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Category Archives: Transhuman News

Eliezer Yudkowsky – Wikipedia

Posted: January 8, 2023 at 11:11 am

American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky (born September 11, 1979) is an American decision theory and artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and writer, best known for popularizing the idea of friendly artificial intelligence.[1][2] He is a co-founder[3] and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.[4] His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion was an influence on Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.[5]

Yudkowsky's views on the safety challenges posed by future generations of AI systems are discussed in the undergraduate textbook in AI, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Noting the difficulty of formally specifying general-purpose goals by hand, Russell and Norvig cite Yudkowsky's proposal that autonomous and adaptive systems be designed to learn correct behavior over time:

Yudkowsky (2008)[6] goes into more detail about how to design a Friendly AI. He asserts that friendliness (a desire not to harm humans) should be designed in from the start, but that the designers should recognize both that their own designs may be flawed, and that the robot will learn and evolve over time. Thus the challenge is one of mechanism designto design a mechanism for evolving AI under a system of checks and balances, and to give the systems utility functions that will remain friendly in the face of such changes.[1]

In response to the instrumental convergence concern, where autonomous decision-making systems with poorly designed goals would have default incentives to mistreat humans, Yudkowsky and other MIRI researchers have recommended that work be done to specify software agents that converge on safe default behaviors even when their goals are misspecified.[7][2]

In the intelligence explosion scenario hypothesized by I. J. Good, recursively self-improving AI systems quickly transition from subhuman general intelligence to superintelligent. Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies sketches out Good's argument in detail, while citing writing by Yudkowsky on the risk that anthropomorphizing advanced AI systems will cause people to misunderstand the nature of an intelligence explosion. "AI might make an apparently sharp jump in intelligence purely as the result of anthropomorphism, the human tendency to think of 'village idiot' and 'Einstein' as the extreme ends of the intelligence scale, instead of nearly indistinguishable points on the scale of minds-in-general."[1][3][6][8]

In Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, authors Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig raise the objection that there are known limits to intelligent problem-solving from computational complexity theory; if there are strong limits on how efficiently algorithms can solve various computer science tasks, then intelligence explosion may not be possible.[1]

Between 2006 and 2009, Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson were the principal contributors to Overcoming Bias, a cognitive and social science blog sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. In February 2009, Yudkowsky founded LessWrong, a "community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality".[9][10] Overcoming Bias has since functioned as Hanson's personal blog.

Over 300 blogposts by Yudkowsky on philosophy and science (originally written on LessWrong and Overcoming Bias) were released as an ebook entitled Rationality: From AI to Zombies by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2015.[11] MIRI has also published Inadequate Equilibria, Yudkowsky's 2017 ebook on the subject of societal inefficiencies.[12]

Yudkowsky has also written several works of fiction. His fanfiction novel, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, uses plot elements from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series to illustrate topics in science.[9][13] The New Yorker described Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality as a retelling of Rowling's original "in an attempt to explain Harry's wizardry through the scientific method".[14]

Yudkowsky is an autodidact[15] and did not attend high school or college.[16] He was raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew.[17]

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Eliezer Yudkowsky - Wikipedia

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Gene Therapy: Genes As Medicine | Pfizer

Posted: January 6, 2023 at 2:58 pm

References:

1. NIH Genetics Home Reference. What is a Gene? https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/basics/gene. Accessed February 10, 2020.

2. Forbes. How Many Possible Combinations of DNA Are There? https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/20/how-many-possible-combinations-of-dna-are-there/. Accessed February 10, 2020.

3. NIH National Human Genome Research Institute. Genetic Disorders. https://www.genome.gov/For-Patients-and-Families/Genetic-Disorders. Accessed February 10, 2020.

4. NIH Genetics Home Reference. How Can Gene Mutations Affect Health and Development? https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/mutationsanddisorders/mutationscausedisease. Accessed February 10, 2020.

5. NIH Genetics Home Reference. How does Gene Therapy Work? https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/therapy/procedures. Accessed February 10, 2020.

