Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biological

“Sirtuins are kind of like an orchestra working together to produce a symphony, but each piece, each section, has its own role. Together you get a unified outcome, which we think is improved health.”

— Dr. Leonard Guarente

Dr. Leonard Guarente’s office in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Koch Biology Building is, at first glance, a modest room filled with the artifacts of a decades-long career as a professor and researcher: archives of important journals including Cell, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Nature; framed covers of his most important papers (he’s published more than 250); achievement awards recognizing his work in genetics and molecular biology; photos of his family; and odds and ends like a dagger presented to him by a student from Thailand and a faded bottle of The Macallan single malt scotch from 1980.

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Another futurist, Dave Evans, founder and CTO of Silicon Valley stealth startup Stringify, gave his thoughts about Kurzweil’s nanobot idea in an interview with James Bedsole on February.

Evans explained that he thinks such a merging of technology and biology isn’t at all farfetched. In fact, he described three stages as to how this will occur: the wearable phase (where we are today), the embeddable phase (where we’re headed, with neural implants and such), and the replaceable phase.

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Aubrey de Grey in this new interview with Vox.

We all grow old. We all die.

For Aubrey de Grey, a biogerontologist and chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation, accepting these truths is, well, not good enough. He decided in his late twenties (he’s currently 54) that he “wanted to make a difference to humanity” and that battling age was the best way to do it. His life’s work is now a struggle against physics and biology, the twin collaborators in bodily decay.

“I understand it takes a certain amount of guts to aim high.” —Aubrey de Grey.

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  • Of the estimated 100,000 mushroom species on Earth, only about 80 glow. Scientists uncovered the explanation behind two of these glowing mushrooms.
  • Studying the mushrooms allowed researchers to make chemicals that glow various colors that may help us make more scientific breakthroughs.

Mushrooms are our favorite fungi. From savory dishes to surprising video game power-ups — we can’t seem to get enough of the little things. What’s more interesting, however, is the fact that mushrooms can be far more relevant to our own progress as a society than we imagined. The Neonothopanus gardneri and Neonothopanus nambi are two distinct species of glow-in-the-dark mushroom found in Brazil and Vietnam respectively, that have reshaped our perspective on bioluminescence permanently.

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OpenAI vs. Deepmind in river raid ATARI.

AI research has a long history of repurposing old ideas that have gone out of style. Now researchers at Elon Musk’s open source AI project have revisited “neuroevolution,” a field that has been around since the 1980s, and achieved state-of-the-art results.

The group, led by OpenAI’s research director Ilya Sutskever, has been exploring the use of a subset of algorithms from this field, called “evolution strategies,” which are aimed at solving optimization problems.

Despite the name, the approach is only loosely linked to biological evolution, the researchers say in a blog post announcing their results. On an abstract level, it relies on allowing successful individuals to pass on their characteristics to future generations. The researchers have taken these algorithms and reworked them to work better with deep neural networks and run on large-scale distributed computing systems.

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The fast-advancing fields of neuroscience and computer science are on a collision course. David Cox, Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Computer Science at Harvard, explains how his lab is working with others to reverse engineer how brains learn, starting with rats. By shedding light on what our machine learning algorithms are currently missing, this work promises to improve the capabilities of robots – with implications for jobs, laws and ethics.

http://www.weforum.org/

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© Sören Boyn / CNRS/Thales physics joint research unit.

Artist’s impression of the electronic synapse: the particles represent electrons circulating through oxide, by analogy with neurotransmitters in biological synapses. The flow of electrons depends on the oxide’s ferroelectric domain structure, which is controlled by electric voltage pulses.

Download the press release : PR Synapses

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Thanks for your interest!

Thanks to SAP Italia for making this video available, the original video is at https://youtu.be/PLS5wGAM3R8 You can download all my slides at www.gerdcloud.net; direct link to the slides used here is gerd.fm/sapitaliagerd

In this talk, I address the opportunities and challenges of exponential transformation, the coming convergence of man and machine, the changes coming to society, work and jobs, the 10 megashifts, and what it takes to lead into this future responsible and openly.

If you enjoy my videos and talks, please take a look at my new book “Technology vs Humanity” http://www.techvshuman.com or buy it via Amazon http://gerd.fm/globalTVHamazon

Gerd Leonhard Futurist, Humanist, Author / Keynote Speaker.
CEO of The Futures Agency
Zürich / Switzerland
http://www.futuristgerd.com or www.gerdleonhard.de
Download all of my videos and PDFs at http://www.gerdcloud.net

About my new book: are you ready for the greatest changes in recent human history? Futurism meets humanism in Gerd Leonhard’s ground-breaking new work of critical observation, discussing the multiple Megashifts that will radically alter not just our society and economy but our values and our biology. Wherever you stand on the scale between technomania and nostalgia for a lost world, this is a book to challenge, provoke, warn and inspire.

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