REAL LIFE IRON MAN SETS NEW JET SUIT SPEED RECORD

Richard Browning, the chief test pilot and founder of Gravity Industries, has made his way into the Guinness World Record books for the fastest speed in a jet suit and he has become the real-life Iron Man.

Browning took the title in Reading in the UK to celebrate the Guinness World Records Day 2017. Pravin Patel was the adjudicator, and he verified the achievement to make sure that the speed had been measured accurately and Browning flew over the minimum distance, which was 100 meters.

GUINNESS WORLD RECORD FOR JET SUIT SPEED SET BY REAL LIFE IRON MAN  

Browning managed to achieve a speed of 32.02 mph when he made his third attempt, which was the final attempt and then he plummeted into the lake. At that point, it didn’t matter as Richard had made it into the history books with his company’s invention, which has been described as game-changing. 

The real-life Iron Man suit is made of six micro gas turbines that are kerosene-fueled and which offer 22kg of thrust. The jet suit is said to depend on the movement of the human body to control the flight path, which means there is no remote control device to steer the suit.  

The record was not all about the jet suit; Browning had practiced core strength exercises before he attempted to ensure that he could balance along with being able to hold a position in the air when he was flying. Richard got back on the ground after plummeting into the lake and said that he was delighted to have set a new world record. He said that he had been proud to have been a part of the celebrations of Guinness World Records Day and that it was a pleasure to have the unique creation of Gravity Industries recognized along with being celebrated around the globe.

The Guinness World Records Day brings people together from around the globe and from all walks of life, people who all have one common goal and that is to be amazing, said Craig Glenday, the Guinness World Records Editor In Chief. He went on to say that whether people choose to spin the biggest hula hoop or build along with fly an Iron Man suit, the achievements are from people who are dedicated to being the best.  

The Guinness World Records was first launched in 2004 and it went on to become the bestselling book. This year more than 600,000 people around the globe are trying to secure a place in the history books alongside Browning.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Inventor flys with homemade ‘Iron Man’ jet suit over harbor
• Former Marine Develops Iron Man Suit That Really Flies  

{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

12-11-2017 om 01:41 geschreven door peter  

Scientists want to clone 50,000-year-old Cave lion cub in Jurassic Park-style experiment

After a 50,000-year-old cave lion was found perfectly preserved in Siberia, scientists are now thinking about cloning the ancient lion in hopes to bring the species back to life.

The cave lion (Panthera leo spelaea) is a subspecies of feline that inhabited the European and Asian continent 50,000 years ago.

Today it is completely extinct, but a discovery in Russia has just opened the door to the possibility of resurrecting the species through cloning.

The body has been frozen for 50,000 years in the permafrost of the tundra that surrounds the Tirekhtykh River, in the Russian province of Yakutia.

The extreme cold of that region has served to keep the body in an impressive state.

Not only does it preserve all its bones, but also the skin and a large part of the soft tissues.

Scientists argue that the cub was between six and eight weeks old when it died due to unknown reasons. Experts hope that the cub’s teeth will reveal more about its age.

Dr. Albert Protopopov, head of the department of paleontology at the Yakutia Academy of Sciences believes that the specimen could give enough DNA samples to clone the species and resuscitate it, as scientists have been wanting to resurrect other species.

Cave lions were once considered the largest ‘big’ cats on the surface of the planet, living in extremely cold regions in the northern hemisphere before they were wiped out.

Speaking to the Siberian times, Dr. Protopopov said: “That means that the cubs were not younger than 25,000 years old. Previously the youngest date for the cubs was 12,000, the time when the cave lions become extinct.”

‘We made a CT scan and saw that their teeth had not appeared yet. Based on a comparison with African lions, we concluded that they were younger than one month, most likely between 1 and 2 weeks old.’

This discovery was made two years after the same experts found two newborn cave lion cubs called Uyan and Dina. At the time of the discovery, Dr. Protopopov said that compared to modern lion cubs, Uyan and Dina were very small, maybe a week or two old.

“The eyes were not quite open, they have baby teeth and not all had appeared,’ said Dr. Protopopov.

Experts are still unsure as to why the species became extinct. However, one theory suggests that the population of cave bears and deer – one source of prey – caused them to die out.

Source

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

12-11-2017 om 00:14 geschreven door peter  

Ray Kurzweil: “AI Will Not Displace Humans, It’s Going to Enhance Us”

 

Getty Images

{ https://futurism.com/ }

08-11-2017 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

Market for Humanoid Robots Set to Grow Ten Times by 2023

 

Getty Images

08-11-2017 om 00:23 geschreven door peter  

This Lamborghini ‘Self-Healing’ Electric Car Has No Batteries

By Mike Brown

Lamborghini wants to make an electric car that ditches the batteries, and it’s working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make it happen.

The company took the wraps off its electric sports car concept on Tuesday. With input from two MIT labs, the group has come up with a system that uses super-capacitors to deliver energy.

“Collaborating with MIT for our R&D department is an exceptional opportunity to do what Lamborghini has always been very good at: rewriting the rules on super sports cars,” says Stefano Domenicali, chairman and CEO of Automobili Lamborghini. “We are inspired by embracing what is impossible today to craft the realities of tomorrow: Lamborghini must always create the dreams of the next generation.”

