Lifeboat Foundation

A British teenager has become the first child in the UK to be cured of epilepsy by a robot that drilled deep into his brain.

Billy Whitaker, 15, had suffered daily seizures for seven years until the operation two weeks ago, which medical experts are convinced has cured him.

The procedure used a £350,000 ($503,455) robot, practically the same as those used on car factory production lines, to drill electrodes into Whitaker’s brain.

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The San Jose Mercury News took a look at SRI’s collaboration with Yamaha to develop Motobot, the first motorcycle-riding humanoid robot. “Consider it a high-tech diagnostic tool for motorcycles that just happens to look like a cyborg.”

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I still get a kick out of these types of articles because it is the classic “Fear of the Unknown” getting folks worked up. A) we don’t have enough information to confirm or not confirm whether humans will totally disappear and morph into a half Human and half machine species. B) it doesn’t scare me at all because I will make the choice if I decide that I want or need an implant. And, if I do, then more than likely it was to help me beat a disease like cancer or to enrich my life somehow just like I would opt for a surgery or procedure today. Nothing more.

However, there is one thing that is certain and that is Quantum Technology itself is going to truly transform everything in our lives. And, I mean EVERYTHING (medical/ healthcare, manufacturing, AI, devices, communications, services, raw materials enrichment, etc.).

Continue reading “Futurologist Dr Ian Pearson says technology is causing humans to ‘evolve’” »

Things keep getting better and better for Quantum and Brain Interfaces/ implants as well. What you have to love is the fact how Quantum Dots and it’s research helps us both technically and medically as well. When I reported 2 weeks ago about Quantum Q-Dots; what I did not share is how Q-Dots could be leveraged to wipe out many Super Bug Viruses. And, this is why things are really stepping up in AI/ Robotics, Brain Mind Interfaces, micro bots, etc. Definitely on a path to singularity.

Plasmonics enable wavelengths of light to shrink to the nanometer scale.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=c0HLuvmWL7g

Pop music is littered with titles that relay how romantic yearning is sparked and experienced wordlessly with one person staring at the other. Animals don’t have it so good. “Most mammals generally interpret direct gaze as threatening or as a sign of dominance,” wrote researchers in Frontiers In Human Neuroscience.

People, however, usually take gazing with positive interpretations, such as affection, love and attraction. “A preference for direct gaze seems to be present at a very early age: Farroni et al. (2002) found that infants as young as 2 days old prefer to look at faces that gazed directly at them compared to faces with averted gaze.”

Continue reading “Robot-human eye contact helps conversation flow” »

Becoming immortal is one of mankind’s many quixotic notions that most people will relegate to the world of fantasy and science fiction. However, there is a subset of prominent scientists who believe that immortality is not only attainable, but it is something that will come to fruition in as little as 25 years. This idea is shared by men like Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil; Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk; and one of the most interesting presidential candidates outside of Donald Trump and Deez Nuts, Zoltan Istvan. All three men identify as trans-humanist, and for those who don’t know, trans-humanism is the idea that mankind will one day be able to transcend our biological limitations through the use of science and technology; not to mention, the movement has accumulated over 3 million supporters worldwide. So the question remains, with the multitude of prominent intellectuals who believe immortality is a tangible goal, just how will they go about achieving it? Well, the six answers below could possibly hold the key to everlasting life.

Number Six: Uploading Minds to Computers. Futurists believe that at some point in the near future we will be able to copy and scan all of the data that exists in our brains and upload the information into a computer. This will allow us to perpetually exist as incorporeal inhabitants of cyberspace. Of course, the idea of mind uploading is still purely science fiction, but if it ever becomes tangible, progeny could possibly live in a limitless world, that echoes notions expressed in the Matrix; minus the robot despots.

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The year is 2021. You’re driving down the highway on your daily commute. You approach a car that’s stubbornly driving at the max speed limit. You decide to pass this overly law-abiding driver, except when you do, you discover there’s no one in the front seat.

As we learned in the first part of our Future of Transportation series, self-driving cars will become publicly available in only a few short years. But due to their component parts, they will likely be far too expensive for the average consumer. Does this mark self-driving cars as an innovation that’s dead in the water? Who’s going to buy these things?

Most articles about autonomous vehicles (AVs) fail to mention that the initial target market for these vehicles won’t be the average consumer—it will be big business. Specifically, taxi and car sharing services. Why? Let’s look at the opportunity self-driving cars represent to one of the biggest taxi/rideshare services on the planet: Uber.

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YOU GOT A BOT PROBLEM — use DARPA’s BOT Killer”

DARPA shared their method of eliminating “bots.

Bots are a particularly pernicious presence on Twitter. While they can be used for good, (R.I.P., original @horse_ebooks), bots often power spam, scams and, most interestingly, very volatile clusters of political and cultural discussion on Twitter. Last year, DARPA confronted the problem and, according to MIT Tech Review, a new report shows just how researchers were able to identify and shutdown the malicious programs.

Continue reading “Here’s how DARPA trained researchers to kill bots” »

2 trends that is happening now especially with millennials: car ownership is no longer the desire; and home ownership is out of reach. And, this will impact at a minimum 4 industries — financial, real estate, auto, and insurance industries? Something that many in industry will need to get very creative in addressing to entice the future larger market consumers.

Young people no longer rush to buy their first car, meaning future cities need to think quickly about public transport and the emerging “share economy”, one of Australia’s leading urban futurists says.

Fewer people will “own a car”, “shared” driverless cars will be common and the “Uber” idea of sharing a ride will extend beyond an alternative to taxis, to ‘sharing’ homes, jobs, electric cars, hotel rooms and bikes by 2050.

Continue reading “Young Aussies thinking twice about car ownership: city futurist” »