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Category Archives: Transhuman News

The Longevity Sector: Finding The Fountain Of Youth – The Market Mogul

Posted: March 29, 2017 at 10:42 am

The litany of myths, legends and Hollywood movies involving arcane elixirs or mysterious fountains of immortality are a testament to mankinds perpetual fascination with prolonged life. However, over the weekend, Jim Mellon the British entrepreneur and investor revealed that he is sanguine about the emergence of a fast-growing longevity sector.

In 1900, the world average life expectancy was 31, and has since more than doubled to around 72. However, these figures should not be overstated; in 1900, no more than in 2017, 31 was no considered old. Instead, dramatic reductions in infant mortality and immunisation against particularly devastating diseases have meant that, on average, people live longer. It is fallacious to argue that the maximum attainable age has significantly increased, let alone doubled. Advances in medicine have, quite simply, reduced ones chances of dying before reaching old age.

Nevertheless, as a consequence of being able to effectively treat illnesses that cause premature death, humanity is left largely to tackle diseases that disproportionately afflict the elderly: cancer, heart attacks, and strokes. Though an outright cure has not yet been developed, great strides have even been made in HIV/AIDS treatment, meaning it is no longer the death sentence of years gone by.

Merely eradicating all fatal diseases would, however, leave humans living prolonged lives in frail, withering bodies hardly the stuff of myth and legend. Accordingly, the would-be longevity sector aims not to eradicate the aforementioned diseases, but instead implement changes to the human body at the cellular level.

As usual, it is Silicon Valley that is paving the way in cellular longevity research. Among the various scientists and venture capitalists seeking to advance the maximum human lifespan is 22-year-old Laura Deming, who believes the longevity could be a two-hundred-billion-dollar-plus market.

Born in New Zealand, Deming joined Professor Cynthia Kenyons lab at the University of California, San Francisco aged just 12, where she assisted in successfully extending the lifespan of a worm by a factor of ten. In 2011, Deming accepted the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship and dropped out of MIT in order to devote her polymathic abilities towards setting up her own immortality-focused venture capital fund, which she aptly named The Longevity Fund.

Today, Deming and others are fervent in the belief that human biological immortality is around the proverbial corner. As distinct from the traditional concept of immortality infinite life biological immortality is when the chances of an organism dying donot increase with its age. Indeed, some organisms such as the hydra are widely believed to be biologically immortal because they do not senesce their cells do not stop dividing as they age.

It is not only Silicon Valley that is chasing immortality but researchers in Oxford are also working on revealing the atomic structure of individual cells so that the causes of cellular senescence can be accurately pinpointed.

Laymen will, naturally, seek to discredit the possibility of human immortality ever transcending fiction and becoming a reality. However, as there always is in science, an enormous gulf exists between what the layman is even vaguely aware of, and what is being developed and discovered in various laboratories around the world.

Perhaps along with the Internet of things, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, widespread use of renewable power, and the seemingly endless list of other rapidly-advancing technologies human longevity will also play a part in defining tomorrows world.

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The Longevity Sector: Finding The Fountain Of Youth - The Market Mogul

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Michael Collins, midnight writer – Irish Times

Posted: at 10:42 am

First, a declaration of interest. I came to Michael Collins ninth book, Midnight in a Perfect Life, with a pre-conceived idea, namely that, on the strength of his previous eight, he is one of the finest living Irish writers.

Yet, despite his work winning several awards, and being shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and International Dublin Literary Award, he is relatively unknown, and when I recommend him to people, their instinctive reaction is, you dont mean...? as you watch them try to reimagine the War of Independence hero as a plotter of fiction, not revolution.

The author is, according to family lore, a relative of the patriot, though more distant, he realises now, than he imagined when growing up in Co Limerick, where he was born in 1964. If someone said to me who is my model, says Collins, it is him, a hardcore political figure who took people down, murdered, was politically expedient, but also an absolute pragmatist, who negotiated what he could get, who decided you do things in stages.

Collins left for the United States on an athletics scholarship to University of Notre Dame. He never went home, completing a PhD in Chicago, where he narrowly survived a brutal mugging in which he was stabbed repeatedly with what he recalls as a Crocodile Dundee-type knife.

Unable to afford a move away from the borders of the ghetto where he lived, he started running again. A few months after being stabbed, he ran the Chicago Marathon and, on pure adrenaline, finished in 28th place. Collins still runs. Boy, does he run. In 2006, his Fire and Ice Challenge saw him run marathons in both the Sahara and at the North Pole in the space of six weeks. This year, he hopes to represent Ireland again in the world 100km championships in Gibraltar.

