Lifeboat Foundation

How rejuvenation can make motherhood (and more generally, parenthood) better.

I’m not really a children person. I know some people really are into having children and think that it’s the most wonderful thing in life, but I’m just not one of them. This is perfectly fine. Whether having children is a wonderful thing or not is a matter of opinion, and it is not true or false in an absolute sense. What’s more, it’s not necessarily set in stone forever: I don’t like the idea now, but I can’t be 100% sure I never will; conversely, people who love the idea now might not like it any more in the future.

However, having children is a bit more serious than a simple matter of personal taste. A child is not a toy or a dress that you buy and just put away if it turns out you don’t like it as much as you thought you would: It’s a living human being whom was brought into the world because of someone else’s intentions and/or actions, and it’ll need love and care for quite a while. For this very reason, I think you should have children only if you’re pretty damn sure you really want to and are prepared to do all it takes to raise them. It’s not an easy job, and if it turns out you hate it, you’ll probably end up doing it wrong, messing up the child’s life and your own in the process. This is true of women and men, though women definitely picked the shortest straw. I’ll tell you why I think so in a moment.

Even if you think you are ‘pretty damn sure’ that you want children, you could still be wrong for a number of reasons that aren’t necessarily your fault. If you do decide to have children and then realise you don’t like it, you have good 18+ years ahead of you of bearing with the consequences of your wrong decision. The decision to not have children is, in a sense, safer, because it can easily be undone: Later on, you can change your mind and have children. If you already did make a child, changing your mind about it will not undo the child. However, not having children is only marginally safer, because as things stand you can postpone parenthood only so long before it becomes impossible or impractical (again, especially if you are a woman). The bottom line is that the current state of affairs imposes you a risky choice—having or not having children—that cannot easily (or at all) be undone.

Continue reading “Women, reproduction, and rejuvenation” »

Airbus has proposed a new modular transportation idea mixing air and ground travel that will make you feel that the future cannot get here fast enough.

Unveiled today at the Geneva International Motor show, the system, dubbed “Pop. Up,” would start with a capsule that sits in the frame of an autonomous car. When traffic gets heavy, you just call a drone using your smartphone and lift the capsule up into the air and over the heads of those poor suckers stuck in traffic sucking on exhaust fumes.

The company says a new artificial intelligence platform will help manage the Pop. Up system, letting passengers optimize the mix of modalities for their trip.

Continue reading “Airbus unveils Pop.Up: An autonomous transportation concept that uses drones to carry cars” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&persist_app=1&…TEhohh6eYk

I did a long-form interview on Medium’s Defiant of my run for California Governor. It covers many subjects (Trump, gene editing, basic income), as well as why I think technology is ready to change politics and governance forever:

By AJAI RAJ

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s 2015, and the ever-humming machinery of American presidential politics is picking up steam. The American political machine runs on steam, okay? It’s very old.

Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan Wants to Create Superpeople —Oh, and Also Be California’s Governor” »

IBM esta anunciando que estão desenvolvendo um sistema universal de “computação qu ntica”

O serviço será chamado IBM Q, e ele dará às pessoas acesso ao seu computador qu ntico de estágio inicial pela internet para usar como desejar — por uma taxa.

O grande elefante na sala é que, por enquanto, o computador qu ntico da IBM só funciona com cinco qubits, então não é muito mais rápido (se houver mais rápido) do que um computador convencional.

Continue reading “IBM Is Rolling Out the World’s First Universal ‘Quantum Computing’ Service” »

As I start to look at the emerging trends of 2017 from the vantage of IndieBio, where we see hundreds of biotech startup applications and technologies per year, a few key themes are already emerging. Even as political landscapes change, science and technology continue to push forward.

1. Cell Therapies and Regenerative Medicine

Most of us have seen science fiction shows that show future doctors regrowing and replacing entire organs. That fiction is now becoming a reality with cell therapies from companies like Juno (curing two infants with leukemia of their previously treatment resistant cancers with engineered T-cells), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) pioneered by the Nobel prize winning scientist, Shinya Yamanaka that can become any cell in the body, growing organoids (mini organs with some function of a fully grown organ like the stomach organoids grown by researchers in Ohio), and entirely re-grown organs.

Continue reading “3 Exciting Biotech Trends to Watch Closely in 2017” »

By Matt Reynolds

By making DNA endlessly change, researchers have shown how a biological computer might one day solve problems much faster than conventional computers or even quantum computers. It’s still a long way from being functional though.

The DNA-based system is an experiment in how it may be possible to make a theoretical type of computer known as a non-deterministic universal Turing machine.

Continue reading “First hint of how DNA calculators could supercharge computing” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3TtODhB-008

Robots and AI are going to become an everyday part of life, but will that take away other everyday parts of life?

The goal of transcending flesh is an old fetish. Yogis meditated and fasted for eons in order to rise above our ‘meat casing,’ performing painful ablutions and inventing kriyas, intense breathing exercises that are physiologically indistinct from intentional hyperventilation. The goal of many religions, from some forms of Tibetan Buddhism to numerous strains of Christianity and Islam, is all about letting the spirit soar free.

While language changes, pretensions remain. Today we talk about ‘uploading consciousness’ to an as of yet discovered virtual cloud. Artificial intelligence is only moments away, so the story goes, with experts weighing in on the ethical consequences of creating machines void of emotional response systems. In this view consciousness, itself a loaded and mismanaged term, is nothing more than an algorithm waiting to be deciphered. Upon cracking the code, immortality awaits.

Of course others are more grounded. The goal of extending life to 150 years includes the body by default, though the mind is still championed above all else. Yet we seem to age in opposing directions by design. At forty-one little has changed in how I think about myself, yet my body is decaying: a post-knee surgery creek here, a perpetual tight shoulder there. It certainly feels like a slowly approaching transition, even if that, like much of life, is an illusion.

Continue reading “From AI to Anxiety Relief, The Brain Needs a Body” »