6. NIH Genetics Home Reference. What is Gene Therapy? https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/therapy/genetherapy. Accessed February 10, 2020.

7. Data on file. Pfizer Inc, New York, NY.

8. Haasteren J, Hyde S, Gill D. Lessons Learned From Lung and Liver In-Vivo Gene Therapy: Implications for the Future. Expert Opin Biol Ther. 2018;18(9):959-972.

9. Gowing G, Svendsen S, Svendsen CS. Ex Vivo Gene Therapy for the Treatment of Neurological Disorders. Prog Brain Res. 2017;230:99-132.

10. NIH National Human Genome Research Institute. What is Genome Editing? https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/what-is-Genome-Editing. Accessed February 10, 2020.

11. Carroll D. Genome Engineering with Zinc-Finger Nucleases. Genetics. 2011;188(4):773-782.

12. Unniyampurath U, Krishnan M, et al. RNA Interference in the Age of CRISPR: Will CRISPR Interfere with RNAi? Int J Mol Sci. 2016;17(3):291.

13. Your Genome. Facts: What is Gene Therapy? http://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-isgene-therapy. Accessed February 10, 2020.

14. Arruda VR, Favaro P, Finn JD. Strategies to Modulate Immune Responses: A New Frontier for Gene Therapy. Mol Ther. 2009;17(9):14921503.

15. Mingozzi F, High KA. Immune responses to AAV vectors: overcoming barriers to successful gene therapy. Blood. 2013;122(1):23-36.

16. Payne J. Antibody and antigen tests. Patient Platform Limited Web site. https://patient.info/health/antibody-and-antigen-tests. Accessed February 10, 2020.

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Gene Therapy: Genes As Medicine | Pfizer

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Colonization of Europa – Wikipedia

Posted: January 4, 2023 at 6:51 am

Proposed concepts for the human colonization of Europa

Europa, the fourth-largest moon of Jupiter, is a subject in both science fiction and scientific speculation for future human colonization. Europa's geophysical features, including a possible subglacial water ocean, make it a possibility that human life could be sustained on or beneath the surface.

Europa as a target for human colonization has several benefits compared to other bodies in the outer Solar System, but is not without challenges.

On a flyby mission around Europa in 1979, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 took relatively detailed photographs of the moon's surface. They noted several important characteristics including dark streaks across the surface, or lineae, and an otherwise remarkably smooth icy crust. The lineae are believed to be the result of icy tectonic plates moving over a submerged ocean. Moreover, the smooth crust is believed to be the result of its recent formation.[1] Submerged water may have risen to cover the older, more damaged surface and smooth it over. These surface features indicate the existence of a subsurface ocean. Given water's importance to life on Earth, it is considered to be a possible indicator of life on other celestial bodies.

The high radiation on Europa's surface is one of the environmental challenges to colonization.[2] Europa receives 5.4 Sv (540 rem) of radiation per day,[3] which is approximately 1,800 times the average annual dose experienced by a human on Earth at sea level. Humans exposed to this level of radiation for one day would have greater than a 50% mortality rate within 30 days.

Another problem is that the surface temperature of Europa averages around 90K, or -183C.[4]

Furthermore, the low gravity of Europa may also present challenges to colonization efforts. The effects of low gravity on human health are still an active field of study, but can include symptoms such as impaired eyesight and a diminished sense of balance.[5] Negative health effects can also include muscle deterioration and bone loss. Galactic cosmic radiation along the journey is likely to lead to an increased chance of developing Alzheimer's Disease.[6][7] Astronauts in Earth's orbit have remained in microgravity for more than a year at a time and have had to develop countermeasures to address its negative effects. Experts have also hypothesized that children born and raised in low gravity would not be well adapted for life under the higher gravity of Earth.[8]

Moreover, experts have speculated that alien organisms may exist on Europa, possibly in the subsurface ocean under the moon's ice shell.[9][10] If true, this would mean human colonists may come into contact with harmful microbes.