A short career as a Microsoft engineer in Seattle followed his studies, before the success of his third novel, The Keepers of Truth, written longhand after hours at work like a Neanderthal aboard a space ship, secured him an American publisher and a couple of movie deals, encouraging him to pursue his true vocation, writing politically-motivated thrillers, sugaring his sociological philosophising with suspense, about the economically devastated rust belt of America, the workers and their families churned up and spat out by Reaganomics, the American dream turned sour.

It seemed the dismantling of America and the death of industrialisation was for each American a personal guilt trip and not an occasion for workers to band together in unions to try and preserve their jobs... he muses on his website. The notion of taking responsibility for your own economic and spiritual salvation was the single most important thing I learned about how America works.

The US edition of his brilliant last novel, The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton, was renamed Death of a Writer, and his new book, Midnight in a Perfect Life, could easily share that title, for it is the story of Karl, facing the frailty of forty, a troubled author forlornly chasing literary immortality with his dubious Opus while in truth he is failing even to make ends meet as a hack and a ghost writer. Meanwhile, his wife wants biological immortality in the form of a child. Karl, whose father killed himself after apparently murdering his mistress, reflects: trying to get pregnant seemed to me about as absurd as trying to get polio.

Karl, who has already secretly remortgaged their home to pay for his mothers nursing home costs, now juggles credit card applications to pay for Loris fertility treatment, while his writing leads him down dangerous alleys, first a magazine assignment with the beautiful Marina, a mysterious Russian performance artist, and then a challenge from Fennimore, the crime writer he ghosts for, to find him the perfect real-life victim, implying that his next work could be a snuff novel (another echo of Collins last work).

The subject matter is dark, but the writing glitters memorably, and if the plotting sometimes feels underdone, this book of ideas is thought-provoking like few others, tackling modern notions of sexuality, IVF as a scam on career women in their forties, the culture of easy credit, and the place of fiction in the free world.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall, wrote the critic Cyril Connolly, so how does Collins combine writing with being a father, not to mention the long-distance running?

It has its challenges, he admits. I have four children under the age of eight and one had a brain cyst. The priority has to go towards the children. With kids the intense concentration that you need for art is obviously compromised, I dont mind that. I used to write from 11 at night to 4am, now its compressed to 1am or 2am.

He has always combined writing with a fulltime job, making notes during the day, writing them up at night. Ive understood that the mania of what youre trying to express can draw you away from human contact. When you live within your mind, when your mind is your office, that can become overbearing and lead to insanity.

Today he teaches at a community college in the small town where he lives 30 miles away from Notre Dame. This is the territory where his books are set, which look at the devastation of poverty, the dignity of the individuals who are oppressed by economic circumstances. In terms of writing political novels about disenfranchised groups of people this is a kind of haunt for me.

The way Collins describes an upmarket apartment in the language not of an estate agent but an existentialist philosopher reminds me of Eoin McNamee, another author of big ideas and dark deeds.

He is around the same age as me, theres a strain of writers who are not so much plot-oriented as politically oriented or philosophically oriented. Plot is a secondary concern, says Collins, referencing the grinding poverty of 1970s Limerick, which formed his social consciousness and conscience, the era of Boomtown Rats singing I Dont Like Mondays, not love songs, he says.

Karl is a dark character but Collins defends him against critics charges that he is racist or misogynistic. I feel sad for him but hes honest about the male preening, women aggressively in the workplace, the economic joke of credit applications, private enterprise raping people, he recognises the endgame for society, he is a soothsayer, a marginalised figure, maddened. He lives in the greatest democracy in the world where you can say anything but no one wants to listen.

I constantly react against modernism in terms of taking away your psychological dignity, you cant say what you want to say because everything is politically incorrect, its a minefield to speak your mind. In physical terms, America is a country of obese people and cars.

In a western world gone mentally lazy and physically flabby, Collins bucks the trend, running like mad, thinking like crazy.

Going for a run, doing something physical, with the endorphins, if there are issues on your mind, it percolates, things crystallise. I go for a run for 20 miles and this is when I really think.

For me as an artist it has always been about truth. Early on I landed on the title The Keepers of Truth, and this book is about uncovering truth, everything looks one way, Lori looks like shes pregnant but shes wearing a pregnancy belly, a man looks like a woman but he has a penis. In Limerick, he says, fathers he knew in one sphere by day were involved in the IRA at night.

