IEET contributor Danko Nikolic will be speaking at a conference in Berlin on February 25, titled “Rise of AI.”

On Monday, January 4, 2016, the History Channel aired a 2-hour documentary called “The Seven New Signs of the Apocalypse” at 9pm ET.

Gerd Leonhard is an acclaimed European futurist; his popular video was recently featured at IEET and he will soon be an IEET contributing writer. To introduce him to our audience, I interviewed him on his forecasts, ideas, and values.

IEET: Can you expand on your comment in the video, where you say: ”we will see more changes in the next 20 years than we did in the previous 300” ?

After reading the IEET article No Form, Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, Consciousness:  A Buddhist Perspective on AI by Andrew Cvercko, I found myself coming back to a question that I’ve been thinking about on various levels for quite a while: What would an artificial intelligence want? From a Buddhist perspective, what characterizes sentience is suffering. 

I am one of those people who “believe” (for lack of a better term) in the future. I am sure advancing technologies are mostly a good thing. Progress makes existence for humans better, and beyond that technological advances allow us to change undesirable aspects of the human state (and there are many) and engineer these in objectively better states of “transhumanism”.

Building really intelligent machines, or so-called strong AI, is a daunting task for technology. I describe here an approach that can lead to creation of strong AI. The approach requires two technological novelties. One is a novel way of organizing knowledge. The other is a novel way for knowledge acquisition. Both novelties heavily mimic biology. The resulting method is called AI-Kindergarten and allows creation of safe AI that is biologically-like intelligent. At Nikolic Research Inc. we use AI-Kindergarten to produce strong AI software for time series forecasts, including applications to stock trading. Here is the story of the AI that we use.

Pourquoi une durée de vie considérablement augmentée pourrait signifier une amélioration de l’humanité, au sens physique comme au sens moral ?

Didier Coeurnelle is a leading European spokesperson in the radical life extension movement, plus he’s an IEET Advisory Board member. I queried him on via email on his anti-aging activities and opinions.

IEET: Let’s being with you introducing yourself and the groups you work with.

My friend Michael LaTorra, an ordained Zen priest and the abbot of the Zen Center of Las Cruces, New Mexico, has written a short, simple and readable introduction to Buddhist Transhumanism. The article was published in Theology and Science in April with the title “What Is Buddhist Transhumanism?”

Do we need a broad consensus in society before rolling out vital new medical therapies?

CRISPR-Cas9 is a dramatic development in genetic technology. It is a powerful, relatively simple, and increasingly precise technique for editing the DNA of living organisms. Its potential application to human beings was highlighted in April 2015, when researchers in China reported their experiments on non-viable human zygotes.

‘The God of Israel said, to the Rock of Israel [David]; I rule man; who rules Me? It is the righteous: for I make a decree and he may annul it’.

Babylonian Talmud 16b

A few weeks back I was sitting in a laundromat watching my clothes spin round and reading a book on the Holocaust. Not quite sure why such a situation would lend itself to commentary from strangers, but I was approached by a 50ish or so middle class looking guy who felt it his duty to point out to me that Stalin and Mao had killed a lot more people than Hitler. 

The Ketogenic Diet is a intriguing topic for IEET readers; in 2015 Aaron Mortiz’s article “Ketosis Makes Your Brain Work Better - That’s Why Dave Asprey Puts Butter In his Coffee”  was 20th most popular article at IEET. 

To provide our audience with more info, I interviewed Chris Bair, inventor of Keto Chow, http://ketochow.xyz a top-selling powdered food.

People would be surprised by how much less toxic gender politics were in the 1970s than they are now.

Mary Ziegler teaches law at Florida State University, where she holds the Stearns Weaver Miller chair in the College of Law. Her book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, traces the evolution of American political dynamics surrounding abortion.

Tal Zarsky’s work has featured on this blog before. He is an expert in the legal aspects of big data and algorithmic decision-making. He recently published a paper entitled “The Trouble with Algorithmic Decision-Making” in which he tries to identify, categorise and respond to some of the leading objections to the use of algorithmic decision-making processes. This is a topic that interests me too, so I was eager to see what he had to say.

LongeCity is a high-functioning life extension organization with a forum where 30,000 members share their cutting-edge health knowledge. But that’s not all. To learn everything about the multiple offerings of this spectacular group, I interviewed Peter Carimico, the Lead Navigator. 

I love my sic-fi.  Reading, watching, listening - I can’t get enough of it. Having said that, there’s far more out there unread, unwatched, and unheard of by me than I’ve had the opportunity to chance upon or get around to.

I’ve been a fan of Cynthia Breazeal for well over a decade, and have watched her research evolve from her early doctoral work with Kismet, to her current work as the creator of JIBO and the founder of JIBO, inc. What I found so interesting about Dr. Breazeal was her commitment to creating not just artificial intelligence, but a robot which people could interact with in a fashion similar to human beings, but not exactly like human beings. 

On entend souvent que le transhumanisme a été importé en France à partir de la Californie où il a émergé dans les années 1980, avatar contemporain de la “soft power” américaine et allant de pair avec l’adoption mondiale de produits comme ceux d’Apple ou Google. C’est nier la complexité des échanges culturels, académiques et scientifiques de la seconde partie du XXème siècle, et surtout l’existence en Europe d’un terreau philosophique favorable. Le positivisme du français Auguste Comte, le cosmisme du russe Nicolai Fedorov, furent autant de formulations d’une foi dans le progrès technique qui marque profondément nos sociétés industrielles. Aujourd’hui et pour l’anecdote, il existe d’ailleurs en France et en Russie des courants transhumanistes relativement structurés.

Thanks to movies like Terminator, Universal Soldier and Blade Runner, the popular image of a cyborg is that of a futuristic, evil killing machine. The reality, however, is quite different, says Dr. Chris Hables Gray, a cyborg expert and professor at the  University of California at Santa Cruz. In fact, he says cyborgs are everywhere; technically speaking, anyone who’s had a vaccination can be considered a cyborg.

I want to start with a thought experiment: Suppose the most extreme predictions regarding technological unemployment come to pass. The new wave of automating technologies take over most forms of human employment. The result is that there is no economically productive domain for human workers to escape into. Suppose, at the same time, that we all benefit from this state of affairs. In other words, the productive gains of the technology do not flow solely to a handful of super-wealthy capitalists; they are fairly distributed to all (perhaps through an guaranteed income scheme). Call this the ‘postwork’ world. What would life be like in such a world?

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