Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: law – Page 85

With huge leaps taking place in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), right now, experts have started asking questions about the new forms of protection we might need against the formidable smarts and potential dangers of computers and robots of the near future.

But do robots need protection from us too? As the ‘minds’ of machines evolve ever closer to something that’s hard to tell apart from human intelligence, new generations of technology may need to be afforded the kinds of moral and legal protections we usually think of as ‘human’ rights, says mathematician Marcus du Sautoy from the University of Oxford in the UK.

Du Sautoy thinks that once the sophistication of computer thinking reaches a level basically akin to human consciousness, it’s our duty to look after the welfare of machines, much as we do that of people.

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Steve Forbes sits across Brian Singer, a partner at William Blair, as Blair explains the potential of blockhain encryption to empower individuals. He also explains why credit card companies are beginning to embrace a technology that undermines their high fees.

https://youtu.be/CecpCepnkAU

Singer-Forbes

US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.

Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military’s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world’s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.

Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under international law since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria—called the Ghouta attack —claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country’s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, “demilitarized”) aboard the US Navy vessel MV Cape Ray.

The Ghouta attack highlighted two things: one, that the world would be a better place if we could annihilate all chemical weapons. Two, that we really don’t have a safe method of doing so. “The Cape Ray did a great job achieving its objective, which was to demilitarize Syria’s chemical weapons,” said Dr. Tyler McQuade, a chemist and program manager at DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “The downside is, the weapons had to be transported a long distance, and we did the demilitarization on the Mediterranean. If anything had gone wrong, it could have been really horrible for the local environment.”

Continue reading “DARPA Has a Simple Plan to Clean Up the World’s Deadliest Weapons” | >

As specialists gather in private to discuss a grand plan for constructing a human genome, Drew Endy and Laurie Zoloth argue that such an enormous moral gesture should not be discussed behind closed doors.

Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images.

At Harvard today, an invitation-only group of about 150 scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, met to discuss if and how to construct from scratch an entire human genome – the heritable genetic material that in nature is transferred from parents to children.

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CEO Harald Krueger has announced a third electric model in their BMW i series: a self-driving, intelligent luxury car named i Next, to be released by 2021.

Shortly after the announcement of its first two electric models i3 and i8, BMW is confirming its release of a third model in its “BMW i” series. Their first self-driving car, called i Next, is an autonomous, intelligent luxury car which will be released in 2021.

“People often ask me, when will we be driving autonomously? My answer is: We already can,” CEO Harald Krueger said. “A BMW test vehicle autonomously completed a lap of the Hockenheimring racetrack back in 2006. In 2011, a BMW drove on the A9 autobahn from Munich towards Nuremberg — without any driver intervention. It will be a while before these cars reach series maturity, also because the proper legal framework for customers and manufacturers has not yet been decided.”

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I still ponder on this question “Under current US laws, can I possibly win a suit against a law firm for poor representation because they used AI on my case and I lost my case that ended up causing me to lose millions and impacted my reputation? And, could this firm lose their license through the state board resulting from my claim & suit as well as others who claimed poor representation due to AI used on their case?” I believe they can under current laws.

Welcome to the firm, robot lawyers!

Last week, BigLaw firm BakerHostetler announced that it was partnering with ROSS Intelligence to bring artificial intelligence to its Bankruptcy, Restructuring, and Creditor Rights practice. ROSS will be used to help BakerHostetler’s non-robot lawyers research more quickly and intelligently. Will other firms follow their lead?

A New Kind of First Year Associate

Continue reading “BigLaw Firm Brings Artificial Intelligence on Board” | >

Another report on the Russian land give away from NY Daily News.

They’re Putin it all on the line.

Signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, a new deal offers every Russian citizen up to approximately 2.5 acres of land tax free for five years. The land would be located in Russia’s Far East, territory that stretches from the Artic to Japan and Siberia where just 4 percent of the country’s population lives.

Continue reading “What you can do with the free Russian land Putin is giving away” | >

Russia’s new frontier land grab. Anyone wanting to move to Siberia?

WASHINGTON — Call it the Muscovite version of “manifest destiny.” On Monday, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill that offers every Russian citizen a tract of land in their country’s remote Far East.

“All citizens will be entitled to apply for up to hectare of land in the Kamchatka, Primorye, Khabarovsk, Amur, Magadan and Sakhalin regions, the republic of Sakha, or the Jewish and Chukotka autonomous districts,” the Moscow Times reports. This is a vast stretch of territory spanning the upper Arctic reaches near Alaska, down to islands off the coast of Japan and deep into the Siberian hinterland.

Those interested in the venture can hold their hectare free of payment or tax for five years. After that, they would receive titles to their plot provided they have put it to use in the prior years.

Continue reading “Own a piece of Siberia for free: Russia offers hectare of land to citizens willing to move to Far East” | >

What would you say if I told you that aging happens not because of accumulation of stresses, but rather because of the intrinsic properties of the gene network of the organism? I’m guessing you’d be like: surprised .

So, here’s the deal. My biohacker friends led by Peter Fedichev and Sergey Filonov in collaboration with my old friend and the longevity record holder Robert Shmookler Reis published a very cool paper. They proposed a way to quantitatively describe the two types of aging – negligible senescence and normal aging. We all know that some animals just don’t care about time passing by. Their mortality doesn’t increase with age. Such negligibly senescent species include the notorious naked mole rat and a bunch of other critters like certain turtles and clams to name a few. So the paper explains what it is exactly that makes these animals age so slowly – it’s the stability of their gene networks.

What does network stability mean then? Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward – if the DNA repair mechanisms are very efficient and the connectivity of the network is low enough, then this network is stable. So, normally aging species, such as ourselves, have unstable networks. This is a major bummer by all means. But! There is a way to overcome this problem, according to the proposed math model.

The model very generally describes what happens with a gene network over time – the majority of the genes are actually working perfectly, but a small number doesn’t. There are repair mechanisms that take care of that. Also, there are mechanisms that take care of defected proteins like heat shock proteins, etc. Put together all of this in an equasion and solve it, and bam! here’s an equasion that gives you the Gompertz law for all species that have normal aging, and a time independent constant for the negligibly senescent ones.

What’s the difference between those two aging regimes? The model suggests it’s the right combination of DNA repair efficiency and the combined efficiency of proteolysis and heat shock response systems, mediating degradation and refolding of misfolded proteins. So, it’s not the accumulation of damages that is responsible for aging, but rather the properties of the gene network itself. The good news is that even we are playing with a terrible hand at first, there is a chance we can still win by changing the features of our network and making it stable. For example, by optimizing misfolded protein response or DNA repair.

Continue reading “10 responses to “Hacking Aging”” | >