Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?
In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.
It should be possible to build a silicon version of the human cerebral cortex with the transistor technology that was in production in 2013. The resulting machine would take up less than a cubic meter of space and consume less than 100 watts, not too far from the human brain. This article is summarizing the work of Jennifer Hasler and Bo Marr writing in Frontiers of Neuroscience – Finding a roadmap to achieve large neuromorphic hardware systems.
Computational power efficiency for biological systems is 8–9 orders of magnitude higher (better) than the power efficiency wall for digital computation. Analog techniques at a 10 nm node can potentially reach this same level of biological computational efficiency. Figure 1 show huge potential for neuromorphic systems, showing the community has a lot of room left for improvement, as well as potential directions on how to achieve these approaches with technology already being developed; new technologies only improve the probability of this potential being reached.
The year is 2030. In a high-security containment lab, scientists gathered around a towering machine, eagerly awaiting the first look at a newly discovered bacterium on Mars.
With a series of beeps, the machine—a digital-to-biological converter, or DBC—signaled that it had successfully received the bacterium’s digitized genomic file. Using a chemical cocktail comprised of the building blocks of DNA, it whirled into action, automatically reconstructing the alien organism’s genes letter-by-letter.
Within a day, scientists had an exact replica of the Martian bacterium.
June 22 (UPI) — In a series of experiments, neuroscientists were able to selectively delete different types of memories stored a single neuron belonging to a marine snail.
The feat, detailed in the journal Current Biology, suggests problematic memories — like those responsible for PSTD and anxiety — in the human brain could be excised without harming other memories.
When the brain stores a traumatic experience in its memory bank, the memory is actually stored in multiple forms. Each memory can include bits of incidental information from the experience. Years later, these incidental, or neutral, memories can trigger panic attacks and severe anxiety.
In April, Scientists based in Philadelphia unveiled an artificial womb undergoing testing on fetal lambs. With a prediction from one of the researchers that the technology could be ready for human testing in three to five years, artificial wombs suddenly became the most unexpected rage of 2017. But what sort of artificial wombs might realistically be a part of healthcare in the near future?
In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.
CellAge, the synthetic biology company are going from strength to strength thanks to the support of the community last year during their fundraiser at Lifespan.io.
CellAge is featured in Startup Lithuania. As many of you will recall, CellAge hosted a successful project with us at Lifespan.io and they are busy developing a new aging biomarker for researchers thanks to the support of the community.
Now they are going from strength to strength having just secured a seed round backed by Michael Greve’s Kizoo Technology Capital and other investors.
My theory, alien life will either be nearly impossible to find and we will spend centuries just looking for microbes. Or aliens will turn out to be so common that they could care less who we are and where we came from, and we will just be a new backwards species that turns up at the alien bar.
The world was electrified last year when it was suggested that scientists had spotted an “alien megastructure” orbiting a distant star.
Now a space boffin has suggested huge extraterrestrial constructions could be relatively easy to spot, so long as we look in the right place using the correct tools.
In 2016, one expert suggested the unexplained “winking” behaviour of a far-off sun called Tabby’s Star may have been caused by the rotation of a gigantic craft called a Dyson’s Sphere.
Biological systems don’t completely freeze up when they encounter a new situation, but computers often do.
Biological organisms are pretty good at navigating life’s unpredictability, but computers are embarrassingly bad at it.
That’s the crux of a new military research program that aims to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures. When an organism encounters a new environment or situation, it relies on past experience to help it make a decision. Current artificial intelligence technology, on the other hand, relies on extensive training on various data sets, and if it hasn’t encountered a specific situation, it can’t select a next step.
A new story out on #transhumanism:
In the Basic Income America Facebook group, Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist who recently ran for president, shared his Wired article, Capitalism 2.0: the economy of the future will be powered by neural lace. He (along with many others) argues Wall Street, law offices, engineering firms, and more will soon be mostly void of humans.
I think I mostly agree with him. Algorithms will far surpass human ability to achieve the best possible outcomes (Nash equilibrium). Having read Super Intelligence, the Master Algorithm, The Age of Em, books on evolution, lectures, interviews, etc… I think we’re approaching an important moment in human history where we have to figure out morality so we can build it into the proto-AI children we are giving birth to. I’ve even toyed around with a fun idea related to the simulation hypothesis. Maybe we exist as a simulation, repeating the birth of AI over and over again until we figure out a way to do it without destroying ourselves or turning the universe into computonium.
I’ve argued the world may need a Universal Basic Income and Steem Power might power it. I’ve also discussed the morality of artificial intelligence. I’m a big fan of Ray Kurzweil and love hearing him lecture about the future longevity we might enjoy, but I also recognize how fragile biological life is compared to exponentially growing super intelligence. I’ve heard the concerns by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others, and to me, they are convincing.
So where does this leave us? What do you think of Zoltan’s article? Are we approaching the “If you can’t beat them, join them” moment in our evolution as a species? Will we one day all become transhumanists?
