Toggle light / dark theme

Victoria Turk — Motherboard

As our devices get ever smaller, so do the materials we use to make them. And that means you have to get really close to see them. Really close. A new electron microscope unveiled at the UK’s national SuperST​EM facility images objects at an unprecedented resolution, right down to the individual atoms.

SuperSTEM is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and has three electron microscopes that UK scientists can use. The newest was unveiled last m​onth: a £3.7 million ($5.5 million) Nion Hermes Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope that EPSRC says is one of only three in the world. It can image objects a million times smaller than a human hair.

Read more

— The New York Times

LET me hazard a guess that you think a real person has written what you’re reading. Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. Perhaps you should ask me to confirm it the way your computer does when it demands that you type those letters and numbers crammed like abstract art into that annoying little box.

Because, these days, a shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms. We probably should have suspected that the information assaulting us 24/7 couldn’t all have been created by people bent over their laptops.

Read more

Quoted: “DNotes can best be characterized, as a second generation Bitcoin alternative digital currency. It objectively studied Bitcoin’s strengths and weaknesses as well as threats and opportunities. DNotes was created on February 18, 2014 with an objective to meet the full functions of fiat currency as a unit of account, store of value and medium of exchange within three years. It decided to take a very different path since day one in building a trustworthy stable digital currency with reliable long term appreciation.

Central to DNotes long term strategic plan is the creation of highly scalable building blocks, as the foundation of its own ecosystem. Those strategic building blocks include CryptoMoms; a currency neutral site dedicated to encourage women participation, DNotesVault; a free secure storage for DNotes’ stakeholders with 100% deposit guarantee with verifiable funds, and CRISPs; a family of Cryptocurrency Investment Savings Plans for everyone worldwide. The core mission of CRISP is to make the savings opportunity available to everyone; from the unborn to the most senior; from the unbanked to the super rich. The opportunity for anyone to participate irrespective of financial standing, coupled with combined charity efforts will bring about much needed financial freedom for millions worldwide.”

Read more here > http://www.pressreleaserocket.net/bitcoin-alternative-dnotes-focuses-on-banking-solutions-and-stability-while-venture-capital-investment-continues-at-record-breaking-pace/109719/

In a recent feature article at The clubof.info Blog called “Striving to be Snowdenlike”, I look at the example of Edward Snowden and use his precedent to make a prediction about “transhumans”, the first people who will pioneer our evolution into a posthuman form, and the political upheaval this will necessarily cause.

Transhumanism makes a prediction that people will obtain greater personal abilities as a result of technology. The investment of more political power (potentially) in a single person’s hand’s has been the inexorable result of advancing technology throughout history.

Politically, transhumanism (not as a movement but as a form of sociocultural evolution) would be radically different from other forms of technological change, because it can produce heightened intellect, strength and capability. Many have assumed that these changes would only reinforce existing inequality and the power of the state, but they are wrong. They have failed to note the political disconnect between current government authority figures and political classes, and those people actually involved in engineering, medicine, military trials, and the sciences. Transhumanism will never serve to reinforce the existing political order or make it easier for states to govern and repress their people. On the contrary, transhumanism can only be highly disruptive to the authorities. In fact, it will be more disruptive to current liberal democratic governments than any other challenge they have witnessed before.

There are several realities to this disruption that will convey a profound political change, and would do so whether or not transhumanism pursued political power in the form of the Transhumanist Parties (I still support those parties wholeheartedly due to their ability to raise awareness of transhumanism as a concept and an observation by futurists) or took a political stance for or against these realities. I would narrow the disruption down to these very compelling points of political significance. Please advise any more that you would like to bring to my attention:

  • Some of us will evolve into posthumans prior to others.
  • Such evolution will not be contingent on station, celebrity, political office, political ideology, leadership ability, or other traditional elite criteria.
  • Such evolution will be contingent on injuries (in the case of medical enhancements), vocation (e.g. astronauts), military trials (power armor or other, more invasive enhancements), long before it is marketed to members of the political elite or government authority figures who prefer to stay aloof and avoid taking risks with their lives.
  • This will create a disconnect, early on, between the political elite and the first evolved, posthuman persons.

