Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The majority have focused on outlining high-level principles that should guide those building these systems. W hether by chance or by design, the principles they have coalesced around closely resemble those at the heart of medical ethics. But writing in Nature Machine Intelligence, Brent Mittelstadt from the University of Oxford points out that AI development is a very different beast to medicine, and a simple copy and paste won’t work.

The four core principles of medical ethics are respect for autonomy (patients should have control over how they are treated), beneficence (doctors should act in the best interest of patients), non-maleficence (doctors should avoid causing harm) and justice (healthcare resources should be distributed fairly).

The more than 80 AI ethics reports published are far from homogeneous, but similar themes of respect, autonomy, fairness, and prevention of harm run through most. And these seem like reasonable principles to apply to the development of AI. The problem, says Mittelstadt, is that while principles are an effective tool in the context of a discipline like medicine, they simply don’t make sense for AI.

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Do you want to stop ageing? Do you want to live forever? Can science help you cheat death? In this pioneering documentary, Professor Rose Anne Kenny takes us through the science and the consequences of living longer lives.

Imagine for a moment that old age became a thing of the past. Today, for better or for worse, it would appear that eternal life may soon be a reality. Some scientists are forecasting that the only way many humans will die is if they are shot or run over by a bus.

The programme unveils what is happening in age prevention, shows how we can lengthen our own lifespans and explains how some scientists now believe we are closer than ever to finding the Elixir of Life.

Such power over life itself poses many profound questions: what impact is it going to have on our societies? What preparations should our governments be making for an ever-ageing population? Do people really want to live longer and suffer the inevitable weakening of their capacities? And is it morally right to transcend human fallibility and assume the role of God?

https://goo.gl/Ro2hdY

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Never in history have we seen wealth concentrated (Apple is worth over a trillion dollars). Money and congressional power answers why legislators: let drug companies squeeze dollars from sick people, refuse to stop a president who winks and nods at Putin, at right-wing agitators, who stoke bigotry, or singles out Black, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees (let’s just lump them together). Fear of others comes from seeds planted early in life. Fear is personal — you don’t feel mine, I don’t feel yours.

But, alas, the future will be like nothing we have experienced. It’s a HUUUGE planet, with decades to come, which, if we lived long enough would from today’s vantage be unrecognizable. What we do know from our lives is that we are but a small part, not only small in terms of our kind or beliefs (political, religious, cultural), but small in influence over the planet’s trajectory (war, maybe atomic, population growth, immigration, climate, economy, racial, ethnic composition, e.g., in the U.S.).

Exceptionalism once stood for the idea that Americans served as an example of progressive values (democracy, justice and humanity), control over their destiny; could tame the environment, extract resources (oil, coal) without limit, and provide jobs for everyone through capitalism. For our successors, what they look like and what they believe in will go beyond change wrought by anything imaginable, today.

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Warning: This article presents information that sounds like it comes out of a high-tech Hollywood sci-fi production. I suggest you first view the patent filing linked here to verify its credibility before proceeding.

Because the patent was filed by the US Navy and is now under an “Active” status, this is the real deal. This is NOT a work of fiction.

The Short Story

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Engineered living materials (ELM) are designed to blur boundaries. They use cells, mostly microbes, to build inert structural materials such as hardened cement or woodlike replacements for everything from construction materials to furniture. Some, like Srubar’s bricks, even incorporate living cells into the final mix. The result is materials with striking new capabilities, as the innovations on view last week at the Living Materials 2020 conference in Saarbrüken, Germany, showed: airport runways that build themselves and living bandages that grow within the body. “Cells are amazing fabrication plants,” says Neel Joshi, an ELM expert at Northeastern University. “We’re trying to use them to construct things we want.”

Engineered microbes shift from making molecules to materials.

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