He has been accused of being a highbrow writer slumming it as a crime writer, another casual insult to a genre that often beats the literary genre at its own game. How true is he to his true self as a writer? Collins admits that when no one would publish Emerald Underground in America, despite its success in Europe, he decided he wouldnt let economic reality stop him writing so to gain a readership, to gain the eye of an editor who thinks it might sell, I consciously decided to do a dismemberment novel, a philosophical novel where you throw in the crime element of a murder ... but the essential nature of closure where things are solved didnt settle with me.

He describes as anathema the idea of introducing a cop figure who would clear everything up, just as he didnt want to write a novel that an eighth-grader could understand, because there is no neat or happy ending, he believes, in a world and economy that is falling apart in an expanding universe. Closure is a nineteenth-century conceit, he says, and that he is why he is annoyed that the title he gave his novel was changed.

I understand Im going to get hammered, so you need a title to condition people to see what youre trying to do with the book. The original title, Of Uncertain Significance, was a harrowing term I first heard from doctors in describing my daughters brain cyst. The doctors could not determine if it was the underlying cause or not.

In writing the novel, in reviewing my time at Microsoft and the general aimlessness of modernity and the decentralised nature of information, I think the prevailing theme for the book firmly settled on the idea of life as Of Uncertain Significance.

I think a novel has to have an underlying philosophical intent. I personally adhere to the prevailing view of the universe as described by modern mathematics that there is no essential closure or certainty in the universe. This sense of chaos or entropy has been firmly established for decades in the mathematical realm and forms the basis of how the universe is perceived and studied.

What is disheartening for me as a writer, and what I think is a pitfall of our craft, is how confined we are intellectually and structurally by our ordinary audience, where there is limited tolerance for intellectual deviation from the time-honoured tradition of narrative as having a beginning, middle and end. The standard by which popular fiction is judged falls on notions of completeness and satisfaction, toward the comfort of the known and easily understood.

If I could say Midnight is politically prophetic, it would be in anticipating and railing against the financial madness of the last decade, which is now under postmortem as if it can be fixed or really understood. (My question is, who didnt know it was a scam all along?) A central anxiety Karl faces throughout the book is the need for money. We see him surviving on the false economy of credit card applications that magically transform into credit, where the money is then consumed by the vast expense of caring for his mother.

Was Karl the only one anxiety-ridden about the lack of economic underpinning these last years? Is he not a soothsayer for the modern economic condition? As the novel begins, the need to pay for fertility treatments consumes Karl. What most galls him is this sudden supposed urgent need for women to reclaim their role as nurturer after being bullied into a rabid feminism that eschewed all things maternal. For Karl, he sees the scam for what it is another societal hoodwink of elective medicine redefining what is woman? for the sheer sake of bilking independent, established women of means.

I fear, much of modern fiction is a last refuge for fools. As a writer I try to push against the crushing ordinariness of this fiction, and at least challenge convention. Alas, with a few more damning reviews, I might be silenced... but Ill go down swinging. Midnight in a Perfect Life was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2010. This article was first published in The Irish Post. Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times

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Michael Collins, midnight writer - Irish Times

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Mice have been infesting homes ever since humans started building them – Washington Post

Posted: at 10:41 am

Every fall, Fiona Marshall's home is besieged by legions of mice.

They drive me crazy ... trying to colonize our pantry, said Marshall, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

It would be easy to think of the furry little creatures as invaders. But Marshall knows that they are here only because of us. In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marshall and her colleagues trace house mice to their origins 15,000 years ago, when they evolved alongside the first humans who built semi-permanenthomes.

This is a story about mice, and mice and humans have a really interesting history together, she said. But even more broadly ... it tells us about humans and our influenceon our environmentand our world.

According to Marshall, house mice are an important example of animal-human commensalism a relationship in which an animal benefits from humans without affecting them. At the end of the Ice Age, an ancient people called the Natufians settled in the Levant, where they builtthe world's first semi-permanent stone dwellings. Shortly after, mice evolved to take advantage of that new habitat. The emerging species,Mus musculus domesticus, benefitedfrom the scraps of food and protection from predators that human homes provided.

Without meaning to, humans had created a new ecological niche and nature swiftly filled it. Evolution hates a void.

