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Dec 5, 2017

We are happy to announce Dr. Jean Hébert as a speaker for the 2018 Undoing Aging Conference

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience

Dr. Hébert will be in Berlin to provide an update on his fascinating work. The use of stem cells to repair the brain is relatively straightforward for Parkinson’s disease, in which cell depletion is localized to one small region, but in Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, the cell loss is widely distributed, whereas cells can only be injected into one spot. The solution that Dr. Hébert explores is to make those cells migrate before dividing and differentiating.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/dr-jean-hebert-to-speak-at-undoing-aging-2018

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Dec 5, 2017

Life 3.0

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 tries to rectify the situation. Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at the general public, the book offers a political and philosophical map of the promises and perils of the AI revolution. Instead of pushing any one agenda or prediction, Tegmark seeks to cover as much ground as possible, reviewing a wide variety of scenarios concerning the impact of AI on the job market, warfare and political systems.


Yuval Noah Harari responds to an account of the artificial intelligence era and argues we are profoundly ill-prepared to deal with future technology.

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Dec 4, 2017

It’s Gonna Get A Lot Easier To Break Science Journal Pay Walls — By Adam Rogers | Wired

Posted by in categories: big data, education, policy, science

““Access to science is going to be a first-world privilege,” Geltner says. “That’s the opposite of what science is supposed to be about.””

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Dec 4, 2017

Beyond Virtual Reality: Synthetic Reality And Our Co-Created Futures — By Robert C. Walcott | Forbes

Posted by in categories: futurism, virtual reality

“Eventually such systems may not require conscious input to capture and respond to shifting user preferences, though user intervention might still remain an option. The notion of ‘virtual’ fails to accurately describe such a world.”

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Dec 4, 2017

Companies with strong ESG credentials make better investments — By Aliya Ram | Financial Times

Posted by in categories: environmental, finance, governance

“ “What we can say now is that the impact [of ESG issues] on risk, volatility and valuation is clearly statistically significant.” ”

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Dec 4, 2017

Putting AI in Medicine, in Practice | Andreessen Horowitz

Posted by in categories: health, machine learning, robotics/AI

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Dec 4, 2017

Homes that are making waves — By Josie Thaddeus-Johns | The Economist 1843

Posted by in categories: architecture, sustainability, water

“The attention of architects and designers is radically improving life on water. A new book “Rock The Boat”, out now from Gestalten, explores their work, and shows that “aquatecture” isn’t all portholes and painted timber, but rather modern, innovative and resourceful.”

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Dec 4, 2017

US military agency invests $100m in genetic extinction technologies

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, existential risks, genetics, military, sex

‘UN diplomats confirmed that the new email release would worsen the “bad name” of gene drives in some circles. “Many countries [will] have concerns when this technology comes from DARPA, a US military science agency,” one said.‘.


Cutting-edge gene editing tools such as Crispr-Cas9 work by using a synthetic ribonucleic acid (RNA) to cut into DNA strands and then insert, alter or remove targeted traits. These might, for example, distort the sex-ratio of mosquitoes to effectively wipe out malarial populations.

Some UN experts, though, worry about unintended consequences. One told the Guardian: “You may be able to remove viruses or the entire mosquito population, but that may also have downstream ecological effects on species that depend on them.”

Continue reading “US military agency invests $100m in genetic extinction technologies” »

Dec 4, 2017

Google’s AI builds its own AI child and it’s better than anything humans have made

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

Of course, it’s not actually all that doom and gloom, the child AI is really only capable of a specific task – image recognition. Using its AutoML AI, Google’s AI-building AI created its child AI using a technique called reinforcement learning. This works just like machine learning, except it’s entirely automated where AutoML acts as the neural network for its task-driven AI child.

Known as NASNet, the child AI was tasked with recognising objects in a video, in real time. AutoML would then evaluate how good NASNet was at its task and then improve its algorithms using the data to create a superior version of NASNet.

READ NEXT: Watching an AI create fake celebrity faces is nightmare fuel.

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Dec 4, 2017

Samsung envisions phones that read your palm

Posted by in category: mobile phones

Samsung is exploring palm scanning tech that would put password hints in your hand.

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