“Should it ever occur, an encounter with interplanetary life will surely reorder our own society in ways that this new SFI initiative suggests that we ought to consider right now.”
Warfare and technology make the perfect partners of destruction. Military innovations from wooden catapults to nuclear bombs have been transforming the way war is waged since prehistoric humans carved arrows from stones some 10,000 years ago.
The visions of futurists don’t always match the experiences of military personnel, but the battlefields of the future will bear little resemblance to the war zones of today.
The future of technology in warfare: From AI robots to VR torture.
Continue reading “Here’s the Future of Warfare Tech. Warning: it’s Not Pretty” »
The world’s most populous nation suffers from a shortage of medical practitioners, with the World Health Organisation estimating there are only 1.5 physicians available for every 1,000 people, compared with 2.4 in the US and 2.8 in the UK. That has led to deteriorating work conditions for doctors and radiologists who constantly work overtime to process huge amounts of patient data. As a consequence, the error rate is high.
Alibaba Health unveiled this week its first artificial intelligence service for disease diagnosis, offering hope that advanced technology will alleviate the workload of mainland Chinese physicians in a nation suffering from an acute shortage of doctors.
The AI solution, called Doctor You, can be used for medical image diagnosis of CT scans to identify inflammatory cells in human organs, which can be an early indicator of cancer.
Continue reading “Alibaba, Tencent see AI as solution to China’s acute shortage of doctors” »
My work is featured in Reason today via a review on book Radicals, which opens with a controversial chapter on my transhumanist presidential run: http://reason.com/blog/2017/07/12/theres-no-harm-in-fantasizing-about-a-be #transhumanism
In Radicals Chasing Utopia, transhumanist enthusiasm gets a bad rap.
AI is being used for much more than many realize. In fact, particle physicists are currently pushing the limits of our understanding of the universe with the help of these technologies.
Many might associate current artificial intelligence (AI) abilities with advanced gameplay, medical developments, and even driving. But AI is already reaching far beyond even these realms. In fact, AI is now helping particle physicists to discover new subatomic particles.
Keith Comito introduces the Lifespan Heroes, a campaign to help support scientific progress, journalism and advocacy at the LEAF Foundation.
By becoming a Heroes patron you are helping us to create more content, exclusive interviews, the latest biotech news, livestream events and more.
Check out the campaign here: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/join-us-become-a-lifespan-hero/
Interesting results in mice but don’t jump on the bandwagon yet.
Fisetin is a naturally occurring plant polyphenol from the flavonoid group, similar to quercetin. It is present in many plants, where it acts as a colouring agent. It is also found in many fruits and vegetables, such as strawberries, apples, persimmons, onions, and cucumbers.
It has also been found to be a senolytic compound able to clear senescent cells, at least it does in vitro studies in a petri dish[1]. The clearance of dysfunctional senescent cells is one of the repair based approaches proposed by the SENS Research Foundation to prevent or reverse age-related diseases.
Continue reading “Fisetin a Compound in Strawberries Slows Aging in Mice” »
A new therapy for brain cancer.
A new type of cell that can seek and destroy brain cancer and then dispose of themselves has just been successfully tested in mice. The cells are able to home in on brain tumors and reduce them to between 2 to 5% of their original size[1].
This new approach could potentially give doctors a new weapon against aggressive cancers like brain cancer (glioblastoma), which normally kills in 12–15 months.
Continue reading “Reprogramming Cells to Seek and Destroy Brain Cancer” »
Reason at Fight Aging! discusses the need to fund and support advocacy as much as research. Ultimately profressional advocacy and marketing could help popularize the field. Currently advocacy is left to a handful of volunteers and zealous individuals and that is not an optimal strategy for growth.
Useful activities in our community can be powered either by zealotry or by money. Zealotry has the advantage of being cheap, but the profound disadvantages of being rare, unreliable, and never quite optimally opinionated for the task at hand. Set a zealot to a challenge and you get the output the zealot decides upon, and only for so long as he or she is suitably motivated by whatever internal alchemy is at work in that particular case. Sustainable, reliable, long-term zealots only exist in stories. Money, on the other hand, has the disadvantage of being expensive, but for for so long as income is greater than expenditure, it can be used to produce reliable, sustainable, long-term outcomes. Changing the world always starts with the zealots, but the whole point of the subsequent bootstrapping process is to transition to money rather than zealotry as a power source just about as rapidly as possible. The future is defined by the few visionaries who care greatly enough to set aside their lives to work upon it, but it is enacted by the vastly greater number of people who take a paycheck and go home at the end of the work day.
To the extent we agree that the advocacy, fundraising, and other matters accomplished via Fight Aging! are good things, we’d like to see more of this taking place. More of it, and not dependent on the fickle motivations of zealots. Ultimately that means finding ways to do what Fight Aging! does, but for profit, with money. In this I do not mean Fight Aging! itself, which will be powered by zealotry until such time as the alchemy fails, at which point it will vanish just like everything else does in time, but something like it, and preferably dozens of varied somethings. Experimentation and diversity drive progress, and we won’t find out exactly what it is that Fight Aging! is doing suboptimally without the existence of many other attempts at the same types of initiative.
In the years that I have been running Fight Aging!, I’ve seen many longevity science interest and news sites come and go. Zealotry has a short half-life. When it comes to the money side of the house, things haven’t been much better, however. The typical ad-supported sites roll over and die fairly quickly; there never was enough money in that to do it for a niche interest such as ours over the past fifteen years. Their business models fail, and they linger a little while on the fumes of zealotry until that also departs. The initiatives that try sponsorship from the “anti-aging” marketplace tend to last longer, but are so corrupted by that revenue that they quickly lose all possible usefulness and relevance. You can’t take money from people pushing interventions that do not work and still speak with correctness and authority.
Continue reading “Envisaging For-Profit Alternatives to Fight Aging! and Similar Initiatives” »