[Neanderthal microbes reveal surprises about what they ate and whom they kissed]

It's one of the earliest cases of animals evolving to take advantage of environments changed by humans,Marshallsaid. And it's surprising becauseit happened before widespread agriculture, the event that scientists traditionally associate with the origins of domestication.

It shows that, even 15,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers were exerting enough influence on their environment to transform an animal species, Marshall said.

Marshall and lead author LiorWeissbrod, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Haifa in Israel, are bothzooarcheologists. We'repeople who look at animal bones in order to be able to understand the human past in different ways, Marshall said.

Inspired by the work of Israeli scientist Eitan Tchernov, who arguedthat the presence of certain animal companions could be used to understandancient humans' lifestyles, Weissbrod set about examining 200,000 yearsof mouse fossils from the Levant. At the end of the Ice Age, he found, two closely related species of mouse were present: Mus macedonicus andMus musculus domesticus. The formerhasshort tails (which are harder for predators to latch onto) and lives in groves and shrub lands; the latter has a long tailand is adapted to live in human homes.

The relative dominance of each species sharply reflected the activity of the Levant's human population at the time. Before the rise of the Natufian culture, all the fossils Weissbrod found were M.macedonicus.Then, in the early Natufian period, the domesticus type took over. Later on, when archaeological records indicate the climate got drier and Natufians were forced to abandon their stone dwellings, macedonicus was resurgent. But as humans settled down, domesticus became dominant once more.

Archaeologists don't know how committed the Natufians were to the settled lifestyle. They were not farmers, so they probably had to travel at least part of the year in pursuit of food. Marshall said that some researchers believe that the Natufians' stone dwellings were like summer homes, utilized only a few months out of the year.

Butit appeared thatthese hunter-gatherers stayed put long enough to have an effect on the mouse communities nearby.

[Ancient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians. Their bones tell a different story.]

It created a household ecology or villageecology, she said. That was a new world for a mouse to live in. ...It changes the food availability, the predatory pressures, everything about the environment.

Marshall and Weissbrod thought thatNatufian-mouse scenario could be a model for othercommensal relationships. But they wanted to test whether mouse bodies really do evolve in response to human migration. So Weissbrod looked to a modern seminomadic community, the Masai people of Kenya.

In times when this pastoralist community moved a lot, its rodentcompanions were mainly the short-tailed Acomys wilsoni the African counterpart of the Levant's Mus macedonicus. But if the tribe settled for more than a month or so, the demographics would shift, and the long-tailed, more commensal species Acomys ignitus dominated. This finding seemed to confirm Marshall and Weissbrod's theories about mobility and mouse evolution.

Living in one place was a really important factor affecting the beginnings of domestication, Marshall said, and it happened earlier than we thought.

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NASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 years

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Mice have been infesting homes ever since humans started building them - Washington Post

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Human or not? Mysterious figure caught on camera in Aceh sparks … – Jakarta Post

Posted: at 10:41 am

A Banda Aceh-based motor trail community was touring inside a local forest in Indonesias westernmost province when the rider in the lead suddenly fell off his bike due to something on the trail in front of him.

He was shocked by the appearance of a human-like figure suddenly coming out from the woods carrying a wooden stick.

In the video, the mysterious figure looked like a human being but shorter in size, tribunnews.com reported.

The bald-topless figure stopped for a while before running off really fast, leaving the group behind. Other riders tried to chase it, while the camera stayed on, but alas, the figure ran into the shrub and disappeared into the middle of the forest.

The video, uploaded by Youtube account Fredography on March 22, has gone viral and garnered more than 1 million viewers as of Sunday evening.

Many people left comments on the video, sharing theories about the mysterious figure.

There were some who suspected the figure to be a member of the Mante tribe, an ethnic group that is one of Acehs urban legends told and passed down the generations about the origins of modern-day Aceh people. However, there has not been any scientific expeditions to establish the presence of the tribe.

Local online news websites also picked up the story sparking online debates and discussion over the mysterious sighting.

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Human or not? Mysterious figure caught on camera in Aceh sparks ... - Jakarta Post

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Trump can send a human rights message to Egypt’s leader – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Posted: at 10:41 am

Last month, the Post-Gazette website carried a New York Times story acknowledging the Egyptian regimes abysmal human rights record, while also predicting increased U.S. military cooperation with that country. In light of that article, President Donald Trumps upcoming meeting with Egypts coup-installed president, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, poses an important question: Will the U.S. attempt to combat terrorism using blind, brute force or through a principled embrace of core American values?

