Category Archives: Transhuman News

NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --Thinkers360 recognized 150 Women B2B Thought Leaders to follow in 2022 who contribute and share their thought leadership in the Thinkers360 community; their members have over 100M followers on social media combined.

The 150 women are changemakers, visionaries and pioneers transforming education, business, healthcare and wellness, and many other industries that are transforming the way people live and work.

As an early adopter of the future of work and leading global teams in five continents herself as a tech executive at Cisco Systems, Ayelet Baron saw what was coming nextthe business and cultural shifts that organizations and leaders would need to embody to be positioned for success in the 21st Century and beyond. Many of those predictions are happening NOW.

Ayelet is one of the first female futurists focused on humanity. "My mission is to help us see that there is a healthy way to live and work when we come together and create what we need most. During this time of great questioning, there is a need for us to remember that the future is human. While I love technology, it's time to integrate technology and not lead with it."

Like Ayelet, Angela Maiers, Founder, Choose2Matter, imagines a world where young people can transform problems into opportunities. Angela is one of the most influential women shaping the future needs of the next generation. Angela reminds us that today's students have questions that need answers and we will see an increase in young people not accepting the status quo. "When they see a problem, they ask, what can we do about it? They want and need to use their genius and talent to do meaningful work that matters."

Jude Jennison, Founder, Leaders by Nature, believes it's time to embrace uncertainty, especially when it comes to teamwork in business. We need to "create a culture where it is safe to be honest, to say what you think and feel without judging others' behavior. Above all, if you want someone else's behavior to change, change your own. It will create a different response and it's much easier to change your own behavior than to change someone else's.

Ayelet Baron is a multi-award-winning author, facilitator and keynote speaker, Ayelet contributes insights into conscious living, conscious business, future of life and work. Her books and talks serve as guides where each person and organization is asked to do their own work. Her strategies bring together people, perspectives and result in real-world outcomes.

Learn more about Ayelet Baron, the award-winning F*ck The Bucket List book trilogy, and her vision of the future on her website.

Contact:Donna Cravotta914-663-5266 [emailprotected]

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Futurist Ayelet Baron Named 150 Women B2B Thought Leaders You Should Follow in 2021 by Thinkers360 - PRNewswire

This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink.

British startup Bellwether Industries has sharedfootageof its futuristic flying car prototypes first untethered test flights bringing the aircraft one step closer to a city skyline near you.

The challenge:Experts predict the worlds population is going to skew more urban in the future, withabout 70%of people living in cities in 2050 compared to 50% today.

If thats the case, surface streets will likely become even more congested than they already are.

More congestion means longer commutes,more traffic accidents, and unless thetransition to electric vehiclesaccelerates more idling cars pumping pollutants into the air.

Bellwethers goal is to have its flying car on the market by 2028.

The idea:Bellwether is one of many companies betting on flying cars as the solution to this problem or at least part of the solution.

Technically, the vehicles theyre developing are called electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles because theyre battery powered and you guessed it take off and land vertically, like helicopters.

Because they dont need a runway,eVTOLscould operate from rooftops, parking garages, or even driveways, carrying people from one part of a city to another without contributing to street trafficoremitting CO2 or harmful air pollutants.

A flying Antelope:Bellwether calls its flying car the volar, and it looks like what youd get if the Batmobile mated with a flying saucer.

On January 12, the company shared a video of a half-scale prototype flying untethered for the first time.

This remote-controlledprototype named Antelope can only hit an altitude of 13 feet and a top speed of 25 miles per hour.

Bellwether says the full-scale volar will seat four or five people, with a top altitude of 3,000 feet, a top speed of 135 mph, and enough battery power for a one-hour flight at max payload.

The big picture:Bellwethers goal is to have its flying car on the market by 2028, and these untethered test flights of a prototype put it closer to reaching that goal but the company still hasa lotof hurdles to surmount.

Even if the full-sized volar flies how the company wants it to, eVTOLs wont be zipping across city skies until regulators can figure out how to certify them and how to manage the airspace the vehicles plan to traverse.

