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"Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept"
Bostrom: We have to distinguish between positional and non-positional goods. In economics, a positional good benefits you only because others lack it. Height may be an advantage in men, but if everybody were three inches taller, nobody would be better off. Attractiveness may be another example of a positional good. A gain for one person implies a relative loss for others. I would contrast that with a trait like health. Your life is better when you are healthy, even if others are also healthy. Cognitive enhancements are a complex topic, but they have aspects that are intrinsically valuable. It is good if we can understand the world better. Arguments against positional goods are no arguments against enhancements as such.

Memory Implant Gives Rats Sharper Recollection
“Turn the switch on, the animal has the memory; turn it off and they don’t: that’s exactly how it worked,”

Humans Could Have Geomagnetic Sight
Tests of cryptochrome 2, a key protein component of geomagnetic perception, found that its human version restored geomagnetic orientation in cryptochrome-deficient fruit flies.

Lab-grown meat would 'cut emissions and save energy'
‘What our study found was that the environmental impacts of cultured meat could be substantially lower than those of meat produced in the conventional way,’ said Hanna Tuomisto of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, who led the research. ‘Cultured meat could potentially be produced with up to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 45% less energy, 99% lower land use, and 96% lower water use than conventional meat.’

How To Live Forever

Äänestä Piraattia

Mieluummin ääni hukkaan Piraateille kuin löysä taktikointiääni kakkosvaihtoehdolle galluphypetyksen perusteella.

2011.piraattivaalit.fi
Uskonnonvapaus.fi vaalikone
Älä äänestä homofobiaa eduskuntaan

Odota heilahduksia

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

Transcending the Human, DIY Style - Jos lääkärit eivät suostu asentamaan magneetteja ihon alle, hätäilijät tekevät sen itse ja päätyvät lääkäriin.

Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism

Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Holiday Challenge
Jaan Tallinn, a founder of Skype and Ambient Sound Investments, and Edwin Evans, CEO of the mobile applications startup Quinly, every contribution to the Singularity Institute up until January 20, 2010 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $125,000.

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David Nutt: 'The government cannot think logically about drugs'
Government proposes to scrap need for scientific advice on drugs policy

How Was the Billionaire’s Singularity Dinner?

Lonkerokäsiproteesi

WikiLeaked

live.piraattipuolue.fi

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Nokia Supports Singularity University as Fifth Corporate Founder

Sähkövirta aivoihin parantaa matemaattisia taitoja
Why Bioenhancement of Mathematical Ability Is Ethically Important

Gene discovery suggests way to engineer fast-growing plants

It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology

One of the goals of this whitepaper is to prepare the 3D printing community, and the public at large, before incumbents try to cripple 3D printing with restrictive intellectual property laws. By understanding how intellectual property law relates to 3D printing, and how changes might impact 3D printing’s future, this time we will be ready when incumbents come calling to Congress.

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Cryonics: Understanding Why It Failed - TransVision 2010 Presentation by Eugen Leitl

Lakatos proposed a model of scientific advance wherein there is a “hard core” of scientific or mathematical theory which is surrounded by a “protective belt” of gentle inquiry. It is work going on within this protective belt that incrementally advances or erodes the hard core of the paradigm. Virtually all of routine scientific research (institutional science) operates in the zone of this protective belt while revolutionary, or paradigm changing ideas, penetrate it, smash the hard core, and thus demolish the whole structure. Cryonics, like Natural Selection, or the theories of General and Special Relativity, is core-smashing in character, and in the case of cryonics, the idea is so antithetical to the existing order of civilization that it can it only be advanced by insurgent means. This is so because cryonics overturns the Vitalistic view of life, challenges the conventional definition of death, invalidates the core tenets of contemporary medicine, erodes the need for a mystical afterlife, radically redistributes capital (disrupts inheritance, bequests, and mortuary customs), mandates a complete change in reproductive behavior, perturbs generational succession, requires space colonization, requires (and supports) profoundly disruptive technologies such as cloning, regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and finally, ends the species and enables, if not requires Transhumanism.

The real cost of free

As I've written here before, copying isn't going to get harder, ever. Hard drives won't magically get bulkier but hold fewer bits and cost more. Networks won't be harder to use. PCs won't be slower. People won't stop learning to type "Toy Story 3 bittorrent" into Google. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something – generally some kind of unworkable magic anti-copying beans that they swear, this time, will really work.

Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs

On the low end of the spectrum, we have physical jobs that we can’t automate yet (yard work, for example). On the high end of the spectrum, we have creative and cognitive jobs that we can’t automate yet (law and management, for example). But as technology advances, and it certainly will, more people are going to be elbowed out of the workforce. We may be heading toward a future with plentiful high-end jobs and plentiful low-end jobs, and not much in the middle.
-- If the skills and talents that are truly financially rewarding become harder and harder to acquire, people who would never consider themselves students of Marx might start questioning whether, given the circumstances, it still makes sense to pay people based solely on the demand for their skills in a marketplace that would be demanding very few skills.

Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.

Parempien tapojen lisäksi

Kuulumisia Saksan seminaarista - Kryoniikkaseuran matkaraporttia Goslarista ja uusi organisaatio EUCRIO pyrkii tarjoamaan kryoniikkapalveluita Euroopassa.

Toisten ihmisten ongelmat - Hyvin pärjäävä ei käsitä miksi joku pärjää niin huonosti asioissa, joissa itse pärjää hyvin. Jos neuvot masentunutta, että luuserin pitäisi vain ottaa itseään niskasta kiinni, se on kuin neuvoisi jalatonta, että luuserin pitäisi vain lähteä lenkille.

Miltei vihrein keksintö - Geenimuuntelu on hyväksi ympäristölle. Viisi vastausta vasta-argumentteihin.

This is a news website article about a scientific paper - Tämä on lyhyt kommentti linkin takana olevan artikkelin sisällöstä.

Cyborgs Needed for Escape from Earth

"If our objective is to become space-faring people, it's probably going to force you to reconsider how to reengineer humans."

Patients to be frozen into state of suspended animation for surgery

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50 Posts About Cyborgs

Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us. - Domesticated Cyborgs

Emotiv EPOC EEG Headset Hacked

Another company can come along and replace Emotiv pretty easily. They are missing out on a huge opportunity here, and time and again we see companies locking stuff down instead of harnessing developers.

Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable. Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".

Zeros to heroes: 10 unlikely ideas that changed the world

10 impossibilities conquered by science

Immortal Kids