When the two leaders meet April 3, Mr. Trump can do as expected: Double down on military support for a widely discredited authoritarian regime. But theres another opportunity: Take a clear, strong stand against the el-Sissi administrations well-documented human and civil rights abuses by withholding funding for its military.

By taking that unexpectedly principled step, the U.S. will be combating terror in two ways. First, well achieve a major win in the war of ideas, by showing moderate Muslims across the world that yes, well support core American values free press, freedom of assembly and the right to fair trial on behalf of ordinary Egyptian Muslims.

At the same time, well be saying no to the Egyptian governments own version of state-supported terror being applied to its own citizens.

Will Mr. Trump stand up for core American values enshrined in our Bill of Rights on the world stage? Will he say no to Egypts internal version of state-supported terror?

The world will be watching.

RICHARD ST. JOHN Greenfield

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Trump can send a human rights message to Egypt's leader - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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The UN Is Currently Meeting To Negotiate A Complete, Global Ban on Nuclear Weapons – Futurism

Posted: at 10:41 am

Today, delegates from most of the United Nations member states are gathering in New York to negotiate a nuclear weapons ban.More than 2,500 scientists from 70 countries have signed an open letter in support of the nuclear disarmament negotiations. If successful, their words could urge the UN to stigmatize nuclear weapons like biological and chemical weapons, with the ultimate goal being to create a world free of these weapons of mass destruction.

Neuroscience professor and Nobel Laureate, Edvard Moser, believes nuclear weapons represent one of the biggest threats to our civilization:

Other notable scientists in support of the ban are not lacking. The list includes 28 Nobel Laureatessuch as Peter Ware Higgsand Leon N. Cooper;former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William J. Perry; and CERN physicists, such as Jack Steinberger. The letter will be deliveredin the UN General Assembly Hall to Her Excellency Ms. Elayne Whyte Gmez from Costa Rica, who will preside over the negotiations.

The letter, presented by the Future of Life Institute, acknowledges that scientists may have beenthe ones who invented nuclear weapons, but that it is up to the people living today to dictate how this technology should be usedor rather, should never be used. For example, nuclear-induced winter could trigger a global mini ice age, which could lead toa complete collapse of the global food system and kill most of the people on Earth.

And thats just one potential outcome.

Ultimately, such a resultwould occur even if the nuclear war involved only a small fraction of the roughly 14,000 nuclear weapons that todays nuclear powers control.

In total, nine countries (that we know of) possess nuclear weapons: The U.S., Russia, the U.K., France, China, Israel, India, North Korea, and Pakistan. The first five are the only countries allowed to have these weapons, according to the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement that nations signed saying they would not release nuclear weapons, or in any way help othersacquire or build them. Furthermore, thecountries promised, to move toward a gradual reduction of their arsenals of nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of complete nuclear disarmament.

The latter four nations (Israel, India, North Korea, and Pakistan) havent yet signed the treaty.

Unfortunately, the United States and a number of other nations that actually have nuclear weapons boycotted the talks, saying that the time was not right and that a ban would be ineffective.Ambassador Nikki R. Haley, from the United States, told reporters outside the General Assembly that the ideals are currently just a utopian dream: There is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons, but we have to be realistic. Is there anyone who thinks that North Korea would ban nuclear weapons?

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the state supported nuclear talks, in general, We are ready to discuss the possible further gradual reduction of nuclear capabilities. However, he said that Russia was not in support of talks of this severity or gravity. We are ready to discuss this issue proceeding from the growing urgency of making this process multilateral, he noted, adding the criticism that the discussion was too far-reaching: Efforts to coerce nuclear powers to abandon nuclear weapons have intensified significantly recently. It is absolutely clear that the time has not yet come for that,

That said, the talksare supported by 120 nations.

In 1939,just after World War II broke out, physicist Albert Einstein and his colleague Leo Szilard described a bomb of unprecedented power that could be made using nuclear fission. The two men urged the U.S. government to race to build this so-called atomic bomb before Germany could.

Six years later, President Harry S. Truman would order atomic bombs to be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just five years after that, 54 percent of the original population had died from the two explosions. Those who survived had to deal with mental and physical trauma including burns, disfiguration, severe scar formations, blood abnormalities, sterility, leukemia, birth defects in children, cataracts, and cancer.

Einstein would later regret his involvementin the creation of the bomb, saying: had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would have never lifted a finger.

