Lifeboat Foundation

By: Hank Pellesier,Brighter Brains - H+

Humanity+ members will be speaking at an exciting San Francisco East Bay transhumanist conference on March 1, that fans of Hplus should consider attending. Chairman Natasha Vita-More is a keynote speaker (along with her husband Max More) and recent HumanityPlus Board member Linda M. Glenn is also in the illustrious lineup. HumanityPlus is also co-sponsoring the event.

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We have been using the same propellant system for rockets since the Chinese fire arrows in 1000 A.D. A gas is expanded in a tube to generate force. Enough gas and force and you can break the bonds of the earth.

From gunpowder to liquid propellants to solid rocket boosters, nothing except size and volume has changed.

New proposed systems such as nuclear engines, magnetic rail guns, ion engines are all options that have not been shown to be functional at this point in time.

Our popular fantasy TV and movies all have some unspecified, powerful propulsion system that can easily break our gravity well to send us to outer space.

Continue reading “Hydrogen Space Launch” »

Dylan Love — Business Insider

You may have noticed we have a soft spot for sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. His fiction, especially as it pertains to robotics, cemented him in the sci-fi canon and advanced the thinking on what practical robotics would look like in the future.

He also used his fiction to entertain a foreboding question: Should a robot be able to kill a human?

Asimov decided not, and drew up three “laws of robotics” that governed how robots behaved in his fictional universes.

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By John Frank Weaver — Slate

Harvey Milk famously advised his “gay brothers and sisters” to come out, but “only to the people you know, and who know you.” He understood the power of human empathy. It is hard to hate people you know and who know you.

We’ll soon see how human empathy shapes the design of artificial intelligence because, as it turns out, our empathy is so strong we will consider objects people if we can interact with them like people. Her played with this idea in a future where Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore falls in love with his operating system, Samantha. But right now on Indiegogo, you can contribute to EmoSPARK, “the first artificial intelligence console committed to your happiness.”

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John A. Rogers, University of Illinois

Fitness buffs are going gaga for gadgets like the Fitbit Flex and Jawbone UP — for now. Although the stylish rubber bracelets can monitor heart rate, sleep patterns and other vital signs, and even display them on a smartphone, John Rogers thinks wearable health can do better.

Today’s often clunky self-health trackers are “just hanging there,” said Rogers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a result, they only measure a handful of biological functions. “We want to go for more sophisticated, clinical quality measurements in ordinary daily life. Being intimately in contact with the skin is the only way to do it.”

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The Economist

IN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was not without dangers.

One of the worries Keynes admitted was a “new disease”: “technological unemployment…due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” His readers might not have heard of the problem, he suggested—but they were certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come.

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Cory Doctorow — Boin Boing

Some Bitcoin enthusiasts have announced a new project called Bitcloud. The idea is something like the old Mojo Nation P2P architecture, in which individual Internet users perform tasks for each other — routing, storage, lookups, computation — in exchange for very small payments.

The Bitcloud protocol uses Bitcoin-style accounting to allocate those microtransfers, along with Bitcoin-style proof-of-work (they call it “proof-of-bandwidth”) and the authors suggest that the potential for profit by individual members will create enough capacity to replace a large number of centralized commercial services (“Youtube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, ISPs”) with “distributed autonomous corporations,” that obviate the need for centralized control in order to supply anonymous, robust, free services to the public.

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