Category: singularity
This is Part Three of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet
In Part One and Two of this series I showed that we have access to a huge amount of potentially available energy and food on the earth, both stemming from the tremendous input of solar energy to the planet. We have very serious energy and food challenges, which cannot be dismissed. But the challenges are not in the form of a hard limit – they’re in the form of a race between innovation and consumption. Victory in this race is certainly not guaranteed. But the most important variable – how quickly we innovate – is one we can affect through our policies. That’s a topic we’ll return to at the end of this series.
When Fortnite reached stratospheric popularity early last year, there were undoubtedly an awful lot of VCs on the sidelines looking enviously at the massive platform and wondering what opportunities could be gleaned from its rapid rise.
Epic Games went on to raise later that year at a nearly $15 billion valuation so some of those investors decided to invest directly in the Fortnite creator’s continued ascent, but others have been looking to get in on the ground floor of new operations that are aiming to rethink the line between video games and social networks.
Today, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it’s leading the $16.5 million Series A of a stealthy gaming startup called Singularity 6. The startup’s ex-Riot Games co-founders claim their venture is less focused on building a button-mashing competitive shooter than it is a “virtual society” where users can develop relationships with in-game characters powered by “complex AI”.
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© 2019 Singularity Education Group. All Rights Reserved.
Singularity University is not a degree granting institution.
I’m excited to share my new 1 hour interview at Singularity University radio with Steven Parton. Also, check out Singularity Hub and the write-up they did of the interview. We talk all things transhumanism, longevity, Cyborgs, and the future:
Singularity University, Singularity Hub, Singularity Summit, SU Labs, Singularity Labs, Exponential Medicine, Exponential Finance and all associated logos and design elements are trademarks and/or service marks of Singularity Education Group.
© 2019 Singularity Education Group. All Rights Reserved.
Singularity University is not a degree granting institution.
“If you rearrange the atoms in coal, you get diamond. If you rearrange the atoms in sand, you get silicon. How atoms are arranged is fundamental to all material aspects of life,” says Ralph Merkle, currently senior research chair at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. He’s a large, pear-shaped man who, as he speaks, waves his arms far more energetically than his physique would imply. He modulates his tone dramatically for effect, often humorous.
Those words kick off day 2 at the Singularity University Executive Program. The curriculum divides roughly into three days of intensive classroom introductions to critical tech domains, three days of visits to Silicon Valley companies, and two days of workshops devoted to specific industries, plus a final day to wrap up. On Saturday I settled gingerly into a lightly padded metal chair for highly compressed, sometimes super technical, up-to-the-minute overviews of artificial intelligence, robotics, networking, computing, and quantum computing. (Forecast: sunny! With patchy clouds and fog.) That took until dinner time with only a quick break for lunch, which was filled with presentations by graduates of SU’s nine-week summer program.
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The only thing we can be sure of is our own awareness. That we exist. It is from this knowledge that we can infer that survival is important.
In the past I have written about a vision for human civilizational flourishing, and would like to follow up those thoughts briefly now. More to the point, I wish to offer a deeper or foundational basis for those previous ideas. One might consider this to be a simple philosophical basis for action in the 21st Century. These thoughts are also directly relevant to my most recent post, about The Singularity & Convergent Risk.
Assume Nothing
The simplest, most pure basis for any philosophy – especially one that would be in harmony with empirical science – is to assume nothing. Start at the beginning, examine all assumptions.
An excellent interview. Fossel and Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation are in disagreement about telomerase.
https://www.singularityweblog.com/michael-fossel/
Michael Fossel‘s dream is to reverse human aging and since 1996 he has been a strong and vocal advocate of experimenting with telomerase therapy as a potential way of intervention in a wide variety of medical conditions related to aging. In addition, Fossel is one of those unique people who are a real pleasure to not only see speaking from the stage but also to meet in person. And having done both of these, I can honestly say that Michael is as much an impassioned expert speaker as he is a compassionate human being. Not only that but he is also a generous host, who loves entertaining guests visiting his fabulous house near Rapid Falls, Michigan and I have to admit I had tons of fun socializing with him both in front and behind camera. So, all in all, it was a lot of fun meeting and interviewing Dr. Fossel for my Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.
During our 1 hour discussion with Michael we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: his dream to reverse aging and the desirability and feasibility thereof; the Hayflick limit of cell division and Aubrey de Grey’s concerns that telomerase therapy may cause cancer; the distinction between reversing aging and living forever; his “non-sexy” tips on healthy living; his take on cryonics and transhumanism…
My favorite quotes that I will take away from this interview with Michael Fossel are:
“Ageing is dynamic, not static”
“Never mind the low-hanging fruit. […] Go for the important one!”
“The reason to do this [reverse aging] is not to double somebody’s lifespan. The reason to do this is because people out there are hurting. They are frightened. They are terrified by the things that happen to them when they get disease. The reason to do this is because we are human and we should be working at this. It’s not playing God, it is working at being human. It’s compassion. It’s not a matter of living longer, it is a matter of making people healthy again.”
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In the last video in this series we discussed the ancient origins of artificial intelligence progressing forward to the beginnings of the development of modern computing based artificial intelligence, encompassing the philosophies, theories and inventions of many talented individuals and groups.
The focus of this video will continue right were the last one left off, so sit back, relax and join me on an exploration on the official birth of modern artificial intelligence leading to present day!
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Essentially if you can enginneer a planet to a galaxy you could eventually get to a universe level of enginneering which may be needed if the universe keeps expanding. You could control the great forces of the universe to keep it stable so that it will not die out or collapse into a singularity. They say many things that gravity in the begginning kept the universe stable with dark matter that keeps things expanding other claims say that basically the universe could colapse into a single point that our universe may be a jet of another universe. Others say we live in essentially a bubble surrounded by other universes. I think though if we can reverse engineer a universe we can control our own. This would prevent our own universe from dying out or even the sun from dying out. There have been minor experiments of small universes made in the lab this could explain our own universe. But essentially we could have a perfect universe where nothing dies out or collapses into a single point in theory. Essentially an artificial universe where all the forces are controlled.