Lifeboat Foundation

M any prominent people in the tech industry have talked about the increasing convergence between humans and machines in coming decades. For example, Elon Musk has reportedly said he wants humans to merge with AI “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence”

His company Neuralink aims to facilitate this convergence so that humans won’t be “left behind” as technology advances in the future. While people with disabilities would be near-term recipients of these innovations, some believe technologies like this could be used to enhance abilities in everyone.

These aims are inspired by an idea called transhumanism, the belief that we should use science and technology to radically enhance human capabilities and seek to direct our own evolutionary path. Disease, aging and death are all realities transhumanists wish to end, alongside dramatically increasing our cognitive, emotional and physical capacities.

Inside the cult of TESCREALism and the dangerous fantasies of Silicon Valley’s self-appointed demigods, for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue.

As legend has it, Steve Jobs once asked Larry Kenyon, an engineer tasked with developing the Mac computer, to reduce its boot time by 10 seconds. Kenyon said that was impossible. “What if it would save a person’s life?” Jobs asked. Then, he went to a whiteboard and laid out an equation: If 5 million users spent an additional 10 seconds waiting for the computer to start, the total hours wasted would be equivalent to 100 human lifetimes every year. Kenyon shaved 28 seconds off the boot time in a matter of weeks.

Often cited as an example of the late CEO’s “reality distortion field,” this anecdote illustrates the combination of charisma, hyperbole, and marketing with which Jobs convinced his disciples to believe almost anything—elevating himself to divine status and creating “a cult of personality for capitalists,” as Mark Cohen put it in an article about his death for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In helping to push the myth of the genius tech founder into the cultural mainstream, Jobs laid the groundwork for future generations of Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs who have, amid the global decline of organized religion, become our secular messiahs. They preach from the mounts of Google and Meta, selling the public on digital technology’s saving grace, its righteous ability to reshape the world.

In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil reckons with a world dominated by artificial intelligence (good) and his own mortality (bad).

Yesterday Daniel Dennett died. He was 82, about the same age as my father when he died a few years ago.

Japan is ignoring EVs and hydrogen, and has a good reason: They are producing the first-ever magnetic levitation engine, and works like that.

Until today, we’ve seen exactly 40 seconds of Boston Dynamics’ new electric Atlas in action. The Hyundai-owned robotics stalwart is very much still in the early stages of commercializing the biped for factory floors. For now, however, it’s doing the thing Boston Dynamics does second best after building robots: showing off in viral video form.

After debuting a short video of the robot doing push-ups during a recent conference presentation, the company has shared the clip with TechCrunch. While this is in no way an indicator of real-world use, it’s a great demonstration of Atlas’ extremely robust and powerful actuators.

On the future of #ai and #metaverse.

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Artificial electron donors and acceptors expand researchers’ metabolic engineering options — if only cells would cooperate.

A former senior adviser to multiple US presidents has claimed he was briefed on “otherworld technologies” by a top CIA official in the 1960s.