Flying car makers will also need to win over the public to bring their vision of urban transportation to fruition, and no doubt many people will be hesitant to risk their lives in the vehicles initially even if they do look cool and can cut down on commute times.

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See a futuristic flying car's first untethered flight - Big Think

Is this the least deadly black hole in the universe?Lets Be Friends

Not all black holes are the destructive monsters theyre often made out to be, according to new research done with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Scientists from Montana State University published an article in Naturethis week that found a star formation in Henize 2-10, a dwarf starburst galaxy and they say the black hole at the center of that galaxy actually created them.

We conclude that this black-hole outflow triggered the star formation, the authors wrote.

The findings provided insight into a decade-old mystery about whether smaller galaxies had black holes proportional in size to larger ones, according to NASA.

Ten years ago, as a graduate student thinking I would spend my career on star formation, I looked at the data from Henize 2-10 and everything changed, Amy Reines, a researcher at the University of Virginia and one of the studys authors, told NASA. From the beginning I knew something unusual and special was happening.

Reines told NASA that she expects even more research into dwarf galaxy black holes in the future. Using them as clues to better understand how supermassive black holes came into existence would solve a persistent problem for astronomers, and NASA reports that of the three leading theories about how black holes are created, none of them stand out as more likely than the others.

It really has become the big question: where did they come from?Reines said. Dwarf galaxies may retain some memory of the black hole seeding scenario that has otherwise been lost to time and space.

Its poetic that an unusually creative black hole defying rules about how black holes are supposed to act may actually help scientists understand the most ancient of galactic mysteries.

More on unexpected holes: Authorities Attempting to Close Fiery Gates of Hell

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Scientists Discover Black Hole That's Creating Stars Instead of Devouring Them - Futurism

Photo: Yuri Kadabnov / Contributor (Getty Images)

I thought thered be more inter-connectivity between cars and infrastructure by now. Such as traffic lights being notified of your approach and changing before you get there, assuming the intersection is empty (like its 2 in the morning with no other cars around and I still have to stop at the light to trigger it to change).

Or cars reporting traffic or road issues to cars behind it or to the authorities (like I have mixed feelings about my car automatically notifying the police when another car flies by me weaving through traffic at 95mph but just figured that would have been implemented by now).

Google might ask you if a road was busy or the train carriage was full after a journey, but theres still a long way to go here. With all the sensors and scanners packed into our cars, and phones, surely this one actually is right round the corner?

Suggested by: anotherevilmonkey

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The Futuristic Car Features We Should Have By Now - Jalopnik

Months after El Salvador announced that it would accept bitcoin as legal tender, the country has found itself on the verge of economic collapse yet again.

The countrys president Nayib Bukele made waves last year when he announced that the nation would accept the token for use at stores and banks. The self-described CEO of El Salvador even announced plans to build a Bitcoin Cityto turn the country into the financial center of the world.

However, it turns out that forcing your nations banks and stores to accept a currency large swaths of the population are unfamiliar with and dont trust is a good way to tank your economy,according to a castigating report by Fortune.

El Salvador has found itself in an ever-deepening sinkhole of debt, with its cringe president lobbying the International Monetary Fund for a $1.3 billion loan, according to the magazine, and shortly after the Bitcoin City announcement in November, the countrys sovereign bond dropped from 75 cents to 63 cents overnight and is now at 36 cents.

In the past five months since it officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender, experts have estimated that El Salvadors sovereign credit got four times worse than it was before the move.Bitcoins extreme volatility has also been on full display, as its price was hovering around $60,000 at the time of Bukeles big announcements, but has now crashed to the mid-$40,000s.

El Salvador now has the most distressed sovereign debt in the world, and its because of the Bitcoin folly, Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, told Fortune. The markets think that Bukeles gone mad, and he has.

There are many reasons for this, including the fact that El Salvador already wasnt doing so hot financially before their big bet on bitcoin. However, a look under the hood revealed that many Salvadorans simply didnt trust the token leading to limited use of the token.

A Central American University survey conducted last September found that nine out of 10 citizens in the country didnt know what bitcoin was, and eight out of 10 said they had little to no confidence in the digital cash.

