Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: cyborgs – Page 119

Musk concerns over Singularity/ cyborgs technology.

We are said to be headed towards a wired future. But that could equally be a weird future, going by what some tech entrepreneurs and artificial intelligence visionaries are saying about it. It’s going to get a lot weirder than self-driving smart cars. Elon Musk, who co-founded Paypal and started the Tesla electric car company – and thus has a track record of delivering on ambitious projects – also set up the SpaceX company, whose ultimate goal is to colonise Mars. He’s just announced, at this year’s Code Conference in Los Angeles, plans to send the first manned mission to Mars as early as 2024. Moreover cargo flights to Mars are also planned every two years, keeping in mind that a habitation on Mars will require regular supplies from earth.

Musk says he’s doing this to preserve humanity, since possibilities of a calamitous event that destroys human civilisation on earth – thanks to runaway advances in technology – are high. Perhaps we have a foretaste of this already when the Louvre museum packs up its treasures of human art and locks its doors due to floods in Paris, an event that has been linked to the pumping of greenhouse gases into the air that disrupt the earth’s climate. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos comes at the same issue from the opposite end. He says heavy industry is too polluting and will need to be relocated to outer space to preserve the earth.

There is also the spectre of singularity, the point at which machines become so intelligent that humans are rendered superfluous. To head this off, according to Musk, we will need to add an artificial intelligence layer to the human brain itself. The future, it appears, is cyborg. We will all be Superman, or bust.

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A feel good story on 3D printers.

This lil’ kitty named Sonic is now bionic.

The black-and-white cat, who was surrendered to Denver Animal Shelter over three months ago, had been born with a leg deformity called radial agenesis, according to Meghan Hughes, communications director for Denver Environmental Health.

Because of the deformity, Sonic was forced to drag his leg on the ground to move, she told ABC News today.

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As the computation and communication circuits we build radically miniaturize (i.e. become so low power that 1 picoJoule is sufficient to bang out a bit of information over a wireless transceiver; become so small that 500 square microns of thinned CMOS can hold a reasonable sensor front-end and digital engine), the barrier to introducing these types of interfaces into organisms will get pretty low. Put another way, the rapid pace of computation and communication miniaturization is swiftly blurring the line between the technological base that created us and the technological based we’ve created. Michel Maharbiz, University of California, Berkeley, is giving an overview (june 16, 2016) of recent work in his lab that touches on this concern. Most of the talk will cover their ongoing exploration of the remote control of insects in free flight via implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating systems.; recent results with neural interfaces and extreme miniaturization directions will be discussed. If time permits, he will show recent results building extremely small neural interfaces they call “neural dust,” work done in collaboration with the Carmena, Alon and Rabaey labs.

Radical miniaturization has created the ability to introduce a synthetic neural interface into a complex, multicellular organism, as exemplified by the creation of a “cyborg insect.”

“The rapid pace of computation and communication miniaturization is swiftly blurring the line between technological base we’ve created and the technological base that created us,” explained Dr. Maharbiz. “These combined trends of extreme miniaturization and advanced neural interfaces have enabled us to explore the remote control of insects in free flight via implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating systems.”

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Imagine these fighter jets being equipped with the DARPA death laser that is being worked on. Very deadly mix.

The size of a matchstick, the stentrode can provide the “brain-machine interface” or BMI necessary for thought-controlled devices. Neural implants currently in use require invasive surgery.

Stentrodes can be attached to the brain using catheter angiography. This procedure passes the device through blood vessels in the neck and into the brain without cutting open the skull.

Development of the minimally invasive stentrode is a key step in the widespread use of thought-controlled devices such as prosthetics and weapons.

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US Special Ops Command plans to have some initial TALOS exoskeleton suit prototypes by 2018.

Progress is being made on exoskeletons for US special forces. The exoskeletons are designed to increase strength and protection and help keep valuable operators alive when they kick down doors and engage in combat.

The technologies currently being developed include.

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Bionic Power makes wearable technology for charging batteries. Today, we are focused on developing our PowerWalk® Kinetic Energy Harvester for military use and will begin multi-unit field trials with the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps next year. In the future, we see our walk-recharge technology being used in disaster zones and remote worksites, and by consumers in recreational, emergency preparedness and backup applications.

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Pressure is on DARPA by US Military to speed up on completing the soft Exosuit.

The clothing-like Soft Exosuit has been described as a “Wearable Robot” by the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) that’s commissioning universities and research institutions to advance this military technology. The DARPA Soft Exosuit is part of the agency’s Warrior Web program.

A prototype Soft Exosuit had a series of webbing straps around the lower half of the body with a low-power microprocessor and a network of flexible strain sensors. These electronics act as the “brain” and “nervous system” of the Soft Exosuit. They continuously monitor data signals, including suit tension, wearer position (walking, running, crouched) and more.

In 2014, DARPA awarded $2.9 million to The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University to further develop its Soft Exosuit, other versions of which might eventually help persons (military and civilian) with limited mobility.

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Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:

When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.

In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.

I recently walked through Boston’s Logan International Airport; a NASA display reminded me that GPS navigation, anti-icing systems, memory foam and LED lights were all originally created for space travel. Other inventions NASA science has created include the pacemaker, scratch-resistant lenses and the solar panel.

These types of advancements are one of the most important reasons I am hoping our next U.S. president will try to jump-start the American space program — both privately and publicly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear any of them are talking about the issue. But they should be. As we enter the transhumanist age — the era of bionic limbs, brain implants and artificial intelligence — space exploration might once again dramatically lead us forward in discovering the most our species can become.

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Nice!

Our skin is our largest organ. A gateway between our brain and the rest of the world.

Imagine then a scene where skin could communicate what’s going on inside a human body. It could inform surgeons, provide alerts when our body is about to fall ill, or even diagnose diseases inside another human being, simply through the sense of touch.

University of Tokyo scientist Takao Someya is making that scene a reality.

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