Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Artificial Intelligence is touching almost every aspect of our lives. It’s reasonable to expect AI influence will only increase in the future. One of many fields heavily influenced by AI is the military. Particularly in the development of Supersoldiers. The notion of super-soldiers enhanced with biotechnology and cybernetics was once only possible in the realm of science fiction. But it may not be too long before these concepts become a reality.

A new worldwide arms race is pitting countries against each other to be the first to successfully create real genetically modified super soldiers by using tools such as CRISPR. Understandably many of these human enhancement technologies raise health and safety questions and it is more likely these enhancements will first gain traction in countries that do not place as much weight on ethical concerns.

According to US Intelligence, China has conducted “human testing” on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with “biologically enhanced capabilities.

This has made the U.S. military’s top intelligence agencies increasingly worried but the Pentagon has significantly invested in its own research in AI and in the extension of the human senses beyond their current physical limitations, to provide soldiers with superhuman abilities.

The basics of brain-machine interfaces with AI are being developed for the military, and if the results are as successful as scientists hope they will be, soldiers could one day be enhanced with cybernetics, effectively becoming trans-human soldiers.

The US Military is also examining newly scientific tools, like genetic engineering, brain chemistry, and shrinking robotics, for even more dramatic enhancements. But most of this advanced technology remains classified.

Continue reading “The Rise of Supersoldiers — How AI Changes Everything” | >

Outer Space, Inner Space, and the Future of Networks.
Synopsis: Does the History, Dynamics, and Structure of our Universe give any evidence that it is inherently “Good”? Does it appear to be statistically protective of adapted complexity and intelligence? Which aspects of the big history of our universe appear to be random? Which are predictable? What drives universal and societal accelerating change, and why have they both been so stable? What has developed progressively in our universe, as opposed to merely evolving randomly? Will humanity’s future be to venture to the stars (outer space) or will we increasingly escape our physical universe, into physical and virtual inner space (the transcension hypothesis)? In Earth’s big history, what can we say about what has survived and improved? Do we see any progressive improvement in humanity’s thoughts or actions? When is anthropogenic risk existential or developmental (growing pains)? In either case, how can we minimize such risk? What values do well-built networks have? What can we learn about the nature of our most adaptive complex networks, to improve our personal, team, organizational, societal, global, and universal futures? I’ll touch on each of these vital questions, which I’ve been researching and writing about since 1999, and discussing with a community of scholars at Evo-Devo Universe (join us!) since 2008.

For fun background reading, see John’s Goodness of the Universe post on Centauri Dreams, and “Evolutionary Development: A Universal Perspective”, 2019.

John writes about Foresight Development (personal, team, organizational, societal, global, and universal), Accelerating Change, Evolutionary Development (Evo-Devo), Complex Adaptive Systems, Big History, Astrobiology, Outer and Inner Space, Human-Machine Merger, the Future of AI, Neuroscience, Mind Uploading, Cryonics and Brain Preservation, Postbiological Life, and the Values of Well-Built Networks.
He is CEO of Foresight University, founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, and co-founder of the Evo-Devo Universe research community, and the Brain Preservation Foundation. He is editor of Evolution, Development, and Complexity (Springer 2019), and Introduction to Foresight: Personal, Team, and Organizational Adaptiveness (Foresight U Press 2022). He is also author of The Transcension Hypothesis (2011), the proposal that universal development guides leading adaptive networks increasingly into physical and virtual inner space.

A talk for the ‘Stepping into the Future‘conference (April 2022).

The Goodness of the Universe: Outer Space, Inner Space, and the Future of Networks /w John Smart

Many thanks for tuning in!

Have any ideas about people to interview? Want to be notified about future events? Any comments about the STF series?

Continue reading “The Goodness of the Universe — John Smart” | >

Foresight Molecular Machines Group.
Program & apply to join: https://foresight.org/molecular-machines/

John Randall.
Why the world is finally ready for Atomically Precise Manufacturing.

Sergei Kalinin.
Electron Microscopy: The Fab on a Beam.

John Randall is currently President/CEO at Zyvex Labs. Prior to Zyvex, John spent 15 years with Texas Instruments (TI) where he worked in high resolution processing for integrated circuits, MEMS, and quantum effect devices and also worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory on ion beam and x-ray lithography. John is Executive VP at NanoRetina and currently lends his 30+ years of experience in micro-and nano-fabrication to his roles as.
Adjunct Professor at UT Dallas and Fellow of the AVS and IEEE.

Sergei Kalinin is a corporate fellow at the Center for Nanophase Materials.
Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is also a Joint Associate Professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is a recipient of the Blavatnik Award (2018) and the RMS medal for Scanning Probe Microscopy (2015).

Find a written summary of this talk here (including slides, notes and more):

Continue reading “J. Randall & S. Kalinin | Ready for Atomically Precise Manufacturing & Electron Microscopy” | >

A rare, five-planet alignment will peak on June 24, allowing a spectacular viewing of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as they line up in planetary order.

The event began at the beginning of June and has continued to get brighter and easier to see as the month has progressed, according to Diana Hannikainen, observing editor of Sky & Telescope.

A waning crescent moon will be joining the party between Venus and Mars on Friday, adding another celestial object to the lineup. The moon will represent the Earth’s relative position in the alignment, meaning this is where our planet will appear in the planetary order.

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Credential abuse is something that happens only to CEOs or very rich people or employees of fortune 500 companies right? Nope. It’s everywhere, and your compromised passwords and usernames are enabling all kinds of cyber criminals to perform all kinds of account takeover (ATO) attacks. 24,649,096,027 account usernames and passwords have been leaked by cyber-threat actors, as of this year. That’s a big number―one that should shake the cyber security community at its core. But despite this number, which increases exponentially each year, and the deluge of reports highlighting the risk of insecure credentials, you still have a friend or an officemate or boss, who’s carefully typing 123,456 into a password field right now.

The Digital Shadow team collated more than 24 billion leaked credentials from the dark web. That’s a 65 percent increase from 2020, likely caused by an enhanced ability to steal credentials through new ransomwares, dedicated malware and social engineering sites, plus improved credential sharing. Within this leaked usernames and passwords, approximately 6.7 billion credentials had a unique username-and-password pairing, indicating that the credential combination was not duplicated across other databases. This number was 1.7 billion more than found in 2020, highlighting the rate of data breach across completely new credential combinations.

The most common password, 123,456, represented 0.46 percent of the total of the 6.7 billion unique passwords. The top 100 most common passwords represented 2.77 percent of this number. Information-stealing malware and ransomware persists as an important threat to your privacy. Some of these malwares can be bought for as little as $50, and some go for thousands, depending on features.

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