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Dec 6, 2017

Daniel Ellsberg’s Memoir About Life as a Nuclear War Planner Would Be Terrifying Even if Trump Weren’t President

Posted by in categories: existential risks, government, military

Daniel Ellsberg gained notoriety in the early 1970s for leaking the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War, and then for outspokenly protesting the war and the government’s secrecy which sustained it. Yet few, then or now, are aware that he spent much of the previous decade immersed in highly classified studies of the U.S. nuclear-war machine: how it works, who can launch an attack, and how much devastation it can wreak if someone ever pushed the button.

His new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, is his long-gestating memoir of those times and the years since, and it is one of the best books ever written on the subject—certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole’s mad logic and came out the other side.


Dr. Strangelove “was a documentary,” writes the man behind the Pentagon Papers.

Continue reading “Daniel Ellsberg’s Memoir About Life as a Nuclear War Planner Would Be Terrifying Even if Trump Weren’t President” »

Dec 5, 2017

New edition of Lifeboat Foundation book is released

Posted by in category: futurism

The book The Human Race to the Future, by Daniel Berleant (published by the Lifeboat Foundation) has just been released in its 4th and newest edition. As a special promotion the book, jammed with over 300 pages of information, will be priced through December at just $1.23 (1−2−3) for the e-book version on Amazon.

Dec 5, 2017

A few days ago this documentary on cyborgs aired on Spanish Public TV, RTVE

Posted by in categories: cyborgs, education, transhumanism

Lots of futurists are in it. A 5-min section on my #transhumanism work, including the Transhumanist Bill of Rights (image of me below writing the first version on steps of US Supreme Court), is in the doc. My section starts about 45:30, and there are some YouTube versions out there too now (google the title Cyborgs Entre Nosotros) if there are issues to watch outside Spain: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/la-noche-tematica/noche-t…s/4341838/

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Dec 5, 2017

You can post your AMA questions for Dr. Aubrey de Grey in advance here

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

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Dec 5, 2017

SENS: Progress in the Fight Against Age-related Diseases

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Given there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the futurology subreddit, we thought it was a great time to have a look at the progress the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA where you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.


Given that there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the Futurology subreddit, we think it’s a great time to have a look at the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA, in which you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Today, there are many drugs and therapies that we take for granted. However, we should not forget that what is common and easily accessible today didn’t just magically appear out of thin air; rather, at some point, it used to be an unclear subject of study on which “more research was needed”, and even earlier, it was just a conjecture in some researcher’s head.

Continue reading “SENS: Progress in the Fight Against Age-related Diseases” »

Dec 5, 2017

We are happy to announce Dr. Jean Hébert as a speaker for the 2018 Undoing Aging Conference

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience

Dr. Hébert will be in Berlin to provide an update on his fascinating work. The use of stem cells to repair the brain is relatively straightforward for Parkinson’s disease, in which cell depletion is localized to one small region, but in Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, the cell loss is widely distributed, whereas cells can only be injected into one spot. The solution that Dr. Hébert explores is to make those cells migrate before dividing and differentiating.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/dr-jean-hebert-to-speak-at-undoing-aging-2018

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Dec 5, 2017

Life 3.0

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 tries to rectify the situation. Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at the general public, the book offers a political and philosophical map of the promises and perils of the AI revolution. Instead of pushing any one agenda or prediction, Tegmark seeks to cover as much ground as possible, reviewing a wide variety of scenarios concerning the impact of AI on the job market, warfare and political systems.


Yuval Noah Harari responds to an account of the artificial intelligence era and argues we are profoundly ill-prepared to deal with future technology.

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Dec 4, 2017

It’s Gonna Get A Lot Easier To Break Science Journal Pay Walls — By Adam Rogers | Wired

Posted by in categories: big data, education, policy, science

““Access to science is going to be a first-world privilege,” Geltner says. “That’s the opposite of what science is supposed to be about.””

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Dec 4, 2017

Beyond Virtual Reality: Synthetic Reality And Our Co-Created Futures — By Robert C. Walcott | Forbes

Posted by in categories: futurism, virtual reality

“Eventually such systems may not require conscious input to capture and respond to shifting user preferences, though user intervention might still remain an option. The notion of ‘virtual’ fails to accurately describe such a world.”

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Dec 4, 2017

Companies with strong ESG credentials make better investments — By Aliya Ram | Financial Times

Posted by in categories: environmental, finance, governance

“ “What we can say now is that the impact [of ESG issues] on risk, volatility and valuation is clearly statistically significant.” ”

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