Category Archives: Transhuman News

The leader of one of the worlds largest automobile producers expectsthat cars will soon drive themselves and sync to the world around them but dontcount out the human behind the wheel just yet.

Carlos Ghosn, the chief executiveand chairman of an alliance that includes Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, said Thursday that humans will remain involved in the operation of vehicles for the foreseeable future, even as cars with self-driving technology enter the market in the next five years. You will push a button to activate the cars autonomous driving feature, he said, but it will encounter everyday scenarios it cannot compute and that require human assistance.

Artificial intelligence is still way below the creativity of the human brain, Ghosn said.

Imagine a self-driving carcoming upon a broken-down vehicle in the road, but there is a solid line to either side of it, Ghosn said. The car is wired to recognize both as impassable and doesnt have the judgment to cross over the line and pass the vehicle as long as the roadway is clear. A human will have to do the job.

Thats just one common scenario in which artificial intelligence comes up short. General Motors recently acknowledged that its own vehicles arenot sophisticated enough to respond when another motorist honks hishorn.

Ghosns perspective onthe humans role in autonomous driving is not universally shared. One of the major questions hanging over self-driving cars is how much they should depend on humans in the vehicle to intervene, if at all. Studies show that autonomous vehicles can lull passengers into a passive state, and stirring them to act when a problem arises takes time and may pose safety concerns.

Ford has seen engineers fall asleep in its self-driving cars during testing, Bloomberg reportedlast month. Both Ford and Waymo, Googles self-driving car company, intend to eliminate the role of the human driver entirely, according to Bloomberg, though other major automakers, including GM, Audi and Tesla, still plan to rely onhuman vigilance.

Self-driving technology is also expected to be an economic force with both positive and negative consequences. The technology could lead to widespread unemployment among professional drivers, for example, whether they work behind the wheel for ride-hailing services like Uber or long-haul trucking companies.

Ghosn disagrees. He said Thursday the technology will enable companies to satisfy their constant shortage of drivers, while also freeing up existing drivers to do more substantive tasks while en route.

Technology is not going to replace human beings; its going to support you, Ghosn said. Its more, I have a limitation, and I want to eliminate this limitation by bringing this technology in.

Nissan unveiled its vision for the future of cars almost exactly a year ago at the Geneva International Motor Show. Called Nissan Intelligent Mobility, the concept calls for cars that are autonomous, electric and connected to the world around them.

The company brought that vision closer to reality at the International CES technology show in January, when it debuted in-car artificial intelligence that admits when it doesnt know enough to make decisions. The car will then come to a stop and contact a human mobility manager in a command center for instructions.

As the system learns from experience, and autonomous technology improves, vehicles will require less assistance and each mobility manager will be able to guide a large number of vehicles simultaneously, Nissan said in January.

Last year, Nissan began selling a minivan in Japan that comes equipped with ProPilot technology that allows the vehicle to drive itself on single-lane highways.

Ghosn will step down as Nissans chief executivein April. He took the helm of Nissan in June 2001 and oversaw its ascent from a beleaguered automaker to part of a massive automotive alliance that includes Renault and Mitsubishi. He remains the chief executiveof Renault and chairman of all three companies.

He will be replaced at Nissan by Hiroto Saikawa, the companys co-chief executive and former chief competitive officer.

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Why Nissan's CEO says the human brain still trumps artificial ... - Washington Post

Modern humansoutlasted theNeanderthals byabout 40,000 years and counting. Butdont pat yourself on the back too firmly for outliving those troglodytes. Neanderthals crafted tools andtamed fire. They cared for their dead. Animal hornsand blackenedfirepits encircling the remains of a Neanderthal toddler suggest a42,000-year-old funeral rite. If a Neanderthal indeed wore atalon necklace,as a collection of polished eagle claws indicate, they beat us to jewelry, too. Perhaps one of your ancient ancestorsfound the claw necklaces sexy: Some scientists theorize humans gave Neanderthals genital herpes andtapeworm parasites.

Their proportions, however, remained distinctly Neanderthal. Neanderthal bodies were shorter and stockier, moreGimlison of Glointhan GigiHadid. Their skulls were built differently, too, with a fewfeatures like heavy brow ridges particularly unlike ours.

Which makes a pair of newly described skulls something of a wonder. The partial skulls have features up to this timeunseen in the hominid fossil record, sharing both human and Neanderthal characteristics.

It is a very exciting discovery, asKaterina Harvati, an expert in Neanderthal evolution at theUniversity of Tbingen in Germany, who was not involved with the research, told The Washington Post. Especially because the human fossil record from East Asia has been not only fragmentary but also difficult to date.

Excavators dug up the skull cap fragments in 2007 and 2014, in Lingjing, located in Chinas Henan province. The diggers discovered two partial skulls in a sitethought to be inhabited 105,000 to 125,000 years ago, during an epoch called the Pleistocene. The owners of the skulls were good hunters, capable of fashioning stone blades from quartz. Ancient bones of horses and cattle, as well as extinct woolly rhinoceros and giant deer, were found strewn near the skull remains.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and at Washington University in St. Louis described the skulls as having a mosaic of features. Writing Thursday in the journal Science, they noted similarities with three groups: The brow ridges of the skulls were modest and the skull bone mass was reduced, like features of early modern humans living in the Old World. The skulls had abroad and flat brainpan, like other eastern Eurasian humans from the mid-Pleistocene epoch. Their semicircular ear canalsand the enlarged section at the back of the skull, however, were like a Neanderthals.

Eastern Asian late archaic humans have been interpreted to resemble their Neanderthal contemporaries to some degree,Xiujie Wu, an author of the study at theChinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, said in a statement. Yet it is only with the discovery of two human crania, she said, that the nature of these eastern Eurasian early Late Pleistocene archaic humans is becoming clear.

