Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: bioengineering – Page 221

At one time or another, we’ve all been encouraged to “maximize our potential.” In a recent interview, Academic and Entrepreneur Juan Enriquez said that mankind is making progress toward expanding beyond its potential. And the changes, he believes, could be profound.

To illustrate the process, Enriquez theorized what might happen if we were to bring Charles Darwin back to life and drop him in the middle of Trafalgar Square. As Darwin takes out his notebook and starts observing, Enriquez suggested he would likely see what might appear to be a different species. Since Darwin’s time, humans have grown taller, and with 1.5 billion obese people, larger. Darwin might also notice some other features too that many of us take for granted — there are more senior citizens, more people with all their teeth, a lot fewer wrinkles, and even some 70-year-olds running in marathons.

“There’s a whole series of morphologies that are just different about our bodies, but we don’t notice it. We don’t notice we’ve doubled the lifespan of humans in the last century,” Enriquez said. “We don’t notice how many more informations (sic) come into a brain in a single day versus what used to come in in a lifetime. So, across almost every part of humanity, there have been huge changes.”

Part of the difference that Darwin would see, Enriquez noted, is that natural selection no longer applies as strongly to life and death as it once did. Further, random gene mutations that led to some advantages kept getting passed down to generations and became part of the species. The largest difference, however, is our ongoing move toward intelligent design, he said.

“We’re getting to the stage where we want to tinker with humans. We want to insert this gene so this person doesn’t get a deadly disease. We want to insert this gene so that maybe the person performs better on an 8,000 meter peak climb, or in sports, or in beauty, or in different characteristics,” Enriquez said. “Those are questions we never used to have to face before because there was one way of having sex and now there’s at least 17.”

According to Enriquez, the concept of evolving ourselves is an important one because we are the first and only species on earth that has deliberately taken control over the pattern of evolution of what lives and dies (Science Magazine seems to agree). The technologies we’re developing now towards this goal provide us with an instrument for the a potential longer survival of the species than might otherwise be possible.

Those notions, however, raise a number of moral and ethical questions. “What is humanity…where do we want to take it?” Enriquez poses. While he noted that it’s easy to project that tinkering with humanity will lead to a dystopic future, he remains cautiously optimistic about our potential.

“I think we’ve become a much more domesticated species. We’re far less likely to murder each other than we were 50 years ago, 100 years ago or 200 years ago. We have learned how to live together in absolutely massive cities,” Enriquez said. “I think we have become far more tolerant of other religions (and) other races. There are places where this hasn’t happened but, on the whole, life has gotten a whole lot better in the last two or three hundred years and as you’re looking at that, I think we will have the tolerance for different choices made with these very instruments, and I think that’s a good thing.”

As he looks at the future of evolving humanity, Enriquez sees reasons for a great deal of optimism in the realm of single gene modification, especially in the area of eradicating disease and inherited conditions. The consequences, however, are still an unknown.

“In the UK, there was a question, ‘Do we insert gene code into a fertilized egg to cure a deadly disease?’ That is a real question, because that would keep these babies from dying early from these horrendous diseases,” Enriquez said. “The consequences of that are, for the first time, probably in the next year, you’ll have the first child born to three genetic parents.”

The path toward evolving human intelligence in the near future isn’t as cut and dry, Enriquez said. Once we establish the implications and morality between governments, religious organizations, and the scientific community, there are still plenty of hurdles to clear.

“There have been massive studies in China and we haven’t yet identified genes correlated to intelligence, even though we believe intelligence has significant inherited capacity,” Enriquez said. “I think you have to separate reality from fiction. The ability to insert a gene or two, and really modify the intelligence of human beings, I think, is highly unlikely in the next decade or two decades.”

This came up recently and it occurred I never posted this here. This is a lecture by Robert Bradbury, not not Ray Bradbury. I had the pleasure of exchanging a few emails with him. Unfortunately those emails are lost so I cannot share them. He was an advocate of life extension and he was a big thinker. I’ll post both vids and a link to the M-brain page. He is not with us anymore I regret to say. Ready?

Renown aging expert Robert Bradbury discusses whole genome engineering, evolution and aging and ways to defeat aging. His talk touches on many areas including nanotechnology, biology, and computer science. More information can be found at http://manhattanbeachproject.com Follow updates at http://twitter.com/maxlifeorg

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Optogenetic laser light stimulation of the thalamus (credit: Jia Liu et al./eLife)

By flashing high-frequency (40 to 100 pulses per second) optogenetic lasers at the brain’s thalamus, scientists were able to wake up sleeping rats and cause widespread brain activity. In contrast, flashing the laser at 10 pulses per second suppressed the activity of the brain’s sensory cortex and caused rats to enter a seizure-like state of unconsciousness.

“We hope to use this knowledge to develop better treatments for brain injuries and other neurological disorders,” said Jin Hyung Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and bioengineering at Stanford University, and a senior author of the study, published in the open-access journal eLIFE.

