Lifeboat Foundation

Free Will Does Not Exist — Should it be a Transhumanist Enhancement?

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pellissier20150727.

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This death penalty story continuing to get coverage. This article below is nice as it mentions another idea I wrote about, which is that of death row prisoners and the possibility of cryonics.

He also suggests putting violent criminals in the Matrix for the rest of their lives.

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Advances in the field of artificial intelligence are invariably greeted with concern about an imminent robot uprising. Similarly, when we hear about developments in the field of brain-to-brain communication, we imagine any number of outlandish scenarios: perhaps a government marching us unquestioningly into battle via a process of insidious mind control, or an erotic thought we had about a work colleague being unwittingly transmitted to our partner.

When Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced this week during one of his regular Q&A sessions that Facebook is working in the field of thought transmission, we found ourselves momentarily transported to a horrific telepathic future. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too,” he said, as people thought to themselves “under no circumstances do I want anyone to know the dark, unsettling images that flash through my mind on an hourly basis”. We are troubled by that vision. But it’s only a vision. Read more

Researchers in the US have been testing a new type of antidepressant medication on rats, and say it’s able to treat the symptoms of depression in less than a day, compared to the three to eight weeks it takes current drugs to work. If the results can be replicated in humans, the drug could offer a much more effective option than treatments such as Prozac and Lexapro, which are only effective in only a third of patients who have been diagnosed with depression.

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More interesting developments on the regenerative medicine front this time from UCSF and Villeda. B2M is a downstream consequence of too much TGF-b1 as demonstrated in the recent Conboy regeneration test. This is more validation that cell and tissue regeneration is very near future and should translate to humans.

At UC San Francisco, we are driven by the idea that when the best research, the best teaching and the best patient care converge, we can deliver breakthroughs that help heal the world.

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Matching an infrared image of a face to its visible light counterpart is a difficult task, but one that deep neural networks are now coming to grips with.

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A new story on how coming technology may change our attitudes on the death penalty. This story was a feature on Vice yesterday, as well as Motherboard:.

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Small but powerful tool provides manipulation of mice’s neural networks.

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“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.” — Ray Kurzweil.

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