Lifeboat Foundation

by Steve Dent — Engadget

If you recently installed or updated uTorrent on your PC, you may have have picked up an unwanted passenger: a bitcoin miner called Epic Scale. If you don’t pay attention, that piece of code can be inadvertently installed with the latest uTorrent build (version 3.4.2). It can then use your computer as part of a bitcoin farm (Litecoin, to be exact) to generate revenue for third parties. Users first reported the situation on uTorrent’s forums, and it was quickly confirmed by a senior support manager. He said that the app “cannot be installed without permission,” but one user claimed that there was “never a warning about it,” even though he opted out of other bundled software.
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By Levi Sumagaysay — siliconbeat

“When I am successful in realizing this mega-project, then I will finally have 10,000 years for numerous hobbies.”

— Dmitry Itskov, founder of the 2045 Initiative, which aims to transfer our brains and human consciousness to robot avatars instead of bodies that weaken and die. Itskov is a billionaire who’s known as the godfather of the Russian Internet. He also apparently has plenty of hobbies.

Think tech isn’t working on big problems? Newsweek checks on the progress of the 2045 Initiative and other efforts — including in Silicon Valley — to cheat death. The efforts are funded by other deep-pocketed titans of tech: Peter Thiel of PayPal fame has given money to the Methuselah Foundation, which is working to find drugs that cure age-related damage to the body’s cells. Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s Ellison Medical Foundation distributes grants to those who are researching aging. As we’ve written, Google spinoff Calico‘s stated mission is to “harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan.” Google’s Larry Page has also backed Singularity University; co-founders Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis are big fans of immortality — or at least living till 700.

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By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

The desolate reaches of deep space figure heavily in today’s sci-fi short film double feature. Space, as it turns out, is really big and empty. Until we get warp drive or discover a local wormhole—getting anywhere will be a long, lonely slog. The other thread tying the films together? They’re both by director Eli Sasich.

First up is HENRi. The film is like an episode of Life After People in space. What happens to a ship’s artificially intelligent computer after its crew dies? It gets melancholy, begins missing its human friends something terrible, and builds itself a robot body out of the ship’s rusty scrap and spare parts.

“My particular interest for this film was memory and its intrinsic relationship with consciousness,” Sasich writes in an article about the film’s making. “I also wanted a robot of my very own.”

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Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub

Death—that was so last century. Here in the early 21^st, it’s all about life. More life. A lot more life.

Right now, anti-aging medicine is booming. For certain, the size of the market is a little hard to determine, but most estimates put it close to $300 billion. And growing.

Already, serious heavyweights like Google and Human Longevity Inc. (HLI)—the company founded by X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, stem-cell pioneer Robert Hariri, and genomics visionary Craig Venter—have entered the fray. And, of course, ideas about slowing the insults of time are everywhere.

Continue reading “Are We Hunting A Cure For Death In All The Wrong Places?” »

Jordan Pearson — Motherboard

It’s 2020, and you’ve signed up for a weight-loss program. You’re alone on a Saturday night because your significant other is out of town, none of your friends are available to catch a flick at the theatre, and a pizza is sounding pretty good. You Google the address for your favorite joint and walk over instead of ordering dro​ne delivery because it’s cheaper, and you’re old fashioned like that. Just before you order at the counter, however, your friend calls you to ask if you want to see a movie after all.

How did this happen? An algorithm analyzing your communications and monitoring your friend netw​orks learned that your partner was away, and your Facebook posts revealed that you wanted to see a movie but nobody was available. Sentiment analysis of your tweets​ suggested that you were feeling alone and a little sad.
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By Kat McGowan — Nautilus

In January, the pharmaceutical company Roche paid more than a billion dollars to buy about half of a small company called Foundation Medicine. Foundation has not invented any new drugs or life-saving devices. Most insurance companies won’t pay for its main product, and like a lot of biotech companies, it loses money.

The big bucks are for Foundation’s information. Roche, Foundation, and many other cancer researchers now believe that thinking about cancer in terms of data is going to be the way to beat the disease. The deal gives Roche access to Foundation’s database, which holds the DNA sequences of the tumors of 35,000 cancer patients, along with information about what kinds of drugs they were treated with and how good those drugs were at beating back the cancer.
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By NICK WINGFIELD — The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Few technologies have generated more attention than virtual reality, which promises to immerse people in 3-D games and video.

Yet for the last couple of years, the companies building virtual reality headsets have begged for patience from content creators and the public. The companies’ biggest concern: that unpolished virtual reality products could make people physically sick.

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Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation:
How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030
By Tony Seba

Book review by Jose Cordeiro

All the armies in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo, 1854

Continue reading “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: book review” »

Samuel Arbesman — Aeon

My family’s first computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Billed by its pitchman, Star Trek’s William Shatner, as the ‘wonder computer of the 1980s’, I have many fond memories of this antiquated machine. I used to play games on it, with cassette tapes that served as primitive storage devices. One of the cassettes we bought was a Pac-Man clone that my brother and I would play. Instead of a yellow pie with a mouth, it used racing cars.

My most vivid memories are of the games whose code I typed in myself. While you could buy software for the VIC-20 (like the racecar game), a major way that people acquired software in those days was through computer code published in the pages of magazines. Want to play a fun skiing game? Then type out the computer program into your computer, line by line, and get to play it yourself. No purchase necessary. These programs were common then, but no longer. The tens of millions of lines of code that make up Microsoft Office won’t fit in a magazine. It would take shelves-worth of books.
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