruvian Man’, which begins Fuller’s talk.

The ‘fork in the road for the future of humanity’ refers to transhumanism and posthumanism, which Fuller treats as projecting radically alternative visions for the human condition.

You can watch the sixteen-minute video on YouTube:

ROBOTS will be assisting surgeons to carry out complex medical procedures within ten years, offering just one example of how the rapidly evolving scientific field will change the world as the 21st century progresses, a robotic engineer has predicted.

Click on photo to start video.

Let’s take a look at the history of life extension and some of humanity’s attempts €”some promising, some hilariously wrong €”to cheat aging and death.

Launched into space in 2004, Rosetta embarked on a 10-year journey through the cosmos. By 2014, the spacecraft reached its destination, made orbit, and successfully landed its lander module Philae.

A short film cataloging the Rosetta mission to comet 67P, providing a visual spectacle of its landing on the comet’s surface.

The recent discovery of a 3.8m-year-old cranium (skull without the lower jaw) is the hottest topic of conversation among palaeoanthropologists right now. But fossils are found all the time, so why is the cranium of this small, old man so important? It turns out the discovery is changing our view of how early hominin species evolved – and how they led to humans. To understand how, let’s start at the beginning.

In 1995, researchers found several partial jaws, isolated teeth and limb bones in Kenya, dated between 4.2m and 3.9m years old, and assigned them to a brand new species: Australopithecus anamensis. All these fossils were found in sediments associated with an ancient lake – “anam”, which means lake in the local language. A number of additional specimens were then found in Ethiopia, thought to belong to the same species.

The primitive features of A. anamensis have led to the widespread view that this species is the ancestor of Australopithecus afarensis, a younger hominin from Tanzania, Ethiopia and perhaps Kenya, dated between 3.8m and 3m years old. The most iconic fossil of A. afarensis is probably the partial skeleton known as Lucy, which was for a long time viewed as the oldest known human ancestor.

The greatest space program spinoff? Human collaboration.

On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma took the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai to debate artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity. As expected, Ma took a far more optimistic stance than Musk. Ma encouraged people to have faith in humanity, our creativity, and the future. “I don’t think artificial intelligence is a threat,” he said, to which Musk replied, “I don’t know, man, that’s like, famous last words.” An edited transcript of the discussion follows.

Elon Musk: What are we supposed to say? Just things about AI perhaps? Yeah. Okay. Let’s see.

Jack Ma: The AI, right? Okay, great.

Dubbed ‘antibiotic apocalypse’, the antibiotic resistant superbugs have become a massive cause for concern for health professionals as their numbers continue to rise. Such is the worry around antibiotic superbugs that experts believe that they will claim 10 million lives by 2050, with 700,000 people dying a year after catching the infections, according to a recent report from the American Chemical Society’s Enviromental Science and Technology Journal. Humans, especially in the West, have become so reliant on antibiotics to help cure illnesses that many of the bacteria that they are trying to fight have become resistant to the drugs through evolution.

We are now on a collision course with the most significant event in the entire history of our planet comparable in criticality only to the emergence of life itself. This “Novacene” event would mark the technological maturity of human-machine civilization, as we are to inevitably transcend our biology, and even more importantly, we are to transcend our dimensionality by achieving the so-called Simulation Singularity.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of the Technological Singularity. While those terms can be often used interchangeably, the ’Intelligence Supernova’ adds a slightly different connotation — it means the Omega Point of Homo sapiens — the convergent point of exponential technologies and on a civilizational scale, progressively morphing into one Global Mind and a phase transition of humanity termed in the book ’The Syntellect Emergence’. This convergent point would signify no less than Self-Transcendence, in other words, engineered godhood.

Within the next few decades, we’ll witness accelerating changes so profound and swift that the linear progression of human history would eventuate as the Intelligence Supernova of astronomical significance, the “implosion” of all knowledge of man and “transcension” outside the dimensionality of “human” universe.