Category Archives: Transhuman News

Despite these reports, the joint statement released by the White House after the visit lauded Vietnam for its "ongoing efforts to refine its legal system to better protect and promote human rights for everyone." That is laughable; Vietnam has done just the opposite. While the Vietnam National Assembly made some concessions to human rights in the 2015 criminal procedure code, its revisions to the penal code that same year further curtailed free expression. Calls from citizens and civil society to repeal or amend these provisions have fallen on deaf ears, and just this week the National Assembly passed another iteration of the penal code that is even more draconian. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration negotiated with Vietnam and other nations, would have provided an incentive to the communist regime to ease its repression. But Trump jettisoned that accord, and in failing to publicly raise these issues in May he missed another opportunity.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have raised concerns about Vietnam's human rights abuses, showing that the administration's heedlessness does not represent American values. The State Department should take note and speak out in support of the activists who have championed democracy at grave personal risk.

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Washington Post Editorial: A glaring lapse on human rights - Salt Lake Tribune

Chinas jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo has been granted medical parole after being diagnosed with liver cancer, according to the Liaoning Prison Administration Bureau.

According to the brief statement on the authoritys website, Liu was diagnosed with liver cancer recently and he was approved to be treated at the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang. A team of eight renowned Chinese cancer experts has been assigned to treat him, and he was receiving treatment, the prison authority added.

The Nobel laureates brother Liu Xiaoxuan said earlier that Liu was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer on May 23, Lius lawyer, Mo Shaoping, confirmed to the South China Morning Post. The duration of the medical parole was not immediately clear.

Liu, who was jailed over his calls for greater democracy in China, did not plan to seek treatment overseas, Mo said.

Shang Baojun, another lawyer who represented Liu Xiaobo, 61, cited family members as saying he looked seriously ill.

The revelation, which comes just a week after Chinas annual human rights dialogue with the European Union, was a shock to many of Lius long-time friends, who said they had not heard of his health problems over the years.

Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, wrote in an emailed statement to the Post that China should give Liu full freedom.

We are happy Mr Liu has been released, but sad that the circumstances are his failing health. We expect he will be granted full freedom, including the right to travel abroad, Reiss-Andersen wrote. Liu should never have been imprisoned for exercising his right of freedom of speech.

Liu was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for inciting subversion of state power after he helped write a petition known as Charter 08 calling for sweeping political reforms in China.

The arrangement came after his request to be treated outside of prison was approved, the lawyer said. Repeated calls to the No 1 Hospital of the China Medical University in Shenyang went unanswered.

His wife, Liu Xia, remained under house arrest in Beijing and could not be reached for comment. The apartment compound where she lived was under surveillance, with security guards barring journalists entry last night.

Asked about Lius status at a daily press conference, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters: I do not understand the situation you mentioned.

A year after he was sent to prison, Liu was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.

Earlier on in his life, Liu was an activist involved in the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which resulted in a bloody crackdown.

Chinese dissident voices went to social networking sites Wechat and Twitter to call for support of Liu.

He was an energetic person before he went to jail. Seven years later, who could have imagined he would be battling an incurable illness? dissident journalist Gao Yu, herself granted medical parole after being jailed for leaking state secrets, told the Post.

Exiled Tiananmen student leaders Wuer Kaixi and Wang Dan, issuing a joint statement, said: We are shocked and devastated to learn that [Liu] has been suffering from cancer in Chinas brutal prison environment.

We firmly demand immediate restoration of his normal contact with the outside world.

Amnesty International also called for Liu to be unconditionally released. Sophie Richardson, China director of Human Rights Watch, suggested the Nobel Prize Committee head to Shenyang immediately.

The Chinese authorities should immediately ensure that Liu Xiaobo receives adequate medical care, and that all he and all other imprisoned for exercising their human rights are immediately and unconditionally released, Amnesty International said in a statement following news of Lius parole.

The dissident was put behind bars in 2009 for inciting subversion of state power, after he participated in the Charter 08 manifesto.

He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.

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Authorities confirm Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo in hospital - South China Morning Post

No, robots won't take your job -- just part of it

With robots vacuuming our floors, answering our phones, driving our cars, and detecting our cancers, you would hope that at least one of the most basic and essential of human activities that stopped us from aimlessly wandering in search of food -- that which gave birth to great civilizations along the banks of mighty rivers -- would be immune from their predations.

Yet, over the last month, a startup named Abundant Robotics has shot into prominence for doing just that: Ensuring that humanity is one step closer to seeing machines rule the world of farming.

In early May, it attracted $10 million in new investment led by Google's investment arm largely because its new, still-evolving robot is one step closer to taking over a $4 billion industry in the US that currently relies on humans to pick apples. In the fall of this year, these robots will apparently further perfect their trade in the state of Washington and become one step closer to commercialization.

According to its CEO Dan Steere, Abundant's apple-picking bots can detect apples by and large as accurately as humans can, and they're able to extract them from trees with an uncanny gentle precision.

Having a machine pick an apple out of a tree may not seem like such a big deal, but it is in fact supremely difficult to do. Bruise the fruit or drop it, and it instantly becomes destined for the trash heap and bleeds the company. Which is why the ability to detect an apple and then handle it like a newborn infant has only become recently possible because of the relatively new leaps in processing power, vision algorithms, and image processing.

Can these machines, though, be ultimately good for a human society already riddled with unemployment and vanishing jobs? Curiously, in California, a state that accounts for 60 percent of the US's fresh produce, but which has seen its labour force decline by 60 percent, the answer is a resounding "Yes." Tack on President Donald Trump's efforts to curtail immigration, and the scenario gets more dire (and the answer gets more emphatic), especially for the apple industry, which relies on the roughly 40,000 foreign work force that travels to the US during apple season.

Plus, when you consider that around 70 percent of the American population was involved in farming in the mid 1800s compared to 2 percent today, the increasing mechanization of this age-old occupation shouldn't come as such a big surprise. After all, many parts of the food chain are already comfortably mechanized. Cows regularly queue up to robotic milking machines to milk themselves. And where the work is slow and dangerous, such as spraying chemicals to kill weeds that infiltrate lettuce farms, low-cost bots have become an ideal substitute for humans with pesticide-filled backpacks.

Apparently, wine bots already navigate vineyards pruning vines, while others are in the works to monitor crops remotely for moisture, disease, and growth. Efforts are underway to grow cereal crops all the way from planting to harvesting without a human hand involved in the process.

As for apples, a major supplier to Tesco has apparently sunk close to $7 million into packing technology that has allowed it to increase the scope of its operations without adding human bodies, allowing 20 bags to be packed in a minute versus the previous rate of three -- a staggering increase in productivity, thanks to robots that bag the fruits and load them onto pallets. Of course, not all produce -- strawberries is one example -- can be brought under the dominion of machines, and doing so would require significant adaptation of both crops and bots to eliminate human intervention.

Ultimately, how quickly bots take over farming depends on makers of agricultural machinery --how keen are they to experiment and sink money into alternative, constantly evolving ways of harnessing machines to do their bidding? The answer apparently is not so much. Doing so would not just mean significant expenditure. It would also endanger their current revenue stream provided for by existing machines, which would be tantamount to biting the hand that feeds it.

Nevertheless, the fact that a burgeoning human population will require 50 percent more food by 2050 amidst a growing shortage of labour and severe climate change means that this is just the beginning of the march of machines onto your favourite cabbage patch.

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Could apple-picking robots signal the end of a human hand in agriculture? - ZDNet