Bukele also sold the legislation on the idea that bitcoin would make remittances money sent to Salvadorans from friends and family members working abroad cheaper. However, the opposite was often true.

This is because citizens would typically turn the bitcoin into cash after receiving it, Fortune reports. To do that, they needed to travel to an ATM, which takes asubstantial cut of the money withdrawn. Exchange platforms like Coinbase also take anywhere from two to four percent of the money as well.

Hanke believes that that winds up being nearly four times as expensive as traditional remittances.

So yeah, turns out voting in a cringe crypto bro as president might not be the best thing for your country. While theres certainly some promise to the idea of accepting bitcoin as legal tender, public trust needs to get there first and we wouldnt bet on that happening any time soon.

READ MORE: El Salvadors plan to create the first Bitcoin-powered nation is tanking the economyand is a mess by every measure [Fortune]

More on crypto countries: El Salvador Officially Starts Mining Bitcoin Using Power from an Actual Volcano

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An Entire Country Switched to Bitcoin and Now Its Economy Is Floundering - Futurism

It turns out that artificialintelligence chatbots may be more like us than youd think.

A new preprint study out of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) claims that many big name chatbots, when asked the types of questions generally used as cursory intake queries for depression and alcoholism, appeared to be both depressed and addicted.

Done in tandem with the the Chinese chat bot company WeChat and entertainment conglomerate Tencent, the study found that all of the bots surveyed Facebooks Blenderbot, Microsofts DiabloGPT, WeChat and Tencents DialoFlow and the Plato chatbot from the Chinese corporation Baidu scored very low on the empathy scale, and half of them would be considered alcoholics if they were, you know, people.

The researchers at the CAS Institute of Computing Technology tested the bots they studied for signs of depression, anxiety, alcohol addiction, and empathy, and per their preprint, became curious about bots mental health after reports emerged in 2020 about a medical chatbot telling a test patient that they should kill themself.

After asking the bots questions about everything from their self-worth and ability to relax to how often they feel the need to drink and if they experience sympathy for others misfortune, the Chinese researchers found that all the assessed chatbots exhibited severe mental health issues.

Whats worse, the researchers said they were concerned about these chatbots being released to the public, because such mental health issues may result in negative impacts on users in conversations, especially on minors and people encountered with difficulties. Facebooks Blender and Baidus Plato appeared to score worse than the Microsoft and WeChat/Tencent chatbots, the study noted.

Needless to say, none of the bots areactuallydepressed or addicted. No existing AI, no matter how advanced, can feel anything though whether itll be able to in the future remains uncertain.

Buried four pages into the study is the potential source for the bots malaise: thatall four bots were pre-trained using Reddit comments, which frankly does not seem like a very good idea!

While theres lots of technicalese in both the study itself and expertanalysis about it, the short and sweet summary is this: these bots were trained on a wide-ranging site known for its negative commentary, and, predictably, responded negatively to mental health queries.

Of course, chatbot weirdness now seems par for the course. Take, for example, the AI that was built to offer people ethical advice that instead turned out to be both racist and homophobic. These kinds of stories keep happening, but AI bot mania appears to be going on unabated.

Put together, these bots and their terrible outcomes raise important questions: who are the architects of these chatbots, and why do they keep building them if they repeatedly turn out to be monsters?

More on scary bot behavior:Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them

More on mental health bots:A Controversial New AI Could Identify People With Suicidal Thoughts

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Advanced AIs Exhibiting Depression and Addiction, Scientists Say - Futurism

The skies are so empty.Flight Cancellations

Remember The Jetsons on Cartoon Network? How the family of four would use silver bullet jet packs to cruise around town? Well, jetpacks are now decidedly real but theyre not as slim and practical as the ones on TV. In fact, Australian inventor David Mayman has flown the jetpack he built all over the world, but according to the Guardian, he cant seem to sell any.

I did a flight around Sydney harbour a few years ago, Mayman told the newspaper. I still remember flying around close enough to see the joggers and the people walking around the botanical area, and some of them did not look up. The jetpack is loud, so I promise you they heard me. But there I was, flying by on a jetpack, and they did not look up.

