Acclaimed Harvard professor and entrepreneur Dr. David Sinclair believes that we will see human life expectancy increase to at least 100 years within this century. A world in which humans live significantly longer will have a major impact on economies, policies, healthcare, education, ethics, and more. Sinclair joined Bridgewater Portfolio Strategist Atul Lele to discuss the science and societal, political, systemic and ethical implications of humans living significantly longer lives.
Recorded: Aug 30 2021
The Science of Slowing Aging and Increasing Life Expectancy. 0:00 – 19:20
What Increasing Life Expectancy Means for Individuals. 19:20 – 30:40
The Impact on Pension, Healthcare and Education Systems. 30:40 – 44:18
The Economic Benefits of Longer Life Expectancy. 44:18 – 51:24
Designing a society that can adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence and allow everyone to thrive as these changes unfold is likely to be one of our most significant challenges in the coming years and decades. It will require an emphasis on retraining and education for those workers who can realistically undertake the necessary transition, as well as an improved safety net – and perhaps an entirely new social contract – for those who will inevitably be left behind.
From fast food to farming, Covid-19 has accelerated the rise of the worker robots. This in turn will put more jobs at risk and makes the need to reframe society ever more urgent.
Brains aren’t the easiest of organs to study, what with their delicate wiring and subtle whispering of neurotransmitter messages. Now, this research could be made a little easier, as we’ve learned we can swap some critical chemical systems with the host animal being none the wiser.
In a proof-of-concept study run by a team of US researchers, the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans was genetically gifted pieces of a nervous system taken from a radically different creature – a curious freshwater organism known as Hydra.
The swap wasn’t unlike teaching a specific brain circuit a foreign language, and finding it performs its job just as well as before.
According to 2020’s McKinsey Global Survey on artificial intelligence (AI), in 2,020 more than 50% of companies have adopted AI in at least one business unit or function, so we witness the emergence of new AI trends. Organizations apply AI tools to generate more value, increase revenue and customer loyalty. AI leading companies invest at least 20% of their earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) in AI. This figure may increase as COVID-19 is accelerating digitization. Lockdowns resulted in a massive surge of online activity and an intensive AI adoption in business, education, administration, social interaction, etc.
Every year, a few hundred scientists in the United Kingdom try to establish new labs from scratch; globally, thousands of researchers become heads of their own labs. From the outset, it’s a chase for money and a time of intense pressure as scientists try to build research programmes while juggling teaching, fundraising, publishing and family life. Ali began her lab with just £15,000 in grants to cover equipment and experiments; Dan had £20,000. Both need to recruit PhD students, and Dan must also devise and deliver a programme of lectures.
Re-Imagining Health and Wellbeing — Lisa Esch & Dr. Michael Petersen, M.D., NTT.
The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (https://hello.global.ntt/en-us/), commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
NTT DATA Services (https://www.nttdata.com/global/en), is a global digital business and IT services leader focused on a range of business services, including cloud, data and applications, and which has recently embarked on an ambitious new initiative, as part of their goal “To Change The Future For Good”, towards Re-Imagining Health and Well-Being, towards what NTT defines as a more human-empowered, knowledge-driven and technology-enabled approach (https://www.global.ntt/healthandwellbeing/).
Lisa Esch is Senior Vice President-Healthcare Provider, Digital Health, Innovation, & Industry Offerings, at NTT DATA Services, where she oversees solutions and offering development, as well as their Go-To-Market strategy within the vertical and serves as the subject matter expert in the client engagements.
Lisa has an extensive background in disruptive technologies, healthcare innovation, strategic planning, and business process improvement.
Before joining NTT Data Services, Lisa was a Senior Healthcare Executive with DXC Technology, and Computer Science Corporation, where she served as the Chief Innovation Officer-Providr Healthcare.
Along with her executive career, Lisa has served on the boards for Empower Education International, Children’s Heart Alliance, Head Start Health, and Student for Student. She began her healthcare career as a Registered Dietitian.
Lisa graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition, from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and completed Graduate Studies in Public Administration from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Lisa is Yellow Belt Certified in Spartans Sales Training and holds a Certificate in Medical Nutrition & Dietetic Internship from the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Quantum physics is directly linked to consciousness: Observations not just change what is measured, they create it… Here’s the next episode of my new documentary Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind (2021), Part II: CONSCIOUSNESS & INFORMATION
*Subscribe to our YT channel to watch the rest of documentary (to be released in parts): https://youtube.com/c/EcstadelicMedia.
**Watch the documentary in its entirety on Vimeo ($0.99/rent; $1.99/buy): https://vimeo.com/ondemand/339083
***Join Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind public forum for news and discussions (Facebook group of 6K+ members): https://www.facebook.com/groups/consciousness.evolution.mind.
*Based on recent book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020) by evolutionary cyberneticist Alex M. Vikoulov, available as eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Syntellect-Hypothesis-Paradigms-Minds-Evolution/dp/1733426140
Reverse-engineering our thinking should be done in terms of networks, modules, algorithms and second-order emergence — meta-algorithms, or groups of modules. Neuronal circuits correlate to “immaterial” cognitive modules, and these cognitive algorithms, when activated, produce meta-algorithmic conscious awareness and phenomenal experience, all in all at least two layers of emergence on top of “physical” neurons.