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US army’s report visualises augmented soldiers & killer robots.

The US Army’s recent report “Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050” describes a number of future war scenarios that raise vexing ethical dilemmas. Among the many tactical developments envisioned by the authors, a group of experts brought together by the US Army Research laboratory, three stand out as both plausible and fraught with moral challenges: augmented humans, directed-energy weapons, and autonomous killer robots. The first two technologies affect humans directly, and therefore present both military and medical ethical challenges. The third development, robots, would replace humans, and thus poses hard questions about implementing the law of war without any attending sense of justice.

Augmented humans. Drugs, brain-machine interfaces, neural prostheses, and genetic engineering are all technologies that may be used in the next few decades to enhance the fighting capability of soldiers, keep them alert, help them survive longer on less food, alleviate pain, and sharpen and strengthen their cognitive and physical capabilities. All raise serious ethical and bioethical difficulties.

Drugs and prosthetics are medical interventions. Their purpose is to save lives, alleviate suffering, or improve quality of life. When used for enhancement, however, they are no longer therapeutic. Soldiers designated for enhancement would not be sick. Rather, commanders would seek to improve a soldier’s war-fighting capabilities while reducing risk to life and limb. This raises several related questions.

Continue reading “Ethics on the near-future battlefield” | >

“Inhuman: The Next & Final Phase of Man is Here” is not fiction or a mockudrama but a new investigative documentary from Defender Films and Raiders News Productions.

Inhuman travels the globe to unveil for the first time how breakthrough advances in science, technology and philosophy—including cybernetics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, machine intelligence and synthetic biology are poised to create mind-boggling game changes to everything we have known until now about Homo sapiens.

As astonishing technological developments push the frontiers of humanity toward far-reaching morphological transformation (which promises in the very near future to redefine what it means to be human), an intellectual and fast-growing cultural movement known as transhumanism intends the use of these powerful new fields of science and technology as tools that will radically redesign our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and even perhaps—as Professor Joel Garreau, Lincoln Professor of Law, claims—our immortal souls.

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Each year, an estimated 70 million sharks are killed for their fins. The brutal shark finning process involves cutting off a live shark’s fins and returning the debilitated animal back into the water to die a slow death. Highly valued in traditional Asian medicine and cuisine, the fins can sell for as much as $300 a pound on the black market.

What if an artificial shark fin could remove sharks from the equation completely?

New Wave Foods, a San Francisco-based sustainable seafood company, is developing a bioengineered fin product that could pull the rug out from underneath the shark trade.

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In spite of the popular perception of the state of artificial intelligence, technology has yet to create a robot with the same instincts and adaptability as a human. While humans are born with some natural instincts that have evolved over millions of years, Neuroscientist and Artificial Intelligence Expert Dr. Danko Nikolic believes these same tendencies can be instilled in a robot.

“Our biological children are born with a set of knowledge. They know where to learn, they know where to pay attention. Robots simply can not do that,” Nikolic said. “The problem is you can not program it. There’s a trick we can use called AI Kindergarten. Then we can basically interact with this robot kind of like we do with children in kindergarten, but then make robots learn one level lower, at the level of something called machine genome.”

Programming that machine genome would require all of the innate human knowledge that’s evolved over thousands of years, Nikolic said. Lacking that ability, he said researchers are starting from scratch. While this form of artificial intelligence is still in its embryonic state, it does have some evolutionary advantages that humans didn’t have.

“By using AI Kindergarten, we don’t have to repeat the evolution exactly the way evolution has done it,” Nikolic said. “This experiment has been done already and the knowledge is already stored in our genes, so we can accelerate tremendously. We can skip millions of failed experiments where evolution has failed already.”

Rather than jumping into logic or facial recognition, researchers must still begin with simple things, like basic reflexes and build on top of that, Nikolic said. From there, we can only hope to come close to the intelligence of an insect or small bird.

“I think we can develop robots that would be very much biological, like robots, and they would behave as some kind of lower level intelligence animal, like a cockroach or lesser intelligent birds,” he said. “(The robots) would behave the way (animals) do and they would solve problems the way they do. It would have the flexibility and adaptability that they have and that’s much, much more than what we have today.”

As that machine genome continues to evolve, Nikolic compared the potential manipulation of that genome to the selective breeding that ultimately evolved ferocious wolves into friendly dogs. The results of robotic evolution will be equally benign, and he believes, any attempts to develop so-called “killer robots” won’t happen overnight. Just as it takes roughly 20 years for a child to fully develop into an adult, Nikolic sees an equally long process for artificial intelligence to evolve.

Nikolic cited similar attempts in the past where the manipulation of the genome of biological systems produced a very benign result. Further, he doesn’t foresee researchers creating something dangerous, and given his theory that AI could develops from a core genome, then it would be next to impossible to change the genome of a machine or of a biological system by just changing a few parts.