But it was too late for Einstein. And our nuclear history didnt end with him. Today, as political tensions rise, the scientists who have signed in support of the ban believe a nuclear war is more likely than one may expect:

There is a steady stream of accidents and false alarms that could trigger all-out war, and relying on never-ending luck is not a sustainable strategy. Many nuclear powers have larger nuclear arsenals than needed for deterrence, yet prioritize making them more lethal over reducing them and the risk that they get used.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry even noted, the probability of a nuclear calamity is higher today, I believe, that it was during the cold war.

It is evident that the scientific community, as a whole, feels strongly about the issue at hand, and believes the issue deserves a certain level of urgency. Negotiations are sure to be heated, but, as Norwegian neuroscience professor May-Britt Moser, a 2014 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, says,In a world with increased aggression and decreasing diplomacy the availability nuclear weapons is more dangerous than ever. Politicians are urged to ban nuclear weapons. The world today and future generations depend on that decision.

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The UN Is Currently Meeting To Negotiate A Complete, Global Ban on Nuclear Weapons - Futurism

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Expert Says Tesla Will Make All Other Cars Obsolete – Futurism

Posted: at 10:41 am

In BriefIn a recent interview, an analyst at Morgan Stanley discussedthe future impact of Tesla's Autopilot system on the auto industry.He predicts the company will affect everything from the technologyand economics of vehicles to the safety of driving in general. The Road to aDriverless Future

A car that could drive itself used to be solely the stuff of science fiction. Now, its become a reality thanks to companies like Tesla.

Elon Musks companyis continuously improvingits autonomous driving system,Autopilot, which it describes as an increasingly capable suite of safety and convenience features that make personal transportation safer and more enjoyable.

Since September 2014, when it was first added to every Tesla vehicle, Autopilots hardware and software have been inching closer and closer to Level 5 autonomy,a level that requires zero interaction from a human driver. The systems features, whichnow include Autosteer, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Auto Lane Change, Autopark, and Summon (that one lets you call your Tesla car via a mobile app), are products of Teslas Autopilot software learning from the behavior of human drivers.

The company rolled out enhanced Autopilot features earlier this year, and thehighly anticipated 8.1 software update for its hardware 2 platform is expected to arrived this week. Clearly, Teslas Autopilot is increasingly becoming a more advanced, more capable, and safer alternative to human drivers. So what does that mean for the rest of the auto industry?

In a recent interview onCNBCs Power Lunch,Adam Jonas, the resident Tesla analyst from Morgan Stanley, explained just how much of an impact the autonomous cars of Tesla will have in the near future. One point he made was thatTeslas autonomous cars will lead to a faster rate of technological obsolescence for the other vehicles available today.

Our work on used car value is focused on the technological obsolescence of the 250 million cars on US roads today $2 trillion worth of cars. Teslas cars can get better because they can learn, Jonas said. They put in that equipment so that the vehicle five years from now is much more superhuman and much better than the one that is just learning and watching right now. Our used car thesis is that in a five-year period, we are running scenarios of used car value being off by as much as 50 percent.

Tesla is also changing the economics of electric cars, or, as Jonas put it, the economics of electrification. He explained that, while the electric car market in the United States still has plenty of room for expansion, ridesharing will be a game changer for the tech.

We think the electric cars for private use really are for human driving pleasure for wealthier individuals. Thats why its so important that in the shared model where youre not driving 10,000 miles a year, but 50,000 or 100,000 miles in a fleet operation, then the economics of electrification you can get that payback period under three years, Jonas said. Thats the game changer shared.

Vehicle safety is also a factor, as car accidents in the U.S. surged to 40,000 in 2016. It seems like the only thing progressing faster than the pace of machine learning is the pace human unlearning, Jonas said. Were getting dumber faster than the cars are getting smarter. Teslas quickly advancing self-driving car tech could be the perfect way to stop that trend from leading toany more deaths on the road.

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Elon Musk Just Launched A Company To Merge Your Brain With A Computer – Futurism

Posted: at 10:41 am

In case you missed it, Elon Musk is rather concerned about the fate of humanity, given the extreme advancements being made in artificial intelligence (AI). Ultimately, he fears that ourAI will, one day, overtake us. When this happens, he claims that humans will likely become second class citizens (or slaves, or something even worse).

Now, reports have surfaced which assert that he is backing a brain-computer interface venture that was founded to allow humans to keep up with the advancements made in machines. The interface is intended to work by augmenting that which makes us human: our brains.

