Lifeboat Foundation

A Peninsula biotech startup cofounded by pioneering geneticist George Church — who already is working to engineer the woolly mammoth out of extinction — is trying to raise as much as $5 million in a crowdfunding effort to design healthier, longer-living pets.

AdoraPet Biosciences Inc. of San Mateo plans to apply the genome-engineering CRISPR technology at the egg stage of dogs and cats or insert CRISPR-modified DNA into eggs, to make nonallergenic pets that don’t shed and ultimately live longer, are free of genetic diseases caused by inbreeding and are resistant to cancer and other serious diseases.

Artificial intelligence is all over the news. When ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new chatbot, was released last month it seemed, finally, to match the hype that generative A.I. has been promising for years—an easy-to-use machine intelligence for the general public.

Wild predictions soon followed: The death of search engines, the end of homework, the hollowing-out of creative professions.

For the creative professions, the rise of generative A.I. feels like an existential threat. But a familiar technology, invented 184 years ago, can show us how to adapt and thrive in a new reality.

Continue reading “Why The Creative Economy Shouldn’t Fear Generative A.I.” »

One afternoon in the fall of 2019, in a grand old office building near the Arc de Triomphe, I was buzzed through an unmarked door into a showroom for the future of surveillance. The space on the other side was dark and sleek, with a look somewhere between an Apple Store and a doomsday bunker. Along one wall, a grid of electronic devices glinted in the moody downlighting—automated license plate readers, Wi-Fi-enabled locks, boxy data processing units. I was here to meet Giovanni Gaccione, who runs the public safety division of a security technology company called Genetec. Headquartered in Montreal, the firm operates four of these “Experience Centers” around the world, where it peddles intelligence products to government officials. Genetec’s main sell here was software, and Gaccione had agreed to show me how it worked.

He led me first to a large monitor running a demo version of Citigraf, his division’s flagship product. The screen displayed a map of the East Side of Chicago. Around the edges were thumbnail-size video streams from neighborhood CCTV cameras. In one feed, a woman appeared to be unloading luggage from a car to the sidewalk. An alert popped up above her head: “ILLEGAL PARKING.” The map itself was scattered with color-coded icons—a house on fire, a gun, a pair of wrestling stick figures—each of which, Gaccione explained, corresponded to an unfolding emergency. He selected the stick figures, which denoted an assault, and a readout appeared onscreen with a few scant details drawn from the 911 dispatch center. At the bottom was a button marked “INVESTIGATE,” just begging to be clicked.

In this talk titled CYBERNETIC THEORY: THE CODE OF REALITY & OUR FUTURE AS CYBERGODS at the Rotary Club, The Grand Autograph Hotel, Novosibirsk, Russia, on July 19, 2022, I go over many topics such as evolutionary cybernetics, Digital Physics, consciousness, philosophy of mind, cybernetic theory, Omega Point cosmology, physics of time, simulation theory, the Global Mind, AGI, VR, Metaverse, Cybernetic Singularity, transhumanism, posthumanism, cybernetic immortality, synthetic telepathy, mind-uploading, neurotechnologies, Fermi Paradox, the Dark Universe (Dark Matter and Dark Energy), the Argument for Cybertheism. The main 45-minute slide presentation is followed by a 15-minute Q&A session… More.

Russian-American futurist Alex M. Vikoulov presents his published works in a talk titled CYBERNETIC THEORY: THE CODE OF REALITY & OUR FUTURE AS CYBERGODS at the Rotary Club, The Grand Autograph Hotel, Novosibirsk, Russia, on July 19, 2022. The main 45-min.

Continue reading “Cybernetic Theory: The Code of Reality & Our Future as Cybergods” »

The earliest dinosaurs included carnivorous, omnivorous and herbivorous species, according to a team of University of Bristol paleobiologists.

By looking at the tooth shapes of the earliest dinosaurs and simulating their tooth function with computational modeling, experts were able to compare them to living reptiles and their diets. Their findings, published December 16 in Science Advances, show that many groups of plant-eating dinosaurs were ancestrally omnivorous and that the ancestors of our famous long-necked herbivores, such as Diplodocus, ate meat. This ability to diversify their diets early in their evolution likely explains their evolutionary and ecological success.

The earliest dinosaurs are enigmatic: they were much smaller than their later relatives and for most of the Triassic they were in the shadow of the crocodile-like reptiles. It is unknown how diverse they were in terms of diets and ecology, but scientists know something must have happened in the Triassic that allowed dinosaurs to endure the Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction and adapt in its aftermath, becoming the dominant group for the rest of the Mesozoic.

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The Fermi Paradox ask us how in a Universe so vast and ancient we seem to be the only intelligent civilization around, with no older interstellar alien empires visible in the galaxy. But could extinction play a role in that, or might extinction events instead drive evolution forward?

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Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Extinction” »

There are likely many exciting alien worlds for extraterrestrials to visit.

Now that more and more scientists are actively searching for signs of extraterrestrial life, whether in our solar system or in the far reaches of space, more attention has been brought to the Fermi paradox.

A new study in preprint server arXiv suggests that we might not have encountered intelligent extraterrestrials because they may not find humanity very interesting.

Continue reading “Aliens likely haven’t visited because humanity’s technological signature is very limited” »

A massive blast of light considered extremely rare and is believed to have been triggered by the collision of stars with a black hole that hit the Earth recently and which could help change our understanding of the universe, scientists revealed.

The event called a gamma-ray burst (GRB), which lasted for only 50 seconds, came from a nearby galaxy in December 2021. These blasts are considered to be the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Earlier, it was believed that GRBs only resulted from the destruction of massive stars, but astronomers now believe that it can come from the combination of two neutron stars.

What alternative sex-determining system will we adapt?

The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene.

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows how the spiny rat has evolved a new male-determining gene.

Continue reading “Men are losing their Y chromosome, and rats could show our future” »