Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: The revolutionary field of bio-computing is making waves as DishBrain, a neural system combining 800,000 living brain cells, learns to play Pong. Recognizing the pressing need for ethical guidelines in this emerging domain, the pioneers behind DishBrain have joined forces with bioethicists in a study.

The research explores the moral considerations around biological computing systems and their potential consciousness. Beyond its innovation, the technology offers vast environmental benefits, potentially transforming the energy-consuming IT industry.

Pigs with human kidneys? Brain-powered computer chips? Science is creating new kinds of living things – and our moral understanding needs to catch up fast.

A blog by the company’s chief trust officer, Dana Rao, highlighted the importance of ethics while developing new AI tools. Generative AI has come much more into mainstream awareness in recent months with the launch of ChatGPT and DALL-E systems, which can understand written and verbal requests to generate convincingly human-like text and images.

Artists have complained that generative AIs being trained on their work is tantamount to ‘ripping off’ their styles or creating discriminatory or explicit content from harmless inputs. Others have called into question the ease with which humans can pass off AI-generated prose as their own work.

Read more: Schools ban ChatGPT.

Every day we encounter circumstances we consider wrong: a starving child, a corrupt politician, an unfaithful partner, a fraudulent scientist. These examples highlight several moral issues, including matters of care, fairness and betrayal. But does anything unite them all?

Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have passionately argued whether moral judgments share something distinctive that separates them from non-moral matters. Moral monists claim that morality is unified by a common characteristic and that all moral issues involve concerns about harm. Pluralists, in contrast, argue that moral judgments are more diverse in nature.

Fascinated by this centuries-old debate, a team of researchers set out to probe the nature of morality using one of moral psychology’s most prolific theories. The group, led by UC Santa Barbara’s René Weber, intensively studied 64 individuals via surveys, interviews and brain imaging on the wrongness of various behaviors.

How brain enhancements can correct disabilities is an important question. But not a Closer To Truth question. What happens to personal identity? Would “I” still be me? What about moral standing? Would it change? Could my mind be uploaded? Would “I” live on?

Featuring interviews with Michio Kaku, Antonio Damasio, Leonard Mlodinow, V.S. Ramachandran and David Chalmers.

Continue reading “What Would Transhuman Brains Mean? | Episode 2113 | Closer To Truth” »

The Death of Death is an international bestseller by José Cordeiro and David Wood that claims that “death will be optional by 2045” – or even earlier, if more public and private funds are invested in rejuvenation technologies.

Longevity. Technology: Already available in more than 10 languages, the book provides insight into recent exponential advances in AI, tissue regeneration, stem cell treatment, organ printing, cryopreservation and genetic therapies that, say the authors, offer a realistic chance to solve the problem of the aging of the human body for the first time in human history. In fact, the book’s subtitle is The Scientific Possibility of Physical Immortality and its Moral Defense.

Given that until relatively recently, just mentioning the concept of ‘biological immortality’ was enough to raise eyebrows and with most of the opinion that it should be filed away under ‘science fiction’ or ‘charlatanism’. However, longevity science is advancing at an incredible pace and today there are people who no longer wonder if immortality is possible, but when it will be a reality. We sat down with José Luis Corderio PhD to find out more.

Michael Levin discusses his 2022 paper “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds” and his 2023 paper with Joshua Bongard, “There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-scale Machines.” Links to papers flagged 🚩below.

Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University; his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. He works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.

Continue reading “Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond” »

Michael Levin talk for the Mind, Technology, and Society (MTS) talk series at UC Merced on January 23, 2023. Abstract: Each of us makes the remarkable journey from the physics and chemistry of a quiescentunfertilized egg to that of a complex human being. How can we understand the continuousprocesses that scale up minds from the tiny physiological competencies of single cells to the large-scale metacognitive capacities of large brains? Here, I will describe a framework known as TAME-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere — which enables identifying, understanding, andrelating to unconventional cognitive agents. I will use the example of the collective intelligence ofcells during morphogenesis to illustrate how we can begin to widen the lessons of multiscale neuroscience well beyond neurons. This will be essential as we head into a future that will bepopulated by a wide range of evolved, designed, and hybrid beings with novel bodies and novelminds. I will conclude with a case study of our new synthetic biorobot (Xenobots) and a discussionof the implications of these ideas for evolution, biomedicine, and ethics.

That was fast.

The Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper serving the Columbus, Ohio area, has suspended its AI efforts after its AI-powered sports writing bot was caught churning out horrible, robotic articles about local sports, Axios reports.

The Dispatch — which is notably owned by USA Today publisher Gannett — only started publishing the AI-generated sports pieces on August 18, using the bot to drum up quick-hit stories about the winners and losers in regional high school football and soccer matches. And though the paper’s ethics disclosure states that all AI-spun content featured in its reporting “must be verified for accuracy and factuality before being used in reporting,” we’d be surprised if a single human eye was laid on these articles before publishing.