The find comes fromThe Wall Street Journal.According to them, the company which is called Neuralink is still in the earliest stages of development. To that end, it has no public presence at all.

What we do know is that its ultimate goal is to create a device (or possibly a series of devices) that can be implanted in the human brain. These will serve a multitude of purposes the final end being to help humans merge with our software and keep pace with artificial intelligences so we dont get left in the dust.

Initially, these enhancements will likely assist in smaller ways, such as helping us improve our memories by creating additional, removable storage components.

Notably, this is not the first that we have heard of Musk working on such a device. Previously, he mentioned a device called the neural lace. He explained how he imagined it would work at the 2016 Code Conference, which you can see below:

Unsurprisingly, Musk isnt the only one worried about AI. In a video posted byBig Think, Michael Vassar, thechief science officer of MetaMed Research,stated that AI will likely kill us all (literally): If greater-than-human artificial general intelligence is invented without due caution, it is all but certain that the human species will be extinct in very short order. Essentially, he is warning that an unchecked AI could eradicate humanity in the future.

Similarly, Stephen Hawking famously stated that AI is one of the biggest threats to humanity: The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldnt compete, and would be superseded.

To that end, Musk isnt the only person working to ensure that humanity can keep up with AI.Braintree founder Bryan Johnson is investing $100 millionto make a neuroprosthesis to unlock the power of the human brain and, ultimately, make our neural code programmable.

Johnson outlinesthe purpose of his work, stating that its all about co-evolution:

Our connection with our new creations of intelligence is limited by screens, keyboards, gestural interfaces, and voice commands constrained input/output modalities. We have very little access to our own brains, limiting our ability to co-evolve with silicon-based machines in powerful ways.

He is working to change this and ensure that we have a seamless interface with our technologies (and our AI).

Johnson is clear that his company, Kernel, will begin by researching the brain and figuring out exactlyhow it works. This research, Johnson states, is the first step in helping humans achieve permanent equality with machines.

Of course, such technologies will do a lot more than justallow humans to interface with machines. Neuroprostheses could alsorepairour cognitive abilities which will allow us to combat neurological diseases such as Alzheimers, ALS, Parkinsons, and other conditions that destroy our brainsand our lives.

This is just the beginning.

Such advancements could allow us to merge with machines, yes, but they can also allow us to literally program our neural code, which would allow us to transform ourselves in ways that we cant even imagine. In short, we couldprogram ourselves into the people that we want to be. As Johnson states, Our biology and genetics have become increasingly programmable; our neural code is next in line.

It sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is based on remarkable scientific work.

In short, the devices under development work by replicating the way that our brain cells communicate with one another.The tech envisioned is based on 15 years of academic research that was funded by the NIH and DARPA. So get ready. Human superintelligence is only a matter of time.

Disclosure: Bryan Johnson is an investor in Futurism; he does not hold a seat on our editorial board or have any editorial review privileges.

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Elon Musk Just Launched A Company To Merge Your Brain With A Computer - Futurism

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Trump’s Treasury Secretary Says Increased Automation Is "Not Even … – Futurism

Posted: at 10:41 am

During his campaign, now-President Donald Trump promised voters he would bring American jobs back from overseas. Now that he is in office, hisadministration has made job creation a central focus of its efforts.

But what if those jobs overseas cant come back to the United States because companies no longer need to hire humans to complete the tasks? How is the Trump administration gearing up to tackle the rise of automation?

Based on recent statements by Trumps TreasurySecretary, Steven Mnuchin, they arent planning to address it all. In a conversation with Axios co-founder Mike Allen, Mnuchin said that increased automation is not even on our radar screen as the problem is 50 to 100 more years away. He continued, saying, Im not worried at all. In fact, Im optimistic.

The administrations claims run counter to the mounting evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are a much more imminent threat to American workers.

Some reports predict that todays technology could automate 51 percent of economic activity. Such a shift has the potential to causeunprecedented levels of unemployment, puttingmillions of people out of work. Its not just blue-collar jobsthat are at risk, either. Another report expects that850,000 public sector jobs could be taken over by automation in the United Kingdom by 2030, a trend likely to carry over into the U.S.

According to Mark Muro of the MIT Technology Review,jobs that went overseas arent going to be coming back to the U.S. Trump can propose policies to make it more beneficial for companies to bring their operations back to the country, but theres nothing to stop them from replacing American workers with machines should the financial implications of doing so continue to become more attractive.

