Muistilinkkejä

• Needless Megadeaths: A Suggestion for Science in the Public Interest
• Why “Why Transhumanism Won’t Work” Won’t Work
• Bionic feet for amputee cat

Muistilinkkejä

• In the Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday
• The New Field of Neurodiversity: Why 'Disabilities' Are Essential to the Human Ecosystem
• How to keep someone with you forever
• What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?
• Cyborg rights 'need debating now'

Whole Brain Emulation

Huippukokouksia

Humanity+ Summit 2010 - Harvardin yliopistossa 12-13. kesäkuuta. Puhujina mm. Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram ja Aubrey de Grey.

Singularity Summit 2010 - San Franciscossa 14-15. elokuuta. Puhujina mm. Ray Kurzweil, James Randi ja Steve Mann.

Ray Kurzweil, That Singularity Guy

People say, “Gee, I don’t want to be a machine.” They’re thinking of the machines they know today, and that’s not the kind of machine I’m talking about. I’m talking about a machine—and we’ll probably need a different word by then—that’s just as subtle and supple and emotional as humans are today, and even more so.

Futuristic mega-projects by Shimizu

The surprising truth about what motivates us

"Best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table."

Muotia ja robotteja

Intellectual Property in the Fashion Industry - "Apparel design is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection."

Willow Garage - Avoimia robotteja kaikille.

Stem Cell Patent Halts Hospital's Collection - Patenttitrollit estävät lääketieteellistä tutkimusta.

First human 'infected with computer virus' - Mark Gasson laittoi kokeilun vuoksi viruksen implanttiinsa.

Synteettisiä huumesoluja

Biology, or the Drugs Win the Drug War - Synteettiset design-solut avaavat tietysti ovia kotitekoisiin design-huumeisiin. Lainaat kaverilta samplen, remiksaat komerossa ja jaat kopioita eteenpäin.

You know what’s a lot easier than all the high minded business about environment, or life extension, or even the scary doomsday 12 Monkeys scenarios? Growing simpler molecule drugs. I don’t mean like aspirin, I mean like heroin and cocaine, THC and hallucinogens. They already grow in plants thoroughly studied, and people are motivated and not at all risk averse about getting those sequences somewhere they can use them. Cooking meth is hard and dangerous science compared to the ability to get a starter of a minimal cell that poops heroin and feeding it growth medium in your closet. We may have lost the drug war, but not as badly as the drug lords have.

Today we lost the drug war - Anders Sandberg samalla linjalla.

In a scenario building exercise on the future of drugs I participated in a while ago we investigated a future scenario not too unlike the one above: new technologies makes the threshold of entry to the drug market low and people are fairly accepting of drugs. The result was a "drugs-com boom" where startups invented ever more innovative drugs (starting with enhancers, moving on towards recreational drugs and continuing towards strange pharma-bio-nano-info hybrid drugs), leaving drug lords and pharmaceutical companies in the dust.
--
While there might be Microsoft and Apple biologies there will also be open Linux biologies - we are in a sense already living in one. And as the user interface of biology improves more people will poke at it. Just like we will never win the drug war, we will not be able to win a war against biology - synthetic or natural. Just like we have to accept that people will use drugs, we have to accept that people will try to use available tools to get what they want.

Ensimmäinen synteettinen solu rakennettu

First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell - Craig Venterin ryhmä kertoo onnistuneensa synteettisen elämän luomisessa.

While this first construct—dubbed M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, is a proof of concept, the tools and technologies developed to create this cell hold great promise for application in so many critical areas. Throughout the course of this work, the team contemplated, discussed, and engaged in outside review of the ethical and societal implications of their work. The ability to routinely write the software of life will usher in a new era in science, and with it, new products and applications such as advanced biofuels, clean water technology, and new vaccines and medicines.

*golfclap*

Muistilinkkejä

Prosthetic Culture - Amber Case, kyborgiantropologi.

A proximity-based programmable DNA nanoscale assembly line - Ensimmäinen ohjelmoitavien nanokoneiden liukuhihna valmistettu.

Richard Dawkins: If Science Worked Like Religion

Auttaako tiededokumentti?

Tiededokumentti: Auttaako tiede? - BBC:n kolmiosainen dokumenttisarja, jossa Michael Mosley tarkastelee älykkyyttä, elämänpidennystä ja nukkumattomuutta. Ensimmäinen jakso Areenassa, seuraavat YLE Teemalla 6.5. ja 13.5. Älykkyysjaksossa mukana Christopher Langan, joka on korkeasta älykkyydestään huolimatta hieman kreationisti - hyvä esimerkki siitä, ettei korkea ÄO aina tarkoita korkeaa rationaalisuutta ja päinvastoin.

The Art of Human Enhancement - Transhumanistinen online-taidenäyttely, mukana mm. Eduardo Kacin biotaidetta.

The Weird World of Zentai - Koska Star Trekin univormut eivät menneet ihonmyötäisyydessä tarpeeksi pitkälle ja koska huntukielto menee liian pitkälle.

Mittasuhteiden merkitys

Videoita Humanity+ UK2010 -konferenssista YouTubessa.



A sense of proportion - Anders Sandberg konferenssin annista.

When thinking about existential risks it is important to have a sense of what the stakes are, and not just think "that is bad" - some things can be many orders of magnitude worse than others. At the same time, as Nick Bostrom pointed out, we have rather minimal research on how to prevent human extinction, about the same size as the literature on dung beetle reproduction. Toby Ord has pointed out that some charities can be up to 10,000 times more efficient in providing health than others (in terms of years of life per dollar donated), just because they focus on particular very effective means. Aubrey de Grey showed a pretty minor advance in biogerontology that was hailed in the media as "the secret of ageing", while rattling of a series of papers with far more profound implications that nobody outside the field has heard of. A graph of cost and size of carbon abatement methods clearly shows that some fix a vastly bigger chunk than others.