Reality is fundamentally experiential. Nothing is real for us until perceived. The Conscious Instant Hypothesis denotes that we experience waking reality as a series of perceptual frames. Phenomenal mind springs into existence at increments of conscious instants. A series of such conscious instants constitutes a data stream of consciousness. In a sense, consciousness is really mind-based computing of your experiential branch in this quantum multiverse.
John Archibald Wheeler (1911−2008) was one of the first prominent physicists to propose that reality might not be wholly physical, in some sense, our cosmos must be a “participatory” phenomenon requiring the act of conscious observation — and thus consciousness itself. Wheeler also drew attention to implicit connection between physics and information theory, which was invented in 1948 by mathematician Claude Shannon. Just as physics builds on elementary particles, the quanta, defined by measurement, so does information theory. Its “quantum” is the binary unit, or bit, which is a signal represented by one of two choices: yes or no, plus or minus, zero or one. With his famous “it from bit” concept he unites quantum information theory to consciousness and physics.
While Wheeler emphasized bits at his time, it appears that intrinsically quantum-mechanical forms of information – now known as ‘qubits’ – are even more fundamental. In recent years a rising number of theorists have been exploring whether these curious quanta of information may hold the answer to combining quantum theory and general relativity into a quantum theory of gravity.
If we are to reason for the non-dual picture of the world then quantum physics is directly linked to consciousness. The human brain is a physical organ that transmits and interprets electrochemical signals. Its biochemistry is certainly governed by quantum physical laws, and consciousness — which is clearly related to the functioning of the brain — must therefore be related to the quantum physical processes going on within the brain and in the cosmos at large.
If the 21st century has taught us any astronomical lessons, it’s that counting planets is hard. In 2,000 there were nine planets, and now there are eight, but that might not last. Astronomers have been on the hunt for a theorized ninth planet in the extreme outer solar system, and now a study suggests there might be another planet out there. Unlike the massive (and completely hypothetical) Planet Nine, this one is believed to be a small, rocky world like Mars.
All the planetary uncertainty lies in the outer reaches of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune. This is where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, which we thought was a planet for decades but has since been demoted to a dwarf planet. It was still a notable discovery as the first known representative of the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy rocks that includes other big planetoids like Makemake and Eris.
To make sense of the mishmash of objects out there, scientists often turn to simulations that can search for signs of undiscovered planets. And there could be a lot to find out there. “It seems unlikely that nature created four giant planet cores, but then nothing else larger than dwarf planets in the outer solar system,” the study says.
Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind Documentary (2021), a film by Alex Vikoulov, Part I, WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
*Subscribe to our YT channel to watch the rest of documentary (to be released in parts): https://youtube.com/c/EcstadelicMedia.
**Watch the documentary in its entirety on Vimeo ($0.99/rent; $1.99/buy): https://vimeo.com/ondemand/339083
***Join Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind public forum for news and discussions (Facebook group of 6K+ members): https://www.facebook.com/groups/consciousness.evolution.mind.
*Based on recent book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020) by evolutionary cyberneticist Alex M. Vikoulov, available as eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Syntellect-Hypothesis-Paradigms-Minds-Evolution/dp/1733426140
The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy or spirituality. It’s a matter of hard science. It’s a matter of understanding the brain and the mind — a pattern structure made out of information. It’s also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, its neural code, then we can build the same functionality into our computer systems. We should recognize that our brain is not a “stand-alone” information processing organ, though: It acts as a central unit of our integral nervous system with recurrent data exchange within the entire organism and the Universe. Artificial consciousness may be within our grasp, however, not the way many AI researchers envision.
There’s no consensus on what produces consciousness, but everyone regardless of metaphysical views can agree what it is like to be conscious. Given that consciousness is subjectivity, what consciousness is like is what consciousness is.
Different species have a variety of their biological information processors which unsurprisingly results in qualia diversity. All species live in their own unique sensory universes. Consciousness and optimized information-processing are the two sides of one coin. Feeling and thinking are ways we process information, but our emotional sensation is normally faster than a conscious thought.
Contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious minds as macro-level phenomena might have greater influence over the unfolding future than does the sum of their cognitive algorithms that are arguably their micro-level components. That’s why human consciousness is so scientifically elusive. Neuronal circuits supposedly give rise to cognitive modules, and these immaterial cognitive algorithms, in turn, give rise to meta-algorithmic conscious awareness, all in all at least two layers of emergence on top of “tangible” neurons.
Mammalian neural circuits, referred to as the limbic system, are responsible for human emotional intelligence and forming of long-term memories. The main structures of the limbic brain are the hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus. The neocortex, the latest evolutionary addition, is present in primates and now culminated in the human brain with its two large cerebral hemispheres. The neocortex has been responsible for the development of human language, abstract thought, imagination and self-reflective consciousness. The neocortex is flexible enough to allow almost infinite learning abilities. The neocortex is also what has enabled human cultures to develop.
