Lifeboat Foundation

By Graham Templeton — ExtremeTech

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.
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By Antonio Regalado — MIT Technology Review

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.
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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-ut…in/104609/

Brian Krassenstein — 3dPrint

We all likely have realized by now that the rate of technological progress increases over time. For example, we will likely see as much progress in the next decade as we have in the last 30 years combined. This accelerating rate of development in technology ultimately will equate to a world alien to most of us, likely within many of our lifetimes.

There are few areas, if any, in which technology is developing faster than that of the 3D printing space. In the last several years alone we have gone from a society in which nearly no one had heard of the phrase ‘3D printing’ to one where it’s almost impossible to go a couple of days without hearing about it in one form or another.

So you may now be wondering just how quickly 3D printing will develop over the next few decades. Will we be 3D printing organs for transplantation? How about 3D printing street legal cars or even airplanes? How about entire living organisms? Okay, wait, what did I just say?
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by Daniel Roberts — Fortune

For all the media coverage, and for all the venture capitalist interest, the average person on the street still knows nothing about bitcoin.

According to a study released by the nonprofit Coin Center last month, 65% of the general public is “not at all familiar” with the digital currency or its underlying technology. Of those who do have some awareness, 84% have never used it.

That hasn’t stopped authors from rushing in to churn out books on bitcoin. In 2014, hundreds of books were published on the topic. Why are business writers so intrigued? Fortune spoke to the authors of three recent serious books on the topic. Below are five questions from each conversation.
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Black Holes made Stephen famous: the conjecture that they would “evaporate” through what was called “Hawking radiation.”

Unfortunately, 7 years ago black holes were first proved to be individually stable and to be growing exponentially inside matter. Hawking never defended his disproved conjecture.

CERN will bet the planet on Hawking’s falsified theory this month – by doubling up their nuclear energies as announced. No human being was ever given a weightier homage of faith.

I herewith ask CERN: Why try to generate Hawking radiation in dangerous collisions after it got disproved? Is Hawking’s dream worthy of more respect than everyone else’s life?

Continue reading “STEPHEN and the WORLD” »

by Steve Dent — Engadget

If you recently installed or updated uTorrent on your PC, you may have have picked up an unwanted passenger: a bitcoin miner called Epic Scale. If you don’t pay attention, that piece of code can be inadvertently installed with the latest uTorrent build (version 3.4.2). It can then use your computer as part of a bitcoin farm (Litecoin, to be exact) to generate revenue for third parties. Users first reported the situation on uTorrent’s forums, and it was quickly confirmed by a senior support manager. He said that the app “cannot be installed without permission,” but one user claimed that there was “never a warning about it,” even though he opted out of other bundled software.
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By Levi Sumagaysay — siliconbeat

“When I am successful in realizing this mega-project, then I will finally have 10,000 years for numerous hobbies.”

— Dmitry Itskov, founder of the 2045 Initiative, which aims to transfer our brains and human consciousness to robot avatars instead of bodies that weaken and die. Itskov is a billionaire who’s known as the godfather of the Russian Internet. He also apparently has plenty of hobbies.

Think tech isn’t working on big problems? Newsweek checks on the progress of the 2045 Initiative and other efforts — including in Silicon Valley — to cheat death. The efforts are funded by other deep-pocketed titans of tech: Peter Thiel of PayPal fame has given money to the Methuselah Foundation, which is working to find drugs that cure age-related damage to the body’s cells. Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s Ellison Medical Foundation distributes grants to those who are researching aging. As we’ve written, Google spinoff Calico‘s stated mission is to “harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan.” Google’s Larry Page has also backed Singularity University; co-founders Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis are big fans of immortality — or at least living till 700.

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By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

The desolate reaches of deep space figure heavily in today’s sci-fi short film double feature. Space, as it turns out, is really big and empty. Until we get warp drive or discover a local wormhole—getting anywhere will be a long, lonely slog. The other thread tying the films together? They’re both by director Eli Sasich.

First up is HENRi. The film is like an episode of Life After People in space. What happens to a ship’s artificially intelligent computer after its crew dies? It gets melancholy, begins missing its human friends something terrible, and builds itself a robot body out of the ship’s rusty scrap and spare parts.

“My particular interest for this film was memory and its intrinsic relationship with consciousness,” Sasich writes in an article about the film’s making. “I also wanted a robot of my very own.”

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