Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: policy

Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:

When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.

In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.

I recently walked through Boston’s Logan International Airport; a NASA display reminded me that GPS navigation, anti-icing systems, memory foam and LED lights were all originally created for space travel. Other inventions NASA science has created include the pacemaker, scratch-resistant lenses and the solar panel.

These types of advancements are one of the most important reasons I am hoping our next U.S. president will try to jump-start the American space program — both privately and publicly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear any of them are talking about the issue. But they should be. As we enter the transhumanist age — the era of bionic limbs, brain implants and artificial intelligence — space exploration might once again dramatically lead us forward in discovering the most our species can become.

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IARPA’s Christmas List :

• Brain computer interfaces to enhance cognitive processing or increase bandwidth of human-machine interactions.

• Computational social policy.

• Reliable, real-time feedback methods for assessing human judgment and reasoning.

• Methods for assessing capability and intent to develop weapons of mass destruction.

• Methods for assessing capability and intent to leverage cyber capabilities against U.S. critical infrastructure.

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The question breaks down into two parts:

  1. For what public benefit? —and—
  2. No, it cannot be achieved in this way

Governments are in the business of regulating certain activities—hopefully in an effort to serve the public good. In the case of business methods and activities, their goal is to maintain an orderly marketplace; one that is fair, safe and conducive to economic growth.

But regulation that lacks a clear purpose or a reasonable detection and enforcement mechanism is folly. Such regulation risks making government seem arbitrary, punitive or ineffective.

QR Code_CRYPSA-001«— This is money. It is not a promissory note, a metaphor, an analogy or an abstract representation of money in some account. It is the money itself. Unlike your national currency, it does not require an underlying asset or redemption guarantee.

Bitcoin is remarkably resistant to effective regulation because it is a fully distributed, peer-to-peer mechanism. There is no central set of books, no bank to subpoena, and no central committee to pressure (at least not anyone who can put the genie back into the bottle). In essence, there is no choke point or accountable administrative party.

Sure—it is possible to trace some transactions and legislate against ‘mixers’ and other anonymization methods—but there is no way to prevent a transaction before it occurs or to know the current distribution of assets. Bitcoin can exist as a printed QR code and it can be transmitted from a jail cell with a blinking flashlight. Sending bitcoin from Alice to Bob has no intermediary. Settlement requires only that one of the parties eventually has access to the Internet. But, there is no credit authority or central asset verification. [continue below image]…

feral_cat_mating-02-ts

If you are thinking of legislating against the use of Bitcoin, you might as well pass laws to ban the mating of feral cats or forbid water from seeping into underground basements. These things are beyond the domain of human geopolitics. You can try to shape the environment (e.g. offer incentives to cats and water levels), but you cannot stop sex or seepage.

Fortunately, Bitcoin is not a threat to governments—not even to spending or taxation. A gross misunderstanding of economics and sociology has led some nations to be suspicious of Bitcoin, but this improper perception is abating. Governments are gradually recognizing that Bitcoin presents more of an opportunity than a threat.

I have written more extensively on this issue:

Philip Raymond is co-chair of Cryptocurrency Standards Association, MC for The Bitcoin Event in NY and board member for Lifeboat Foundation. This fall, he will teach Cryptocurrency and The Blockchain in Massachusetts.

New requirement if you’re a Smartphone device provider and trying to sell in India.

Starting next year, all mobile phones sold across India must include a panic button, local news outlets are reporting. In addition, by 2018, all cell phones need to come with a built-in GPS chip, so a person in trouble can be more easily found.

“Technology is solely meant to make human life better and what better than using it for the security of women,” communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a statement, according to The Economic Times. “I have taken a decision that from January 1, 2017, no cell phone can be sold without a provision for panic button and from January 1, 2018, mobile sets should have in-built GPS.”

According to the Times, those with feature phones can press keys 5 and 9 to alert local law enforcement to an emergency under the new policy. On smartphones, vendors will be required to display an “emergency” button. Smartphone makers can also build in a feature that alerts law enforcement once the on/off button is pressed three times in succession.

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Don’t kill the messanger; I’m just sharing.

Yesterday Trump acknowledged the power of technology to help the USA in his future plans.

In a major foreign policy speech, yesterday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said the U.S. needs to make better use of “3D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyberwarfare.”

“We need to think smarter about areas where our technological superiority – and nobody comes close – gives us an edge,” he explained. “This includes 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyber-warfare.”

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My new Vice Motherboard article on environmentalism and why going green isn’t enough. Only radical technology can restore the world to a pristine condition—and that requires politicians not afraid of the future:

I’m worried that conservatives like Cruz will try to stop new technologies that will change our battle in combating a degrading Earth

But there are people who can save the endangered species on the planet. And they will soon dramatically change the nature of animal protection. Those people may have little to do with wildlife, but their genetics work holds the answer to stable animal population levels in the wild. In as little as five years, we may begin stocking endangered wildlife in places where poachers have hunted animals to extinction. We’ll do this like we stock trout streams in America. Why spend resources in a losing battle to save endangered wildlife from being poached when you can spend the same amount to boost animal population levels ten-fold? Maye even 100-fold. This type of thinking is especially important in our oceans, which we’ve bloody well fished to near death.

As a US Presidential candidate who believes that all problems can be solved by science, I believe the best way to fix all of our environmental dilemmas is via technological innovation—not attempting to reverse our carbon footprint, recycle more, or go green.

As noted earlier, the obvious reason going green doesn’t work—even though I still think it’s a good disciplinary policy for humans—is the sheer impossibility of getting the developed world to stop… well, developing. You simply cannot tell an upcoming Chinese family not to drive cars. And you can’t tell a burgeoning Indian city to only use renewable resources when it’s cheaper to use fossil fuels. You also can’t tell indigenous Brazilian parents to stop poaching when their children are hungry. These people will not listen. They want what they want, and are willing to partially destroy the planet to get it—especially when they know the developed world already possesses it.

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2016-04-21-post-paris

“Inevitably, the compromises of the Paris Agreement make it both a huge achievement and an imperfect solution to the problem of global climate change.”

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Hmmmm;

Liberty International Underwriters (LIU), part of Liberty Mutual Insurance, has launched a cyber extortion endorsement to its Product Recall and Contamination insurance policy for food and beverage companies.

This endorsement offers coverage to food and beverage policyholders for cyber extortion monies and consultant costs up to the policy sub-limit for acts against production and day-to-day operations.

“With operations being mostly automated now and an increasing reliance on technology, the food and beverage industry faces a very real risk of having its systems hijacked by cyber criminals and held for ransom,” said LIU Senior Vice President of Global Crisis Management, Jane McCarthy. “But what many companies don’t realize is that cyber extortion is not always covered under a typical cyber policy or by a general liability policy. We developed this to address the risks associated with new technology and –‘ransomware’–, malicious software designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid.”

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