Lifeboat Foundation

“Every great and difficult thing has required a strong sense of optimism,” says editor and author Kevin Kelly, who believes that we have a moral obligation to be optimistic. Tracing humanity’s progress throughout history, he’s observed that a positive outlook helps us solve problems and empowers us to forge a path forward. In this illuminating talk, he shares three reasons for optimism during challenging times, explaining how it can help us become better ancestors and create the world we want to see for ourselves and future generations.

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A new global agreement has been established by eight worldwide universities to commit to the development of human-centered approaches to artificial intelligence (AI). The newest university to join the agreement, which could impact people all across the globe, was the University of Florida (UF).

The Global University Summit was held back on October 27 at Notre Dame University. Joseph Glover, UF provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, signed The Rome Call for AI Ethics on behalf of the University of Florida. He also served as a panelist for the two-day summit, which was attended by 36 universities from around the world.

Ensuring Human-Centered Principles

This lecture was recorded on March 25, 2012 as part of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015).

SAM HARRIS IS THE AUTHOR of the New York Times bestsellers, The Moral Landscape, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. His new book is short (96) pages, to the point, and will change the way we all view free will, as Oliver Sacks wrote: “Brilliant and witty — and never less than incisive — Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000.” UCSD neuroscientist V.S, Ramachandran notes: “In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates — with great intellectual ferocity and panache — that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.”

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Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.

Summing up fears

The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.

The escalating crisis exposes the weakness of Biden’s position. He is gambling with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, over which he has no moral claim, that Ukraine will somehow be in a stronger military position after a winter of war and power outages, with hundreds of thousands more Russian troops in the areas they control. This is a bet on a much longer war, in which U.S. taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and many more Ukrainians will die, with no clear endgame short of nuclear war.

#StopWar #NoWar #NuclearWar #WW3

Leaders in the global South, former U.S. diplomats and Henry Kissinger (!) agree: It’s time to negotiate for real.

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One day, we might be able to bring back to life every human ever lived, by the means of science and technology. And it will be a good day.

To the best of my knowledge, the idea was first described in detail by Fyodorov, a 19th century thinker.

Fyodorov argued that it is our moral duty to save our ancestors from the claws of death, to resurrect every human ever lived. And one day, we’ll have the technology.

*Intelligence Beyond the Brain: morphogenesis as an example of the scaling of basal cognition*

*Description:*
Each of us takes the remarkable journey from physics to mind: we start life as a quiescent oocyte (collection of chemical reactions) and slowly change and acquire an advanced, centralized mind. How does unified complex cognition emerge from the collective intelligence of cells? In this talk, I will use morphogenesis to illustrate how evolution scales cognition across problem spaces. Embryos and regenerating organs produce very complex, robust anatomical structures and stop growth and remodeling when those structures are complete. One of the most remarkable things about morphogenesis is that it is not simply a feed-forward emergent process, but one that has massive plasticity: even when disrupted by manipulations such as damage or changing the sizes of cells, the system often manages to achieve its morphogenetic goal. How do cell collectives know what to build and when to stop? Constructing and repairing anatomies in novel circumstances is a remarkable example of the collective intelligence of a biological swarm. I propose that a multi-scale competency architecture is how evolution exploits physics to achieve robust machines that solve novel problems. I will describe what is known about developmental bioelectricity — a precursor to neurobiology which is used for cognitive binding in biological collectives, that scales their intelligence and the size of the goals they can pursue. I will also discuss the cognitive light cone model, and conclude with examples of synthetic living machines — a new biorobotics platform that uses some of these ideas to build novel primitive intelligences. I will end by speculating about ethics, engineering, and life in a future that integrates deeply across biological and synthetic agents.

Fellow webinar participant Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, argued that gene-hacking astronauts could even be a moral imperative.

“And are we maybe ethically bound to do so?” Mason said. “I think if it’s a long enough mission, you might have to do something, assuming it’s safe, which we can’t say yet.”

I had quite a thought-provoking discussion on modern education with Boris Zimin, the head of the Zimin Foundation, which funds education and research.

The Zimin Foundation is a non-profit organization established by the Zimin family to aid education and science. The Foundation partners with distinguished universities and funds research and educational projects that combine academic excellence with high potential for positive, real-world impact. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Zimin Foundation has been supporting researchers and students affected by the war. I spoke with philanthropist Boris Zimin, the head of the Zimin Foundation, about his perspective on modern education.

Julia Brodsky: From your experience working with various educational funds and organizations, what do you think should be the emphasis of modern education?

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