Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sex

What if prospective parents had the opportunity to make decisions ahead of time about the combination of genetic traits their child would inherit? The question is more than science fiction, says Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University.

The underlying science and technology are advancing rapidly—and now is the time to consider carefully “what kind of legal changes would be necessary to try to maximize the benefits and minimize the harm of this new approach to making babies,” he says.

Greely explored the legal, ethical, and societal implications of emerging biotechnologies for a new book, The End of Sex and The Future of Human Reproduction (Harvard University Press, 2016), that envisions a world where procreation may not start in bedrooms, but rather in a petri dish in a medical clinic.

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Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as ‘The AI with zero chill’ — and that she certainly is.

@icbydt bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 24, 2016

To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=a_mYvSVG3QY

For those unfamiliar, SXSW is a week-long, trendy, if not seriously geeky festival of film and culture, panels and discussions. This year, one of the strangest – and either most disturbing or most compelling, depending on where you stand – talks was delivered by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese inventor and roboticist. The Osaka University professor was speaking about human-like androids and what roles they might fill within society in the near future. Ishiguro discussed his greatest and most marvellous creation to date: a “Geminoid” (robot in his own likeness) whose human appearance has been deftly created through with a plastic skull, a metal skeleton and silicon skin – and is controlled by an external computer. It would be hard, at a glance, to tell the two apart. In fact, the Geminoid held an autonomous conversation in Japanese, on stage, in front of an audience of hundreds.

Geminoid is not Ishiguro’s first uncannily human robot. In 2005, he developed a female android named Repliee Q1Expo, telling the BBC, “I have developed many robots before, but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence. Repliee Q1Expo can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It’s very satisfying.”

At SXSW on Sunday, Ishiguro discussed how he imagined these human-looking robots might become a part of the everyday sooner than we think; as receptionists, language tutors and museum-guides. In fact, he discussed how he and his team have tried and tested the robots in everyday situations. “Japanese males hate to talk to the shopkeeper because it signals they want to buy something,” he explained. “But they don’t hesitate to talk to the android.” He then jokingly added that it helps that “[a] robot never tells a lie, and that is why the android can sell lots of clothes.” Which begs a couple of questions including why do Japanese males have problems interacting with shopkeepers, and what happens to the shopkeeper in this scenario?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEFcUuhi1jE

Comedy.
From director: Michael Polish
Writers: Mark Polish, Mark Polish
Hot Bot is the hilarious journey of two sexually repressed and unpopular teenage geeks who accidentally discover a life-like super-model sex bot (Bardot).

Cast: zack pearlman, doug haley, cynthia kirchner, anthony anderson, donald faison, danny masterson.

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“We need to start thinking very seriously—what will humans do when machines can do almost everything?” Vardi said. “We have to redefine the meaning of good life without work.”

And increase inequality.

Robots and artificial intelligence have long posed a threat to humans’ jobs, but a group of scientists on Sunday issued an especially dire warning about the impact of such machines.

Several academics told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that further advances in automation could result in mass unemployment across a whole spectrum of industries, from transportation to sex work.

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The widespread use of virtual reality is inevitable, and it’s getting closer and closer. A new movie called Creative Control now takes the tech to the next level, and the results aren’t good.

Written, directed by and starring Benjamin Dickinson, Creative Control premiered at South by Southwest 2015 to solid reviews and finally hits theaters March 11. It centers on an executive whose company has created the next level of virtual reality, in a form that not-so-subtly reminds us of Google Glass. But as things turn to sex—as they tend to do—the virtual takes precedence over the reality.

And yes, that’s Reggie Watts, as himself, in the movie. Which is worth the price of admission alone.

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I do commend Sacramento for trying to put controls in place to reduce human trafficking; will it work?

What if banning smartphone encryption could stem the rising tide of human trafficking, a form of modern-day slavery from which perpetrators force victims to engage in commercial labor services or sex acts against their will?

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