Lifeboat Foundation

I have added English and Spanish subtitles to my recent talk at the MadridSingularity Meetup, about the foundation and development of Alianza Futurista in Spain, and “What Is Transhumanism?”, the theme of the forum on December 19. Enjoy!

19 de diciembre, 2020
Meetup de MadridSingularity: ¿Qué es el transhumanismo?

Continue reading “La creación del primer partido político transhumanista: Alianza Futurista” »

University of rochester — working at the intersection of aging, DNA repair, and cancer.

Dr. Vera Gorbunova is the Doris Johns Cherry Professor, in the Department of Biology, and Co-director, Rochester Aging Research Center, at University of Rochester.

Continue reading “Dr. Vera Gorbunova — Working At The Intersection Of Aging, DNA Repair, And Cancer” »

Nothing to see here, except a genius scientist in a gorilla suit, chasing another genius scientist around in a billion dollar orbital lab.

This robot + AI is meant to give users the bad news in a gentle way. It’s sense of timing may be off though. 😃

User Testing

In a test with 12 students, Irony Man was deemed more likable than conventional robots. But Irony Man’s inability to know when to use irony could backfire.

Continue reading “Scientists Built a Robot With a Sense of Irony. It’s Insufferable” »

😃 Well, at least fossil-fuel emissions went down.

Global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuel and industry are expected to drop by 7% in 2020, new analysis shows, as economies around the world feel the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns.

The latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project (GCP) suggest that these emissions will clock in at 34bn tonnes of CO₂ (GtCO2) this year – a fall of 2.4GtCO2 compared to 2019.

Continue reading “Coronavirus causes ‘record fall’ in fossil-fuel emissions in 2020” »

The article describes how a college student was able to use GPT-3 to write articles for him. And it seems very few thought that these articles were AI generated. 😃

He notes that the barrier to entry is very easy. And you can make a lot of clickbait articles form them. Some people also note that it can be weaponized for misinformation.

“It was super easy actually,” he says, “which was the scary part.”

Continue reading “A college kid created a fake, AI. It reached #1 on Hacker News” »

A former independent presidential hopeful is vexed at the COVID-19 vaccine at the moment, and for multiple reasons. That would be Zoltan Istvan, a self-described transhumanist candidate who was billed as the “cyborg who is running against President Trump” in press reports throughout 2020. The California hopeful — who ran in the Republican primary — based his campaign on a futuristic message of fusing radical technology with daily life under the motto “Upgrade America.”

Mr. Istvan recently looked into how long it would be before he got a COVID-19 vaccine.

“I took the New York Times’ ‘Find your Place’ in the vaccine line report, and I was near the bottom 15% of the timeline for getting the vaccine — meaning I’ll be nearly last,” Mr. Istvan wrote in an email to Inside the Beltway.

The shroud over P2P firms has fallen, with China’s banking regulator announcing last month that it had shut down all such platforms. However, the financial time bomb is far from being defused for millions of families who invested billions of yuan, and a very real concern exists that mishandling the situation could lead to social unrest.

The shroud over peer-to-peer lending firms has fallen, and China’s banking regulator says all such platforms across the country have ceased operations – but countless billions are already feared lost.

Eco-friendly even in outer space. 🛰️

A Japanese forestry firm has partnered with Kyoto University in what would be a world first.