Lifeboat Foundation

It seems like every day we’re warned about a new, AI-related threat that could ultimately bring about the end of humanity. According to Author and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, those existential risks aren’t so black and white, and an individual’s ability to influence those risks might surprise you.

Image Credit: TED

Bostrom defines an existential risk as one distinction of earth originating life or the permanent and drastic destruction of our future development, but he also notes that there is no single methodology that is applicable to all the different existential risks (as more technically elaborated upon in this Future of Humanity Institute study). Rather, he considers it an interdisciplinary endeavor.

“If you’re wondering about asteroids, we have telescopes, we can study them with, we can look at past crater impacts and derive hard statistical data on that,” he said. “We find that the risk of asteroids is extremely small and likewise for a few of the other risks that arrive from nature. But other really big existential risks are not in any direct way susceptible to this kind of rigorous quantification.”

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BATH, Maine (AP) — The largest destroyer ever built for the U.S. Navy headed out to sea for the first time Monday, departing from shipbuilder Bath Iron Works and carefully navigating the winding Kennebec River before reaching the open ocean where the ship will undergo sea trials.

More than 200 shipbuilders, sailors and residents gathered to watch as the futuristic 600-foot, 15,000-ton USS Zumwalt glided past Fort Popham, accompanied by tugboats.

Kelley Campana, a Bath Iron Works employee, said she had goose bumps and tears in her eyes.

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“You’ll never get a good job, son, if you’re smoking pot all the time!”

That’s a scolding you won’t hear in the future. Besides the fact that pot smokers can become president, the future will not require you to get a good job. The traditional motivation to keep your mind orderly and bourgeois will be gone, so let your mind fly its freak flag and wander the Technicolor pathways already cleared by St. John of Patmos, Salvador Dali, and Carl Sagan.

In the near future, we may all be unemployed. We are entering what is generally called the “second machine age.” And, optimistically speaking, it may become the best thing that ever happened to the human being.

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The future was easily predictable.

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Also you should watch Giant Fully-Mechanized Hulkbuster Toy Has a Full Iron Man Inside SDCC 2015 http://goo.gl/4KLlP1

Video courtesy Tech Insider.

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Check out the trailer for The Shaman, a new short film debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival. As with a lot of short films we’ve seen lately, this has top-notch visual effects — but more than that, it looks like a thing of pure beauty. And it has an original story, with a concept I haven’t come across before.

Basically, in The Shaman, it’s 2204, and the world has been at war for 73 years. And the main character isn’t a soldier — he’s a Shaman, one of a group of people who used to be healers. But now, instead, he uses his supernatural powers to “heal” the souls of the enemy, basically helping them cross over into the afterlife. That’s what I get from the trailer, in any case. This is the work of writer/director Marco Kalantari (Ainoa).

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