Therefore, the posthuman elite will not be the current elite, but a completely different elite. Not only this, but they will have a completely different attitude towards authority that will be very disruptive to the status quo:

  • The evolution will create a high-tech “elite” (but only in the sense of capability, and not rule) with a high degree of autonomy.
  • Since all members of the new elite will have the same ability to function alone beyond the abilities of a normal human, they will be able to function without reliance on a hierarchy, even among themselves.
  • Since all will have superior capabilities to those who are not evolved, they will have no desire or need to rule over the people who are not enhanced, as they will not need them.
  • They will function as titans — extremely powerful individuals capable of achieving their political aims single-handedly, independently of organizations or governments (much as Snowden did).
  • The evolved people will be a potential “rebel elite” or “smart rats” (to use Julian Assange’s term from Cypherpunks) because they will not be part of the government authority structures. Their ethos and their political behavior will be the same as hackers, with the exception that they will be able to effect change in the real world in the way that hackers were only able to achieve them via computer systems.
  • Like hackers, they will be dismissive of government authority, able to overcome government safeguards and defenses, and cognizant of government lies. And, like hackers, their power to subvert government authority will cause them to subvert it.

What happened with Snowden is not the first time we are going to witness a single heroic individual challenging existing power structures and winning against the world’s most powerful state.

If technology is going to invest greater power and responsibility into the hands of lone individuals who have been given privileges because of their personal abilities, those individuals are by definition going to be futuristic “insurgents”, at least some of whom will go as far as to dismantle the state. A government, being paranoid of anyone having merely the capability to undermine it, will by definition attempt to curtail the freedoms of enhanced people.

Posthumans, including their early predecessors, will find themselves in the same situation as the current-day “cypherpunk” elite consisting of whistleblowers and hackers. They will listen to few authority figures, they will have the utmost disrespect for the government, and they will be more interested in sharing their abilities indiscriminately with others than adhering to rules laid down by authority figures or obeying the state.

The evolution into posthuman forms will bring with it a clash of ideas about how society should be governed.

The interaction of quarks and gluons with near-point shaped black holes that are passing through, either slowly or at ultra-relativistic speeds, predictably implies radically different cross sections.

I do not believe that any CERN physicist can answer this question quantitatively so far.

Nevertheless ten thousand CERN physicists gladly bet the planet on their admitted lack of knowledge regarding this point.

I hope the world media will pay attention to this fact.

By LiXuena, WangXinci ‚ZhangBoling — MarketWatch

Every day, two quality-control supervisors monitor four robots tirelessly assembling remote-control devices for home appliances at a Midea Group 000333, +1.04% factory in Foshan, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

The robots recently replaced 14 workers on the plant’s assembly line for remote controls. And soon, according to Midea’s home-air-conditioner division deputy general manager Wu Shoubao, more robots will arrive to replace the quality-control supervisors.
Read more

By — ExtremeTech
Robo-ethics
By its nature, the Open Roboethics Initiative is easy to dismiss — until you read anything they’ve published. As we head toward a self-driving future in which virtually all of us will spend some portion of the day with our lives in the hands of a piece of autonomous software, it ought to be clear that robot morality is anything but academic. Should your car kill the child on the street, or the one in your passenger seat? Even if we can master such calculus and make it morally simple, we will do so only in time to watch a flood of household robots enter the market and create a host of much more vexing problems. There’s nothing frivolous about it — robot ethics is the most important philosophical issue of our time.
Read more

By Antonio Regalado — MIT Technology Review
https://lifeboat.com/blog.images/ERROR: Can't identify image.

If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.

At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.
Read more

Quoted: “The decentralized Sapience AIFX project has developed a distributed artificial intelligence system running on a cryptocurrency network. In addition, the project has implemented the first distributed database platform running entirely over the bitcoin peer-to-peer protocol, built on top of a distributed hash table with redundancy, resiliency, and multi-dimensional trie-based indexing. These technologies are the first core pieces in the Sapience AIFX platform strategy to be the market leader in the consumerization of the blockchain.

The project has implemented the first in-wallet interactive Lua shell, bringing developers unprecedented capabilities to build solutions leveraging the blockchain, multi-layer perceptron networks, and distributed data storage. The possibilities span from algorithmic trading tools to bioinformatics and data mining, and the traditional applications of deep learning.”

Read more here > http://www.pressreleaserocket.net/first-cryptocurrency-to-utilize-artificial-intelligence-on-the-blockchain-sapience-aifx-connects-bitcoin-based-coin-networks-into-a-singularity-leads-consumerization-of-the-blockchain/104609/