An unstable surface could also represent a potential problem as it has been shown that Europa is geologically active. With an outer crust experts believe is made of constantly shifting plate tectonics, Europa's surface would make it difficult to maintain the structural integrity of any long-term infrastructure.[11]

The transportation of humans to Europa would be one of the primary challenges to colonization. Since Jupiter is on average 630.4 million kilometers away from Earth at a given time, it would take at least 3 years just to get into Europa's orbit plus additional time to land. In an effort to develop transportation methods to Mars and other planets, NASA has announced a program called NextSTEP that will merge the efforts of public and private industry to begin the research and architectural design necessary to create an Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) system.[12] The ECLS is currently being designed for Martian operations, will be called the Deep Space Transport (DST) and will allow for missions up to 2.75 years long. The transport vehicle to Europa will be similar to the DST and the International Space Station (ISS), but will also be different in several key aspects. Most importantly, the transport vehicle for Europa would need to be completely self-sufficient so that all the nutritional supplies are included at the onset of the flight, along with the ability to repair any systems that malfunction or break on the voyage. The vehicle would also need to be resistant to radiation because the levels of radiation on this trip would be significantly higher than on Earth. The shielding around the ship would have to be increased to prevent exposure to harmful radiation. While these considerations are prohibitively expensive and require development of current technologies, it is not impossible that a continuation of the DST would meet the requirements necessary to eventually complete this journey.

Like historic colonies that were established on Earth, Europa's economic development would be critical to its continual growth and success.[13] One such economic driver could be its relatively close proximity to Jupiter, the asteroid belt, and the periphery of the solar system. Earth is, on average, almost 500 million miles from Europa.[14] To alleviate the time and distance required to travel, Europa can serve as a midway colony between Earth and the aforementioned locations. "Intermediary" colonies have historic precedents. For example, Cape Town, South Africa, was established as a safe harbor for long voyages between Asia and Europe.[15]

Europa is hypothesized to have a large subsurface ocean. Water makes it possible to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains as it is an essential pillar to agriculture.[16] However, reddish-brown materials whose composition is not yet known, but that experts believe to be salt and sulfur compounds that have been mixed with ice and modified by radiation, litter Europa's surface and could make Europa's surface unsuitable for agriculture.[17] Manure and other fertilizers could be an inter-Europa commodity as it will most likely be essential to delivering the nutrients required for farming and industrial agriculture.[16]

The true breadth of ethical consequences that come from the colonization of Europa cannot be known until such a colony is fully established. The United Nations Outer Space Treaty, ratified in 1967, states that no country may take claim to space or celestial bodies like Europa.[18] It is unclear exactly how ownership over Europa colonial lands would be distributed and whether colonists will have private land ownership once a colony is established. More human centered ethical questions may arise from how extended periods in outer space will impact colonists. Migration on Earth is a well established phenomenon but it carries its own set of psychological impacts like a decrease in mental well-being due to having to adjust to a new environment, set of norms, distress, and separation from family.[19] NASA scientists predict that an altered state of gravity and radiation coupled with isolation and confinement have the potential to pose real psychological hardships on a person.[20] Such negative impacts on colonists will increase as they spend more time in space. Ethical arguments can be made as to why any entity should finance the colonization of Europa when the program has a high risk of failure and could be detrimental to the colonists' health and well-being.

The environment within a Europa colony will inevitably be altered. Colonists will most likely want to terraform the moon to make its surface and climate better suited for their colony.[21] Arguments can be made as to what right humans have, as extraterrestrial visitors, to alter the natural environment. Parallels can also be found between the negative impacts that unmonitored resource exploitation has had on Earth and the potential of such a catastrophe on Europa.

If life is found to exist on Europa, the difference in the environments of Earth and Europa would likely mean terraforming would have adverse effects on the natural inhabitants of the moon.[22] Ethical considerations regarding how to preserve natural life, whether it be primitive or in the form of microorganisms may be necessary.

