Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: law

As technology and innovation move faster and faster, concerns over ownership and access continue to increase. In answer to a question at a Singularity University event, Ray Kurzweil suggested we need to rethink intellectual property laws to more realistically match today’s pace.

Intellectual property laws from the 19th century were envisioned with roughly 20-year cycles, he said, which was enough to give you a head-start on a new idea or invention and attract funding to see it through. But how relevant is a 20-year cycle today when a generation of technology can come and go in a year—and even that is set to speed up?

Attracting investment and capital is a critical function of intellectual property law. But the way things are currently structured, intellectual property laws are falling behind the pace of invention.

Read more

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y_cqBP08yuA

Ross, the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney, has its first official law firm. Baker & Hostetler announced that they will be employing Ross for its bankruptcy practice, currently comprised of almost 50 lawyers.

Law firm Baker & Hostetler has announced that they are employing IBM’s AI Ross to handle their bankruptcy practice, which at the moment consists of nearly 50 lawyers. According to CEO and co-founder Andrew Arruda, other firms have also signed licenses with Ross, and they will also be making announcements shortly.

Ross, “the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney” built on IBM’s cognitive computer Watson, was designed to read and understand language, postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions. Ross also learns from experience, gaining speed and knowledge the more you interact with it.

Read more

European Commission Vice -President Andrus Ansip, responsible for the Digital Single Market, and Commissioner Günther H. Oettinger, in charge of the Digital Economy and Society, welcome today’s publication of guidelines on EU net neutrality rules by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). The publication of these guidelines was foreseen in the Regulation on the first EU-wide net neutrality rules which was agreed by the European Parliament and Council last year (press release) and which has applied in all EU Member States since 30 April 2016. The Commission has worked closely with BEREC on the preparation of the guidelines.

Vice-President Ansip and Commissioner Oettinger said:

“Today’s guidelines provide detailed guidance for the consistent application of our net neutrality rules by national regulators across the EU. They do not alter the content of the rules in place which guarantee the freedom of the internet by protecting the right of every European to access internet content, applications and services without unjustified interference or discrimination. Our rules, and today’s guidelines, avoid fragmentation in the single market, create legal certainty for businesses and make it easier for them to work across border. They also ensure that the internet remains an engine for innovation and that advanced technologies and Internet of Things services like connected vehicles as well as 5G applications are developed today, and will flourish in the future. We are pleased with the intensive engagement with stakeholders in the preparation of the guidelines, which contributed to their quality.

Read more

The first prototype of DeLorean appeared in October 1976, and production officially began in 1981 in Dunmurry, a suburb of south west Belfast, Northern Ireland (with the first DMC-12 rolling off the production line on January 21). The car features gull-wing doors and an innovative fiberglass chassis and underbody structure, along with a brushed stainless steel body.

DMC became famous for its appearance and was modified as a time machine in the Back to the Future film trilogy. A little more than 8,500 DMC-12s left DeLorean’s factory in Northern Ireland between 1981 and 1983, until its founder John DeLorean’s was arrested by the FBI on charges of drug trafficking.

Actually, it is quite impressing that Texas-based DeLorean Motor Company could soon initiate again its production thanks to a new law which exempts small volume car manufacturers from the safety requirements applied to the newly cars. On January 27, 2016, in Humble, Texas location, the car maker announced that production will resume and “new” DMC-12’s will be rolling off the assembly line in early 2017.

Read more

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FGEm1ktRJgk

More on the UN’s concern on the next gen technologies.

UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

Of all the initiatives and developments in the 3D printing world, none have caused as much headaches as 3D printed guns. And regardless of where you stand on the issue of gun rights in America, it’s no secret that completely untraceable plastic guns are bringing security issues to the table. Especially law makers in the US have been scratching their heads about what to do with them. Among others, the US State Department has been trying to limit the spread of 3D printable gun designs, while a new law passed in California last month requires 3D printed guns to be registered.

But the issue of 3D printed guns transcends second amendment debates, according to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. During a speech on the global proliferation of weapons, he listed 3D printing alongside a number of technologies that can be used by terrorists and that facilitate the production of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and other biological and technological threats.

Read more

I’m guessing you’d be like: :o.

So, here’s the deal. My biohacker friends led by Peter Fedichev and Sergey Filonov in collaboration with my old friend and the longevity record holder Robert Shmookler Reis published a very cool paper. They proposed a way to quantitatively describe the two types of aging – negligible senescence and normal aging. We all know that some animals just don’t care about time passing by. Their mortality doesn’t increase with age. Such negligibly senescent species include the notorious naked mole rat and a bunch of other critters like certain turtles and clams to name a few. So the paper explains what it is exactly that makes these animals age so slowly – it’s the stability of their gene networks.

What does network stability mean then? Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward – if the DNA repair mechanisms are very efficient and the connectivity of the network is low enough, then this network is stable. So, normally aging species, such as ourselves, have unstable networks. This is a major bummer by all means. But! There is a way to overcome this problem, according to the proposed math model.

The model very generally describes what happens with a gene network over time – the majority of the genes are actually working perfectly, but a small number doesn’t. There are repair mechanisms that take care of that. Also, there are mechanisms that take care of defected proteins like heat shock proteins, etc. Put together all of this in an equasion and solve it, and bam! here’s an equasion that gives you the Gompertz law for all species that have normal aging, and a time independent constant for the negligibly senescent ones.

What’s the difference between those two aging regimes? The model suggests it’s the right combination of DNA repair efficiency and the combined efficiency of proteolysis and heat shock response systems, mediating degradation and refolding of misfolded proteins. So, it’s not the accumulation of damages that is responsible for aging, but rather the properties of the gene network itself. The good news is that even we are playing with a terrible hand at first, there is a chance we can still win by changing the features of our network and making it stable. For example, by optimizing misfolded protein response or DNA repair.

Read more

tim-cook-apple-great-wall-china-crop-930x488

”“We want to show the world that you can manufacture responsibly, and we’re working alongside our suppliers to help them lower their environmental impact in China,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives …”

As the biotech revolution accelerates globally, the US could be getting left behind on key technological advances: namely, human genetic modification.

A Congressional ban on human germline modification has “drawn new lines in the sand” on gene editing legislation, argues a paper published today in Science by Harvard law and bioethics professor I. Glenn Cohen and leading biologist Eli Adashi of Brown University. They say that without a course correction, “the United States is ceding its leadership in this arena to other nations.”

Germline gene modification is the act of making heritable changes to early stage human embryos or sex cells that can be passed down to the next generation, and it will be banned in the US. This is different from somatic gene editing, which is editing cells of humans that have already been born.

Read more