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Mar 18, 2017

Who wants to live forever? Transhumanism’s promise of eternal life

Posted by in categories: life extension, robotics/AI, transhumanism

A nice long feature on #transhumanism in The Irish Times, one of Ireland’s largest papers. It focuses on the book To Be A Machine: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/who-wants-to-live-fo…-1.3010223 Separately, The New York Times ran a rather somber view of a few transhumanism books, two of the books (The Body Builders & To Be a Machine) which I’m quoted in: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/gene-machine.…html?_r=0


Mark O’Connell has spent several years talking to people who want to live through robots and technology, and he admits it stems from his own obsession with death.

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Mar 18, 2017

House of Wonders

Posted by in category: habitats

Studio aisslinger — berlin and singapore interior design, productdesign, industrial design.

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Mar 18, 2017

Trump Should Make Space-Based Solar Power A National Priority

Posted by in categories: solar power, space, sustainability

My take on why the Trump Administration should make space-based solar power a real priority.


Space-based solar power — technology that would harvest solar energy directly in space for use on Earth — is a concept whose time has come.

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Mar 18, 2017

You Can Ban a Person, But What About Their Hologram?

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, holograms, law, media & arts

If you think augmented reality is only fun and games, consider that we’ve already witnessed the first known police action taken against hologram technology. During the summer of 2015, a performance by controversial gangster-rapper, Keith Cozart, was shut down when local police discovered the musician was broadcast as a hologram into a benefit concert in Indiana—close to the border of his home state of Illinois.

Cozart, who goes by the stage name “Chief Keef,” is from a rough neighborhood in Chicago, and has ties to local gangs as well as a criminal record including felony gun charges. His music, which glamorizes a gang lifestyle and violence, has prompted public officials—including Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel—to pressure music festivals to avoid inviting Cozart because they say it poses a “significant public safety risk.”

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Mar 18, 2017

E-tattoos turn knuckles and freckles into smartphone controls

Posted by in category: mobile phones

Tattoos that turn skin into a touchscreen could display notifications on your body and let you answer a call or pump up the volume with a tap of your fingers.

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Mar 17, 2017

Google Director’s Push for Computers Inside Human Brains Is ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘Human Rights Abuse,’ Theologians Explain

Posted by in categories: engineering, Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI, singularity, transhumanism

3 Christian articles/sites w/ #transhumanism in it: http://www.christianpost.com/news/google-directors-hope-for-…in-177809/ & http://straightoutthegate.com/tech-savings-gate/zoltan-istva…has-to-go/ & https://blogs.lcms.org/2017/storming-gates-paradise


Google’s director of engineering is saying implanting computers “inside our brains” is upon us, words theologians and Christian bioethicists consider a “slap in the face” to Christ and would result in horrific human rights violations.

According to the Daily Mail, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who works on Google’s machine learning project, said at the South by Southwest conference taking place this week in Austin, Texas, that by the year 2029, technological “singularity” will be achieved, the complete merging of human and computer intelligence.

Continue reading “Google Director’s Push for Computers Inside Human Brains Is ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘Human Rights Abuse,’ Theologians Explain” »

Mar 17, 2017

Ground Demonstration of Plant Cultivation Technologies and Operation in Space

Posted by in categories: food, space travel

A critical component of future, human exploration to worlds unknown, will be the supply of edible food for crewmembers. To develop innovations in cultivating food in closed-loop systems becomes integral to future missions.

The goal of the EDEN ISS project is to advance controlled environment agriculture technologies beyond the state-of-the-art. It focuses on ground demonstration of plant cultivation technologies and their application in space. EDEN ISS develops safe food production for on-board the International Space Station (ISS) and for future human space exploration vehicles and planetary outposts.

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Mar 17, 2017

Towards a lip-reading computer

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Scientists at Oxford say they’ve invented an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans.

The system, which has been trained on thousands of hours of BBC News programmes, has been developed in collaboration with Google’s DeepMind AI division.

“Watch, Attend and Spell”, as the system has been called, can now watch silent speech and get about 50% of the words correct. That may not sound too impressive — but when the researchers supplied the same clips to professional lip-readers, they got only 12% of words right.

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Mar 17, 2017

Consequences of The Trump Budget Proposal for Rejuvenation Biotechnology

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

What the proposed Trump budget might mean for scientific funding and especially rejuvenation biotechnology.


What could the proposed Trump budget mean for rejuvenation biotech?

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Mar 17, 2017

NVIDIA and Bosch team up for AI-powered autonomous cars

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

NVIDIA lined up quite a few partners at CES this year, including Audi and Mercedes, to use its powerful upcoming Xavier chip in autonomous vehicles. But days ago, Intel bought MobilEye for $15 billion to develop self-driving software and hardware to use across auto brands. To compete, automotive supplier Bosch announced a partnership today with the graphics chip maker to collaborate on an AI-powered self-driving computer intended for mass-market cars.

MobilEye corners about 70 percent of the market to supply integrated cameras, chips and software for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). As Bosch directly competes with the company, the NVIDIA partnership is a deeper commitment to continue building their tech in-house. The graphics chip maker introduced its upcoming Xavier processor to power the self-driving systems of tomorrow back at CES, but partnering with the automotive component giant can help get the chip into automakers’ cars at scale. The companies are aiming to release their self-driving computer system in 2020, according to Reuters.

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