Galileo Galilei first discovered Europa along with four of Jupiter's other satellites on 7 January 1610.[23] However, he only realized they were moons, rather than stars, on 15 January of that year.[24]

Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were flyby missions to Jupiter in 1972 and 1973 respectively.[25]

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were NASA space probes launched in 1977. During a flyby mission in 1979, the Voyager probes took relatively precise photographs of the moon's surface.[1]

Europa Clipper is a NASA mission planned for launch in 2024.[1] After it is launched, the spacecraft will study Europa on flybys as it orbits Jupiter. The mission's goal is to determine whether there is a liquid water ocean submerged under Europa's icy surface. Furthermore, NASA hopes to determine whether that ocean provides suitable conditions for life.

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Colonization of Europa - Wikipedia

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American Colonization Society | abolitionist organization

Posted: at 6:51 am

American Colonization Society, in full American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, American organization dedicated to transporting freeborn blacks and emancipated slaves to Africa. It was founded in 1816 by Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister, and some of the countrys most influential men, including Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, and Bushrod Washington (nephew of George Washington and the societys first president). Support for it came from local and state branches and from churches, and the federal government provided some initial funding. The membership was overwhelmingly whitewith some clergymen and abolitionists but also a large number of slave ownersand all generally agreed with the prevailing view of the time that free blacks could not be integrated into white America.

The societys program focused on purchasing and freeing slaves, paying their passage (and that of free blacks) to the west coast of Africa, and assisting them after their arrival there. In 1821, after a failed colonizing attempt the previous year and protracted negotiations with local chiefs, the society acquired the Cape Mesurado area, subsequently the site of Monrovia, Liberia. Some saw colonization as a humanitarian effort and a means of ending slavery, but many antislavery advocates came to oppose the society, believing that its true intent was to drain off the best of the free black population and preserve the institution of slavery. Reviled by extremists on both sides of the slavery debate and suffering from a shortage of money, the society declined after 1840. In 1847 Liberia, until then virtually an overseas branch of the society, declared its independence. Between 1821 and 1867 some 10,000 black Americans, along with several thousand Africans from interdicted slave ships, were resettled by the group, but its involvement with transport to Liberia ended after the American Civil War. The society focused on education and missionary activities until the early 20th century. It was dissolved in 1964.

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American Colonization Society | abolitionist organization

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Marsha Blackburn Secures Another Tech Win, Removes Censorship Loophole …

Posted: at 6:49 am

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has secured another win for conservatives on tech policy, removing a loophole from a bill designed to regulate the app marketplaces of Apple and Google that would have allowed them to continue to censor in the name of digital safety, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The bill, the Open App Markets Act, protects the ability of app developers to sideload apps onto iPhones and Android devices, bypassing the chokehold of the two tech giants, who control 99 percent of smartphone operating systems worldwide.

Apple CEO Tim Cook looking pensive ( Spencer Platt /Getty)

Google boss Sundar Pichai is masked up ( Drew Angerer /Getty)

An early version of the bill contained a big loophole: Google and Apple would still have been able to boot apps from their marketplaces if they did so in the name of digital safety a term wide-open to interpretation, that has often been used by Big Tech as a pretext to censor conservatives. Even for non-political apps, Apple and Googles current systems represent a strangehold on their businesses.

However, a new version of the Open App Markets Act seen by Breitbart News no longer contains the digital safety language. Sources familiar with the matter say Sen. Blackburn was responsible for this last-minute change. The new version of the bill is likely to be introduced via the hotline procedure in the Senate, meaning it will pass if no Senators object.

Left wing groups such as the Center for American Progress argued that the earlier version of the bill would ensure hate speech and disinformation were not protected because the loophole allowed platforms to take action to protect the safety or security of its users.

The removal of this censorship loophole, which was the number-one point of conservative criticism of the Open App Markets act, would be the second big win for Sen. Blackburn on tech policy this week.

On Tuesday, a last-ditch effort by supporters of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to force the bill into law by attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) failed.

