Lifeboat Foundation

My new story for Vice Motherboard on the future of political campaining:

Lest we think future elections are all about the candidates, perhaps the largest possibility on the horizon could come from digital direct democracy—the concept where citizens participate in real time input in the government. I gently advocate for a fourth branch of government, in which the people can vote on issues that matter to them and their decrees could have real legal consequence on Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency.

Of course, that’s only if government even exists anymore. It’s possible the coming age of artificial intelligence and robots may replace the need for politicians. At least human ones. Some experts think superintelligent AI might be here in 10 to 15 years, so why not have a robot president that is totally altruistic and not susceptible to lobbyists and personal desires? This machine leader would simply always calculate the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, and go with that. No more Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, or whatever else we are.

Continue reading “Wild Transhumanist Campaign Tech We’ll See in Future Presidential Elections” »

Years ago I was expert witness for an IP case involving some very badly designed and coded software. Case was a significant mount of money, and I had to review tons of documents, code, and diagrams to help prepare the case and give my deposition. It would have been nice to have a bot to assist. So, I do like what I am reading in this article.

Rebecca Hawkes, head of marketing at RAVN Systems, discusses why artificial intelligence is showing promise in the legal sector.

There’s been a considerable amount of media hype around artificial intelligence recently, but this isn’t just the latest buzzword.

Continue reading “The artificial intelligence revolution in legal services” »

Wow — scary. Not scary for law abiding citizens to do this; scary due to criminals & terrorists. And, we have seen the ammo and high quanity gun clip already produced as well.

The 28-year-old is the face of open-source 3D gun design, an online movement of enthusiasts who use 3D printers and machining tools to build their own homemade weapons – ones that can shoot very real, and very deadly bullets.

Wilson isn’t some gun loon on an online soapbox; he is a well-educated, well-spoken, very argumentative young man who’s as responsible for creating his press portrayal as the journalists who’ve written about him. “I’m now more and more of a self-caricature,” he tells me. “I’ve had to become a fanatic over the past three years just to move the ball another three yards.”

Continue reading “Cody Wilson: the man who wants Americans to print their own 3D guns” »

The debate over them highlights one of the more controversial aspects of the increasingly social nature of our interactions with robots as they move from factories into our homes and someday, our bedrooms.”

“‘How we treat robots — it’s a mirror of our own psychology in a way,’ said Kate Darling, an expert in robot ethics at MIT’s Media Lab.

Advancements in machines that can mimic human beings are raising a host of new ethical, legal and moral questions.

Continue reading “Sex robots to become a reality” »

I still believe we need some sort of Environmental Protection Oversight in Space with the space junk already much less with mining.

One of Europe’s smallest states, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, cast its eyes to the cosmos on Friday, announcing it would draw up a law to facilitate mining on asteroids.

Extracting precious metals, rare minerals and other valuable commodities on passing asteroids is a staple of science fiction, but Luxembourg says incentives are urgently needed to turn this dream into fact.

Continue reading “Luxembourg says law legalizing mining asteroids will be completed” »

When you think about the headliners at a music festival, it’s unlikely that the first person to pop into your head would be Martine Rothblatt—the founder of Sirius XM, the one-time highest-paid female CEO in the world who made a robot clone of her wife, and the founder of the Terasem religion, which believes we’ll live forever by uploading our consciousness to the cloud. But Moogfest, a four-day citywide festival of music and technology in Durham, North Carolina, was not the average music festival. Unlike other festivals that make cursory overtures to technology, Moogfest dedicated as much time to explaining how technology influences creativity as to the creative output itself, even listing headline ‘technologists’ alongside its top-billed musical acts.

On the festival’s second day, Friday 20 May, Rothblatt took the stage to talk to a packed house at Durham’s Carolina Theater, in an atmosphere that felt far more like a TED talk than a music fest. Rothblatt, who is transgender, discussed the contentious North Carolina HB2 law, which bans transgender people from using public bathrooms of the gender they identify with; the idea that creativity would be better encouraged by free college tuition; and how she got to a point where she and her company, United Therapeutics, can actually think about 3D printing new body parts, and leaving our bodies behind—if we want. “You want to win more than you want to live,” she told the rapt crowd. “You yell ‘Geronimo’ as you jump crazily into monopolistic opposition.”

Quartz sat down with Rothblatt after her talk to chat more about her thoughts on AI, living forever, free education, and what happens to the soul once we’ve made digital copies of ourselves.

Continue reading “Entrepreneur and CEO Martine Rothblatt thinks we’ll 3D print new bodies and live forever on the internet” »

I reported on this 3 months ago; and glad to see others seeing the light.

While debate has focused on moral and legal issues of autonomous weapons, too little attention has been paid to the material dangers of an AI-powered war.

“It’s been dubbed the Google tax, but it will likely hit every global internet company operating in India—and, in turn, the country’s fledgling startup and digital advertising ecosystems.”

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With huge leaps taking place in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), right now, experts have started asking questions about the new forms of protection we might need against the formidable smarts and potential dangers of computers and robots of the near future.

But do robots need protection from us too? As the ‘minds’ of machines evolve ever closer to something that’s hard to tell apart from human intelligence, new generations of technology may need to be afforded the kinds of moral and legal protections we usually think of as ‘human’ rights, says mathematician Marcus du Sautoy from the University of Oxford in the UK.

Du Sautoy thinks that once the sophistication of computer thinking reaches a level basically akin to human consciousness, it’s our duty to look after the welfare of machines, much as we do that of people.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence should be protected” »