We asked the IEET audience what they were doing to avoid slow death from too much sitting. For the 200+ respondents the most common answer was exercising 140 minutes per week or more, followed by frequent breaks to stand and walk around.

What will the future look like? The further upwards one moves from the basement domain of physics, the harder it often gets to predict long-term trends. Nonetheless, we have some fairly good clues about what to expect moving forward.

(Transcript of the speech presented at Lincoln Center, New York, at the conference Global Future 2045: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution.)

I am going to discuss whole brain emulation, about what it takes to reverse engineer a mind. This is a topic that you’ve heard mentioned a few times over, that term at least (at least during the conference), and several of the speakers that you saw today - and more that are coming up - are going to be talking about technologies, or have talked about technologies, that address a specific part of that. But I want to show: How does all this come together? How could you reverse engineer a mind? And I wanted to show: How do you actually determine the goals for something like that?

Article publiée initialement sur Mesacosan.com

If you’ve watched any James Bond movie with an underwater scene, you’ve likely seen 007 menaced by some form of the villains’ sinister undersea robots. In 2015, thanks to the efforts of Author, Biomimetics Researcher, and Neurophysiology Professor Joseph Ayers, undersea robots are a reality, and the future applications of his RoboLobster are far from evil.

In early 2014, Richard Loosemore published a paper called “The Maverick Nanny with a Dopamine Drip: Debunking Fallacies in the Theory of AI Motivation“, which criticized some thought experiments about the risks of general AI that had been presented. Like many others, I did not really understand the point that this paper was trying to make, especially since it made the claim that people endorsing such thought experiments were assuming a certain kind of an AI architecture – which I knew that we were not.

The recent news that womb transplants will be trialled in the UK has sparked much debate regarding the desirability of this and other future infertility interventions.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea of artificial wombs has been brought into this discussion, complete with the usual concerns about women’s reproductive liberty.

The political left has long been oriented toward the future. This is clear in its revolutionary ethos: the utopia of the revolutionary is, after all, always just around the corner. But in orienting itself toward the future, the left has not always been actively futurist in its outlook. Many leftists are uncomfortable with technology and science, viewing them as insidious and malign capitalistic projects. As a result, their utopian dreams often end up looking to a mythic historical Golden Age for inspiration.

For the rest of this article I assume a model which I see as suboptimal – but realistic – conservative compromise:
Almost all social security policies get slashed in favour of a sufficient UBI.
Consumption taxes and income taxes are both increased so much that they can cover any additional cost that a sufficient UBI would impose.
Land value taxation and social dividends are not used to finance the UBI, even though that might be seen as preferred solution.

Dear Future Centenarian,  
 


If exercise were a drug, it would perhaps be the most important one ever developed. And you would pay through the nose for it.

It’s not though… and it’s free.
 
Here’s some more insight and information from Reason on this major topic:



The automobile industry is still looking to develop the first fully autonomous vehicle, but Tesla Motors recently took the industry one step closer. The US car company has managed to simultaneously make one of the biggest advancements in the history of recent automobile technology and generate massive controversy at the same time.

There is something new and fundamental happening in the world which could be the start of the next enlightenment period. The core of this is shifting from centralized to decentralized models in all aspects of our lives, both individual and societally.

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Debra Satz’s analysis of commercial surrogacy. In that post, I reviewed three classic objections to surrogacy and presented some of Satz’s critiques of those objections. As I mentioned, this was a ground-clearing exercise. Although Satz’s thinks that the traditional objections are flawed, she is not herself a supporter of commercial surrogacy (to be precise, she is not a supporter of ‘contract pregnancy’, which makes the target and conclusion of her arguments less clear — I’ll return to this point below).

I generally avoid political issues in this blog,  but there are a number of very disturbing trends in American politics today that demand attention. The reason for that attention is simple. As both Plato and Aristotle reasoned long ago, one cannot have a good life without a good government; without a good government, few of us will be able to live well.

Outer space is said to be “the final frontier,” yet that frontier may have closed while one other remains open: the human mind.  In December 1972 I stood in the midnight darkness on a Florida beach to watch the launch of Apollo 17, the last voyage humans have ever taken beyond the confines of Earth orbit, pondering what it meant for our feeble but ambitious species.

The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the harder defense becomes.

It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them. This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our software ecosystems today and any other system with many dimensions of movement.

Complexity, more degrees of freedom within a system, allow for greater attack surface. When they can come not just from all points on the compass but from above and below as well.

Is it best to be perfectly adapted to a given environment? Or, rather, is it better to be able to adapt to the changes in that environment or to a completely new one? Adaptability is a more useful characteristic in a rapidly changing world.

Why do we think about the future? This may seem an odd setting in which to ask this question. We’re all here tonight because we’re interested in big changes that seem to be thundering ahead in technology, in politics, in the human experience. But there has to be more than “interest.” An organization like the Institute for the Future wouldn’t be around for nearly a half-century if it was really just the Institute for Idle Curiosity About Tomorrow.

This is part 3 of a series looking at the economic trends of new energy technologies. Part 1 looked at how cheap solar can get (very cheap indeed). Part 2 looked at the declining cost and rising reliability of wind power. Now let’s talk about storage.

Let’s say you have an spare bedroom and you need some extra income. What do you do? You do more of what you’ve trained for, in an environment with the capital and tools to do it best. Anything else only makes sense if the economy is badly screwed up.

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