Going forward, Nikolic still sees a need for caution. Building some form of malevolent artificial intelligence is possible, he said, but the degree of difficulty still makes it unlikely.

“We can not change the genome of machine or human simply by changing a few parts and then having the thing work as we want. Making it mean is much more difficult than developing a nuclear weapon,” Nikolic said. “I think we have things to watch out for, and there should be regulation, but I don’t think this is a place for some major fear… there is no big risk. What we will end up with, I believe, will be a very friendly AI that will care for humans and serve humans and that’s all we will ever use.”

With modern innovations such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wi-fi, tablet computing and more, it’s easy for man to look around and say that the human brain is a complex and well-evolved organ. But according to Author, Neuroscientist and Psychologist Gary Marcus, the human mind is actually constructed somewhat haphazardly, and there is still plenty of room for improvement.

“I called my book Kluge, which is an old engineer’s word for a clumsy solution. Think of MacGyver kind of duct tape and rubber bands,” Marcus said. “The thesis of that book is that the human mind is a kluge. I was thinking in terms of how this relates to evolutionary psychology and how our minds have been shaped by evolution.”

Marcus argued that evolution is not perfect, but instead it makes “local maxima,” which are good, but not necessarily the best possible solutions. As a parallel example, he cites the human spine, which allows us to stand upright; however, since it isn’t very well engineered, it also gives us back pain.

“You can imagine a better solution with three legs or branches that would distribute the load better, but we have this lousy solution where our spines are basically like a flag pole supporting 70 percent of our body weight,” Marcus said.

“The reason for that is we’re evolved from tetrapods, which have four limbs and distribute their weight horizontally like a picnic table. As we moved upright, we took what was closest in evolutionary space, which is what took the fewest number of genes in order to give us this new kind of system of standing upright. But it’s not what you would have if you designed it from scratch.”

While Marcus’ book talked about the typical notion in evolutionary psychology that we have evolved to the optimal, he also noted that the human mind works as a function of two pathways, both the optimal performance and our brains’ history. To that end, he sees evolution as a probabilistic process of genes that are nearby, which aren’t necessarily those that are best for a given solution.

“A lot of the book was actually about our memories. The argument I made was that, if you really want a system of brain that does the thing humans do, you would want a kind of memory system that we find in computers, which is called location addressable memory,” Marcus explained.

“With location addressable memory, I’m going to store something in location seven or location eight or nine, and then you’re guaranteed to be able to go back to that thing you want when you want it, which is why computer memory is reliable. Our memory is not even remotely reliable. I can forget what I was going to say or forget where I parked my car. Our memories are nothing even close to the theoretical optimum that a computer shows us.”

Enhancing our minds, and our memories, won’t happen overnight, Marcus said. One might have a “brain like a computer” in theory, but he believes a more evolved, computer-like human brain is thousands of years away.

“There is what I call ‘evolutionary inertia’ that says once something is in place, it’s very hard for evolution to change it. If you change one or two genes, you might have an organism that survives. If you change several hundred, most likely, things are gonna’ break.”

In other words, evolution is the ultimate resourceful engine. Most evolutionary changes are small, since the brain tends to tweak the existing parts rather than start from scratch, which would be a more costly and rather inefficient solution in a survival-of-the-fittest-type world.

Given that genetic science hasn’t worked through a way to rewire the human brain, Marcus poses that better solution toward cognitive enhancement might be found in implants. Rather than generations from now, he believes that advancement could happen in our lifetimes.

“There are now actual cognitive enhancements, if you count motor control substitutes. Neural prostheses are here in limited ways. We know roughly how to make them. There’s a lot of fine detail that needs to be sorted,” Marcus said. “We certainly know how to write computer programs that can translate between interfaces. The big limiting step in improving our memory or enhancing our memory is, we just don’t really understand how information is stored in the brain. I think (a solution for that) is a 50-year project. It’s certainly not a 50,000 year project.”

Gooooood, good.

Big data will help crack the code on aging.

Two of the leading scientists at the edge of the medical revolution believe that our life expectancy could start creeping up toward the triple digits.

David Agus, a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California, said at the Fortune Global Forum on Monday that he believes that with our current technology humans have the potential to regularly live into their ninth or tenth decade.

Continue reading “Big Data and Genetic Sequencing Will Help Extend the Human Lifespan” | >

Substantially smaller and longer-lasting batteries for everything from portable electronic devices to electric cars could be come a reality thanks to an innovative technology developed by University of Waterloo researchers.

Zhongwei Chen, a chemical engineering professor at Waterloo, and a team of graduate students have created a low-cost battery using silicon that boosts the performance and life of lithium-ion batteries. Their findings are published in the latest issue of Nature Communications.

Waterloo’s silicon battery technology promises a 40 to 60 per cent increase in energy density, which is important for consumers with smartphones, smart homes and smart wearables.

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