Sen. Blackburn was the first Republican Senator to come out against the bill, which would establish a gravy train of financial handouts and other favors from Big Tech to the media industry, when it was first introduced in the spring of 2021.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.He is the author of#DELETED: Big Techs Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.

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Morris: Internal Twitter Deliberations on Laptop from Hell Censorship …

Posted: at 6:48 am

Internal Twitter deliberations surrounding the censorship of the New York Posts reporting on Hunter Bidens laptop from hell reveal the companys management engaging in willful ignorance of the facts of the story in order to justify censoring it on the platform.

Matt Taibbi, the journalist tasked by Elon Musk to reveal the internal communications, explains that Twitter management at the time used the companys hacked materials policy as an excuse to squelch the Posts reporting, but knew it wasnt going to hold. The reason it wasnt going to hold was because the Post explained that the reporting was based on a hard drive abandoned at a computer repair shop, not hacked material, and produced a federal subpoena given to the repair-shop owner to bolster the claim.

Jack Dorsey and Twitter employees (@Jack/Twitter)

Twitter Exec Vijaya Gadde (Fortune Brainstorm TECH/Flickr)

Former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth messaged colleagueVijaya Gadde, The policy basis is hacked materials though, as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016, were erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.

Another member of management, Brandon Borrman, then asks, Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?

Jim Baker, Twitters then-Deputy Legal Counsel and former senior member of the FBI, adds, [We] need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that conclusion is warranted.

Baker then admits, per the Posts reporting in the story in question, that there is evidence indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.

But during the time this communication was underway, Twitter did not contact the New York Post to inquire about whether the reporting was based on hacked material, and the story in question explained exactly how the Post obtained the material it was reporting on.

In the story headlined, Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad, published on October 14, 2020, it says that the correspondence between Burisma board memberVadym Pozharskyi and Hunter was contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

The Post published that it had the entire hard drive, which was originally obtained by a computer repair shop in Delaware.

The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Bidens home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the stores owner, the Post wrote in the initial story.

The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.

The shop owner couldnt positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunters late brother and former Delaware attorney general.

Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shops owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.

But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giulianis lawyer, Robert Costello.

Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.

The Post also published an image of a federal subpoena, showing the computer was in the FBIs possession, after being turned in by the computer repair shop owner, who has now been publicly identified as John Paul Mac Isaac.

Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her atejmorris@breitbart.comor follow heronTwitter.

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Poll: Majority of Americans Say Big Tech Censorship of Hunter Laptop …

Posted: at 6:48 am

Over half of Americans believe media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story constitutes election interference, a new survey finds.

The survey from the Media Research Center found 49 percent of respondents said it was inappropriate for social media sites to suppress an October 2020 New York Post report that showed Hunter promised Ukrainian business partners access to his father. Twitter suspended the Posts account following publication and blocked users from sharing the link. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the blackout constituted election interference.

Big tech has come under fire over the past year for censoring posts on hot-button issues. Facebook has regularly removed or suppressed content that suggests COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab. The platform also removed posts from a Gold Star mother critical of Biden's handling of the death of her son. Twitter this month suspended the account of Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) after he referred to a transgender Biden official as a man.

The Media Research Center survey found that the ban on the Hunter Biden story also shaped voters' perceptions of Joe Biden. Almost 30 percent of respondents said they would have been less likely to vote for Biden if they had been aware of evidence Biden lied about "knowledge of his son Hunter's overseas business dealings."

When the story first broke, media outlets labeled it Russian disinformation, even though there was no evidence that Russian agents were behind the story or that the emails had been falsified. The survey found that line has stuck with many voters, with 30 percent still saying the story was Russian disinformation.

Dan Gainor, a vice president at the Media Research Center, said the survey showed "people are finally catching on to how much we're getting manipulated by big tech." He framed the survey results as a reflection of widespread concerns about self-rule, asking the Washington Free Beacon, "How can democratically elected countries survive if big tech decides it wants to pick who wins the election?"