The largebrains of these archaic humans ruledout Homo erectusand other known hominid species, the scientists wrote. The researchers were vague about what they thought the species might be, describing them only as archaic humans. ButWu toldScience Magazine that the fossils could represent a kind of unknown or new archaic human that survived on in East Asia to 100,000 years ago.

Other experts speculated that these skull caps could represent a little-known human relative: the mysteriousDenisovans, a species that currently exists only as sequenced DNA taken from finger bone and a tooth found in a Siberian cave. Thought to live some 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, the Denisovans shared genetic material with humans as well as Neanderthals. A 2015 analysis of the specimen scraps indicated that the Denisovans lived for some 60,000 yearsside-by-sidewith Neanderthals and humans in Asia.

(That humans interbred with Neanderthals is, of course, old news. Many humans who have Eurasian ancestry carry bits of Neanderthal DNA, around 2 to 5 percent of it, within their genes. In the process of swapping DNA, Neanderthals lent us genes forbad skin while boosting our immune responses.)

The cranial remains show an intriguing combination of Neanderthal-like as well as archaic features, Harvati said. This would be the combination that one would expect based on the ancient DNA analysis of Denisovans, who were closely related to Neanderthals.

The paper did not mention Denisovans, the study authors said, because DNA extraction attempts failed to yield genetic material.

But the lack of even a nod toward the Denisovans in the new report was a point thatPhilipp Gunz, an evolutionary anthropologist at theMax Planck Institute in Leipzig, found surprising. The fossils, which Gunz called remarkable, as he told The Post, certainly look like what many paleoanthropologists (myself included) imagine the Denisovans to look like.

Time may tell if scientists can pull off a successful laboratory analysis.

Unfortunately, however, it is not possible to infer skull morphology from ancient DNA directly, Gunz said. I therefore hope that future studies will be able to extract ancient DNA from these or similar specimens.

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Skulls found in China were part modern human, part Neanderthal; possibly new species - Washington Post

More than four decades after the last man walked on the lunar surface, several upstart space entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on NASA's renewed interest in returning to the moon, offering a variety of proposals with the ultimate goal of establishing a lasting human presence there.

The commercial sector's interest comes as many anticipate support from the Trump administration, which is eager for a first-term triumph to rally the nationthe way the Apollo flights did in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition team about the company'sinterest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment servicefor the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable future human settlement of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)

It is time for America to return to the Moon this time to stay, Bezos said in response to emailed questions from The Post. A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.

The Post obtained a copy of the white paper, marked proprietary and confidential, and the company then confirmed its authenticity and agreed to answer questions about it.

Bezoss proposal comes as SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a stunning announcement this week that his company plannedto fly two unnamed, private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year an ambitious timeline that, if met, could beat a similar mission by NASA.

[SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year.]

Anticipating that the Trump administration is focusing on the moon, the space agency recently announced it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crew for a mission that would then occur by 2019.

[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]

Obama killed plans for a lunar mission, saying in 2010 that weve been there before. But the administrations Mars plan was still far fromactually delivering humans there, and critics grew frustrated that NASA has not been able to fly humans out of low Earth orbit since the 1970s. A shot around the moon, however, could be feasible, even within a few years.

Blue Origins proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesnt involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver theequipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left flags and footprints and then came home.

NASA already has shown a willingness to work closely with the commercial sector, hiring companies to fly supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. It is providing technical expertise, but no funding, to SpaceXs plan to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars by 2020.

The prospect of a lunar mission has several companies lining up to provide not just transportation, but also habitats, science experiments and even the ability to mine the moon for resources.

The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has also been working on plans to create a transportation network to the area around the moon, known as cislunar space.

Im excited by the possibilities, said Tory Bruno, the alliance's chief executive. This administration, near as we can tell, feels a sense of urgency to go out and make things happen, and to have high-profile demonstrations that are along the road map to accomplish these broad goals. There is an opportunity to begin building that infrastructure right now within the next four years.

Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of inflatable space habitats, said his company could create a depot that could orbit the moon by 2020, housingsupplies and medial facilities, as well as humans. A smaller version of the possible habitats, known as the BEAM, is docked to the International Space Station, where astronauts have been testing it.

In an interview, Bigelow said he was glad the administration seems to be refocusing on the moon. Mars is premature at this time. The moon is not, he said. We have the technology. We have the ability, and the potential for a terrific business case.

At an Aviation Week awards ceremony Thursday evening, Bezos added that the moon could help propel humans even further into space, to destinations such as Mars: "I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily."

After remaining quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origins attempt to partner with NASA is a huge coming out of sorts for the company, which has been funded almost exclusively by Bezos. The paper urges NASA to develop a program that provides incentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.

Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed thatit could only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. Im excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.

Last year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the companys West Texas facility.

That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origins feather symbol.

The company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moons south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecrafts solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the water ice in the perpetual shadow of the craters deep crevices.

Water is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.

The Blue Moon spacecraft could carry as much as 10,000 pounds of material and fly atop several different rockets, including NASAs Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliances Atlas V or its own New Glenn rocket, which is under development and expected to fly by the end of the decade, the company said.

Once on the surface, the landers useful payload can be used to conduct science or deploy rovers, the company said. A robotic arm attached to the lander will deploy to examine the lunar surface with an array of instruments.

The initial landing is envisioned as the first in a series of increasingly capable missions, including flying samples of lunar ice back to Earth for study.

The company said it could also help deliver the cargo and supplies needed for human settlements.

Blue Moon is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the Moon, Bezos wrote. Any credible first lunar settlement will require that capability.

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An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos's plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for 'future human settlement' of the moon - Washington Post