Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

Nice.

Synthetic RNA kit business Synthego has raised $41 million to step up its efforts to make CRISPR gene editing easier and more accurate. The West Coast startup relied heavily on tech VCs for the cash, but also gained validation from having CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna invest in its business.

Redwood City, CA-based Synthego exited stealth in August, four years after it was set up by two former SpaceX computer engineers. In those early years, which were bankrolled by an $8.3 million investment in 2013, Synthego established an automated manufacturing process for guide RNA products that it thinks sets it apart from larger competitors in terms of cost, turnaround time and editing efficiency.

Sythengo has persuaded some big names it is on to something. 8VC, an infrastructure-focused VC that also invested in uBiome, led the round with support from fellow new backers AME Cloud Ventures, Elements Capital, OS Fund, Alexandria Equities and ZhenFund. Existing investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Menlo Ventures also contributed to the Series B round.

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A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.

Insurance firm Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is making 34 employees redundant and replacing them with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLr7E2Ms4Y4

“I’m a political theory researcher at Sciences Po, and this talk draws on modern political theories of liberalism, the latest transhumanist literature, and ancient Greek theories of the good life.”

The Transhumanist Paradox.

Deciding between technological utopias in a liberal state.

How does a pluralist society – a society built to accommodate our irreconcilable differences – make a choice about the technological future of mankind? How can a liberal state dedicated to upholding individual liberty interfere in technological progress, and why should it?

Do we really want to leave our technological futures in the hands of the major AI researchers – Google, Facebook, and the US Defense Department?

I argue that our political system is designed not to deal with the questions raised by the transhumanist movement, and that without a major overhaul of political liberalism, technological progress will escape democratic oversight.

For the first time in history we have the ability to choose what it means to be human, and yet our liberal pluralist societies preclude substantive debate about our collective future. Modern liberal states are based upon the assumption that there is no single best way to live, and that for the state to endorse a substantive vision of the good life is to open the door to totalitarianism. On matters of personal conviction – human nature, our place in the cosmos, and our ultimate goals – liberal states want us to agree to disagree.

However, we cannot simply agree to disagree about transhumanism because our individual choices will affect the entire species. If you decide to upload your brain onto a computer and abandon your biological body, you are choosing what is essential to humanity: you are defining human nature. If, on the other hand, the government bans technological enhancement, it is also imposing a vision of humanity. Thus, only once liberalism abandons the pretense of neutrality can we start imagining alternative technological futures and debating the underlying vision of the good life that will orient our choice.

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In Brief

  • Microsoft is partnering with a prestigious eye hospital in India to help perfect AI powered computer diagnostics to the field of ophthalmology.
  • Artificial intelligence is continually making great strides to integrate more in various healthcare settings, hopefully increasing the quality and availability of patient care.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 285 million people are visually impaired, with 39 million living with blindness and the other 246 million having low vision.

In a world of modern technological advancements, visual impairment has been the subject of much medical research. Perhaps the most notable among these are those that use artificial intelligence (AI), specifically through machine learning. Google’s DeepMind has been working with the UK’s National Health Service to do ophthalmology research.

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In Brief

  • The Taiwanese company that manufactures Apple’s iPhone has announced a three-part plan to fully automate its factories, with hopes to achieve 30% automation by 2020.
  • The move could put as many as a million people out of work, another example of automation’s major implications for the global workforce.

Foxconn Electronics, the Taiwanese manufacturing company behind some of the biggest electronic brands’ devices, including Apple’s iPhone, has announced that it will ramp up automation processes at its Chinese factories. The goal is to eventually achieve full automation.

In an article published in Digitimes, General Manager Dai Jia-peng of Foxconn’s Automation Technology Development Committee explains that the process will unfold in three phases.

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