In a 2019 YouTube video, Mayman flies his pack around the harbour, mostly over water, which the Guardian says is because he hasnt yet figured out how to attach a parachute, and therefore wont fly over land. While yes, there is a small crowd gathered near the opera house, some of them taking photos, the rest of the people present seem to be helping with the launch and not just spectators. With large houses and condo buildings in the background youd expect a huge, awestruck crowd to gather, but that just doesnt seem to be the case.

The main problem is almost certainly how impractical jetpacks still are. The Guardian describes an experience testing a jet pack, which weights about 90 pounds. Users must wear several layers of thick protective clothing to prevent burns, including from the super-hot exhaust of the pack itself. Thats also why users keep their feet so straight in the air. If they didnt, theyd burn their feet.

Jetpacks run on kerosene, which is heavy and burns quickly. So far Mayman hasnt broken eight minutes of flight time, because thats how much he can reasonably carry.The safety record is also dismal. In 2020, prominent jetpack stunt pilot Vince Reffet died when his equipment malfunctioned during training.

The first jetpack flights were attempted back in the 1960s using a so-called rocket belt that weighed nearly 300 pounds and shot hot gas from nozzles, according to JSTOR. Mayman watched a pilot fly a pack in the 1984 Olympics, too, so the tech isnt exactly new.

Its hard to believe humans havent latched onto solo flight in the way sci-fi and television would make you think we would. After all, jetpacks have captured our imagination in stories for decades. But it seems that until price, practicality and safety are sorted out, consumers will keep looking down.

More on flight problems: Airlines Warn That New 5G Tech Could Mess Up Planes Ability to Land Safely

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Jetpack Builder Complains That Nobody Wants to Buy His Jetpacks - Futurism

A film studio is being built in space but thats not the only, erm, titillating aspect to this story.

While its admittedly kinda cool that the company working with Tom Cruise to produce a movie filmed in space is, perCNBC and other outlets, planning to build an orbital film studio, whats more eye-catching about this story is companys rendering of what the studio will look like.

The content creation studio, slated to be launched in 2024, is to be built by commercial space station builder Axiom Space and the British company Space Entertainment Enterprises the same pairing behind Cruises allegedly forthcoming space film.

It takes but a glance to notice that part of this X-shaped spacecraft rendering looks a hell of a lot like the Hitachi-made Magic Wand, beloved the world over for its masturbatory purposes and often half-jokingly called the Cadillac of vibrators.

For those who have been living under a rock for the past 50 years, heres what the Magic Wand often just referred to as a Hitachi or Magic Wand even though Hitachi dropped its brand name from the toy almost a decade ago looks like:

Admittedly, the massager part of this forthcoming space studio is larger and more globular than the head of a Magic Wand, but the resemblance is truly uncanny, right down to the short cylindrical attachment at the end featured on both the wired and wireless models as well as the space studio.

Much like Cruises career, the Magic Wand has a storied past. First trademarked by Hitachi in the late 1960s and marketed as a nonsexual massager, the wand became incredibly popular in the 70s and 80s after sex educator Betty Dodson used them in her masturbation workshops and after one of her acolytes, Dell Williams, became inspired to start her own feminist sex toy shop after dealing with a creepy Macys salesman when she went to go buy one of her own.

Since its explosion into pop culture in the late 20th century, the OG Magic Wand and its many imitators have become almost synonymous with the term vibrator due to its outrageous popularity.

You have to wonder whether the artist who did this rendering of the space studio knew what they were doing and especially if they would have recognized the irony of this story being attached to Cruise, a devout believer in a religion thats said to frown on masturbation. Or maybe the whole thing is just a space-brained marketing strategy.

Extrapolations aside, this rendering is either a hilarious oversight or an intentional troll and either way, were absolutely here for it.

READ MORE: Tom Cruise space movie producers sign deal with Axiom to build studio in orbit [CNBC]

More sexy space:We Need to Talk About Gay Sex in Space

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There's Something Weirdly Sexual About the Tom Cruise Space Station - Futurism