As Muro said, No one should be under the illusion that millions of manufacturing jobs are coming back to America.

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Where Will Space Tech Take Us by 2030? – Futurism – Futurism

Posted: at 10:41 am

Space technologies will one day take us to asteroids, Mars and back to the moon, and the impact of these missions will be felt back on Earth, says George Whitesides, Chief Executive Officer at Virgin Galactic and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Space Technologies. In this interview, he explains how the latest developments in space technologies will help bring about revolutions in wifi access, travel and beyond.

We are at an exciting moment. What we see are several converging trends that will change how we approach space technologies, at a rate of innovation that we havent seen in a long time.Click to View Full Infographic

The power of miniaturization, for example, is having a huge impact on satellites. Its becoming easier to put more capabilities into smaller packages. Constellations of small satellites are allowing for both new capabilities as well as existing capabilities at much lower costs.

The exploration of space is also becoming global. More nations are now within reach of space than ever before, while the influx of entrepreneurial capital is driving innovation and new technologies in the private sector.

What excites me most about space technologies is that its an opportunity for us to put the best of humanity forward into the future. It enables international cooperation, courage, boldness and entrepreneurship. We are doing things for the benefit for the planet.

We live on the spaceship Earth. Space technologies help us understand our mothership. The climate, peace and security, energy issues: these are all things space technologies can play a key role in.

How Will Your Global Future Council Be Contributing to the Conversation?

We have a very impressive group of people from around the globe and a diversity of professions.

We will certainly want to look at how we make space exploration sustainable, for business, government and science. We need to ensure the long-term sustainability of the space environment. Its particularly important now with so many new actors coming into the field.

We will also be looking at how we should react to trends such as space property rights and space debris.

The issue of sustainability in space is really crucial. When we talk about sustainability in space, there are a variety of issues.

There is no nationally owned sector of space. Its all shared, so the responsibility is global. This is the same thing here on Earth, when you look at international waters. The pollution in our waters is an international problem. In space, we have a growing amount of debris that comes from old satellites, launch vehicle stages, collisions and so on. It is very hard to clean up areas of space that have been filled with debris.

Radio frequency is another shared resource which is actually being handled rather well right now, but it will continue to be something we need to pay attention to.

A lot of people are looking at launch vehicles and reusability. Right now we dont use space launch vehicles very efficiently. Imagine if we threw away an airplane after every flight. Thats how space flight works today. These are amazing, precision engineered vehicles and we essentially throw them away after one use. The prospect of getting better reusable vehicles could reduce costs substantially and have a dramatic impact on increasing space access.

Small vehicles are also showing enormous potential. Those are being tailored to smaller satellites. This all leads to what we call disaggregation, or the idea that you can accomplish certain goals in space technologies in multiple small units rather than in a single large one. GPS is a good example of this.

Multiple small satellites also reduce the chance of failure. By simple numbers, if one satellite goes down, the system is not significantly affected as a whole.

Many companies are seeking to provide global communications and broadband via space, and this approach to constellations of small satellites is going to help make that possible.

The perspective of space is truly important to the future of our planet. Before we can act on any particular policy, it is helpful to shift our worldview to a planetary perspective. Its a crucial element in solving the challenges facing us.

Youll see vehicles taking people into space, but also on high-speed journeys around the planet. We might be making our first human journeys to Mars, to an asteroid and possibly a return to the moon.

Back here on Earth we will see benefits ranging from a better understanding of the climate to ubiquitous broadband. Global access to broadband would bring billions into the global economy, spurring development.

Space science will continue to make great advances. Finding new planets around other stars, perhaps showing signs of organic material, and also identifying other resources in our solar system are very possible. Perhaps, by then, we may even have found signs of actual life outside our planet.

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Category Archives: Transhuman News

The Longevity Sector: Finding The Fountain Of Youth – The Market Mogul

Michael Collins, midnight writer – Irish Times

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Human or not? Mysterious figure caught on camera in Aceh sparks … – Jakarta Post

Trump can send a human rights message to Egypt’s leader – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The UN Is Currently Meeting To Negotiate A Complete, Global Ban on Nuclear Weapons – Futurism

Expert Says Tesla Will Make All Other Cars Obsolete – Futurism

Elon Musk Just Launched A Company To Merge Your Brain With A Computer – Futurism

Trump’s Treasury Secretary Says Increased Automation Is "Not Even … – Futurism

Where Will Space Tech Take Us by 2030? – Futurism – Futurism

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