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Jonathan Turley Blisters Democrats Over Twitter Files as ‘Indictment of …

Posted: at 6:48 am

Jonathan Turley is not only a renowned George Washington University law professor, legal scholar, and Fox News contributor; he has called himself a Democrat whos willing to speak truth to power, and as a result, regularly blasts the Democrat Party and liberal media now over the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Turley dropped by Fridays episode of Fox Newss Hannity to discuss the ongoing Twitter Files dumps with an intelligent-as-usual take on the Twitter 1.0 internal documents, telling host Sean Hannity that Congressional Democrats have refused to pursue censorship allegations against Twitter for years:

These files are not just an indictment of the FBI, theyre an indictment of Congress. Congress has shown a steadfast refusal to dig into these censorship allegations, many of us have been writing about this for years. The Democratic members have refused to pursue this, and in fact, Democratic members have pushed social media companies to expand censorship.

The good professor then analyze the Democrats telling response to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorseys apology for the social media companys part in the Hunter Biden story:

In the very hearing where Jack Dorsey apologized for the Hunter Biden laptop debacle, the immediate reaction of Democratic senators [was] to tell him, dont backslide on us, we want more censorship. Well, now, we have, not just censorship, we have blacklisting, we have these shadowbans. All of that is now open to the public.

And so, in some ways, Musk has forced people to choose sides. And I think that some of the anger that you see in the media borders on self-loathing. I mean, theyre having now to embrace not just being censorship apologists, but blacklisting and shadowbanning and also lying, because thats what weve seen for the last three years.

Thats a lot to take on yourself and still claim that youre a journalist or you believe in free speech, Turley said of the media.

Both the Democrat Party and the liberal media sock puppets are between a rock and a hard place as a result of Elon Musks return of free speech to Twitter. The Democrats and mainstream media lapdogs vociferously deny their support of censorship out of one side of their face, yet histrionically almost condemn Musk to eternal hell for lifting multiple suspensions of high-profile conservative Twitter accounts out of the other side.

Meanwhile, Musk gleefully continues to troll the crap out of the whole lot.

Elon Musk & Neuralink to start human trials of his computer chip brain …

Posted: at 6:37 am

Elon Musk has said this week that his company Neuralink will begin human trials of their brain chip within the next six months.

The implant reportedly has the ability to fully restore a blind persons vision, even those born completely without sight, as well as restoring body functionality, including movement and verbal communication.

Musk, who plans to get the implant himself, said, We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human.

The progress at first, particularly as it applies to humans, will seem perhaps agonisingly slow, but we are doing all of the things to bring it to scale in parallel. So, in theory, progress should be exponential.

Musk is still waiting for permission from the FDA to sell the product, but has said that paperwork has been submitted.

The interface has already been testing on animals, but as Neuralink move into human experiments, the brain chip takes another step forward to becoming reality.

[Image via Shutterstock]

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Transhuman Space – Wikipedia

Posted: at 6:37 am

Transhumanist tabletop role-playing game

Transhuman Space (THS) is a role-playing game by David Pulver, published by Steve Jackson Games as part of the "Powered by GURPS" (Generic Universal Role-Playing System) line. Set in the year 2100, humanity has begun to colonize the Solar System. The pursuit of transhumanism is now in full swing, as more and more people reach fully posthuman states.

Transhuman Space was one of the first role-playing games to tackle postcyberpunk and transhumanist themes.[citation needed] In 2002, the Transhuman Space adventure "Orbital Decay" received an Origins Award nomination for Best Role-Playing Game Adventure. Transhuman Space won the 2003 Grog d'Or Award for Best Role-playing Game, Game Line or RPG Setting.

The game assumes that no cataclysm natural or human-induced swept Earth in the 21st century. Instead, constant developments in information technology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and nuclear physics generally improved condition of the average human life. Plagues of the 20th century (like cancer or AIDS) have been suppressed, the ozone layer is being restored and Earth's ecosystems are recovering (although thermal emission by fusion power plants poses an environmental threatalbeit a much lesser one than previous sources of energy). Thanks to modern medicine humans live biblical timespans surrounded by various artificially intelligent helper applications and robots (cybershells), sensory experience broadcasts (future TV) and cyberspace telepresence. Thanks to cheap and clean fusion energy humanity has power to fuel all these wonders, restore and transform its home planet and finally settle on other heavenly bodies.

Human genetic engineering has advanced to the point that anyonesingle individuals, same-sex couples, groups of three or morecan reproduce. The embryos can be allowed to be developed naturally, or they can undergo three levels of tinkering: 1. Genefixing, which corrects defects; 2. Upgrades, which boost natural abilities (Ishtar Upgrades are slightly more attractive than usual, Metanoia Upgrades are more intelligent, etc.); and... 3. Full transition to parahuman status (Nyx Parahumans only need a few hours of sleep per week, Aquamorphs can live underwater, etc.) Another type of human genetic engineering, far more controversial, is the creation of bioroids, fully sentient slave races.

People can "upload" by recording the simulation of their brains on computer disks. The emulated individual then becomes a ghost, an infomorph very easily confused with "sapient artificial intelligence". However, this technology has several problems as the solely available "brainpeeling" technique is fatal to the original biological lifeform being simulated, has a significant failure rate and the philosophical questions regarding personal identity remain equivocal. Any infomorph, regardless of its origin, can be plugged into a "cybershell" (robotic or cybernetic body), or a biological body, or "bioshell". Or, the individual can illegally make multiple "xoxes", or copies of themselves, and scatter them throughout the system, exponentially increasing the odds that at least one of them will live for centuries more, if not forever.

This is also a time of space colonization. First, humanity (specifically China, followed by the United States and others) colonized Mars in a fashion resembling that outlined in the Mars Direct project. The Moon, Lagrangian points, inner planets and asteroids soon followed. In the late 21st century even some of Saturn's moons have been settled as a base for that planet's Helium-3 scooping operations.

Transhuman Space's setting is neither utopia nor dystopia, however: several problems have arisen from these otherwise beneficial developments. The generation gap has become a chasm as lifespans increase. No longer do the elite fear death, and no longer can the young hope to replace them. While it seemed that outworld colonies would offer accommodation and work for those young ones, they are being replaced by genetically tailored bioroids and AI-powered cybershells. The concept of humanity is no longer clear in a world where even some animals speak of their rights and the dead haunt both cyberspace and reality (in form of infomorph-controlled bioshells or cybershells).

And the wonders of high science are not universally shared some countries merely struggle with informatization while others suffer from nanoplagues, defective drugs, implants and software tested on their populace. In some poor countries high-tech tyrants oppress their backward people. And in outer space all sort of modern crime thrives, barely suppressed by military forces.

After the initial set of GURPS books that were published using the GURPS Lite, later publications such as Transhuman Space by David Pulver were labelled simply "Powered by GURPS" without using the name "GURPS" in the book title.[1] Transhuman Space received a significant amount of supporting publications, and was the largest original background setting that Steve Jackson Games produced in 15 years.[1] Shannon Appelcline noted that by its inclusion of posthuman characters, the book began to show the limits of the GURPS system as it was, which is something that Pulver would address soon thereafter.[1]

Steve Jackson Games has not updated the core book (GURPS Transhuman Space) to 4th edition, although the supplement Transhuman Space: Changing Times provides a path for migrating to 4th edition. It has produced several 4th edition supplements for the setting: Transhuman Space: Bioroid Bazaar, Transhuman Space: Cities on the Edge, Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100, Transhuman Space: Personnel Files 2-5, Transhuman Space: Shell-Tech, GURPS Spaceships 8: Transhuman Spacecraft, Transhuman Space: Transhuman Mysteries, and Transhuman Space: Wings of the Rising Sun.

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Category Archives: Transhuman News

Eliezer Yudkowsky – Wikipedia

Gene Therapy: Genes As Medicine | Pfizer

Colonization of Europa – Wikipedia

American Colonization Society | abolitionist organization

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Transhuman Space – Wikipedia

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