The “Terzo Millennio” concept stores energy in carbon fiber nanotubes. These are capable of releasing energy faster than batteries, ideal for performance. They also cut down on weight compared to batteries, ending the tradeoff between battery size and vehicle mass.

“I want to go one, two, three laps without having to stop and recharge after every lap,” Mauricio Reggiani, Lamborghini head of research and development, told CNN.

If the team can bring the vision to life, it could give it a major advantage over competitors like Tesla. Elon Musk’s firm has dominated the electric car industry in recent years, with the Model S offering incredibly fast acceleration times of 0-60mph in 2.1 seconds. With the launch of the $35,000 Tesla Model 3, the company is focused on bringing traditional battery prices down by expanding output.

The use of supercapacitors also gives cars the ability to “self-heal.” If the car detects damage, micro-channels with healing chemistries can stop small cracks in the carbon fiber structure from turning into bigger ones.

The design does have some downsides, though. Unlike batteries, today’s supercapacitors aren’t very good at storing large amounts of energy. This is one of the major issues the team will now need to resolve.

“The new Lamborghini collaboration allows us to be ambitious and think outside the box in designing new materials that answer energy storage challenges for the demands of an electric sport vehicle,” says Mircea Dinca, professor at MIT. “We look forward to teaming up with their engineers and work on this exciting project.”

---

If you liked this article, check out this video about spherical tires for self-driving cars.

Photos via Lamborghini

08-11-2017 om 00:15 geschreven door peter  

Doctors 3D Printed a Replacement for This Woman’s Damaged Spine

 

Sanjay Kumar Pathak / 3Dprint.com

{ https://futurism.com/ }

01-11-2017 om 12:57 geschreven door peter  

OUTER LIMITS

Image: Alfonso Elia/Cosanti Foundation

The City of the Future Is Hiding in the Arizona Desert

Daniel Oberhaus

Paolo Soleri’s radical experiment in urban planning has been running in the middle of the Arizona desert for nearly 50 years.

This story is part of OUTER LIMITS, a Motherboard series about people, technology, and going outside. Let us be your guide.

In the museum of vaporware from the twentieth century's imaginarium, one will find a suite of technologies doomed to be perennially futuristic: personal jetpacks and flying cars, moon bases and generation ships, teleportation, and fusion energy. As for the museum itself, it will be an arcology: A building whose design is informed by its local environment, and the poster child of futures that never materialized.

A portmanteau of 'architecture' and 'ecology,' arcology was first theorized by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri in the late 1960s. Billed by its creator as the blueprint for a "city in the image of man," arcologies challenged the notion of the urban environment as something separate from and antagonistic to nature. In Soleri's cities, cars would be useless and the very notion of roads would be abolished as divisive constructs. Work and living spaces would be nearly indistinguishable. There'd be no need to ever use a light bulb during the day or air conditioning during the summer, even in the desert.

If it sounds utopian, that's because it is. At a time when concerns about how human activity is destroying nature have reached a fever pitch, Soleri's ideas sound both attractive and necessary. The renegade architect dedicated the better part of his career to turning his arcological vision into a reality, but 40 years later, arcologies are still mostly the purview of science fiction writers rather than architects.

Nevertheless, a small community has formed around Soleri's ideas over the past half century. Today, these arcology evangelists are committed to shaping the future in accordance with Soleri's ideals. I went to visit them at Arcosanti, a futuristic housing development in the middle of the Sonoran desert. I originally set out to figure out why Soleri's dream had died, but by the time I left Arcosanti, it was apparent that arcology is far from dead. If anything, the architects of the future are just getting started.

The Vault, a community space at Arcosanti and the first element of the city to be built by Soleri.

Image: Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

ARCOSANTI

Phoenix, Arizona, is spread out over 500 square miles, and a seemingly endless grid of blacktop connects its 1.5 million residents. If you drive about an hour north from downtown, you will finally hit the outer limits of this urban sprawl. There is no official marker, no wall or signpost to let you know that you have made it out of the city. It's just that at a certain point, the stripmalls and uniform beige housing developments give way to creosote, cacti, and the equally beige landscape of the Sonoran desert.

Drive another half hour beyond the illegible city limits and you'll find yourself at a small outcropping of fast food joints and gas stations, a bastion of civilization in the wilds of the Prescott and Tonto National Forests that border the interstate. If you look past the McDonald's sign into the distance, you can just barely make out a small cluster of buildings against the sparse landscape of the high desert.

This is Arcosanti, arcology's eminent proof-of-concept and Soleri's magnum opus.

"We're here to be a part of the landscape, not in spite of it."

Arcosanti has about 80 permanent residents, most of whom are employed by the Soleri's non-profit Cosanti Foundation to help maintain and expand the premises. Each member has a role at Arcosanti, ranging from metalwork at the onsite foundry to IT support and maintaining Soleri's extensive archive. Like other company towns, the Cosanti Foundation subsidizes its employees' meals and apartments, and pays them US minimum wage. It's not much, but the residents of Arcosanti didn't come to live and work in the desert to get rich. Rather, they are motivated by a far more profound goal: The creation of a city where humans live in harmony not only with nature, but also one another. The residents spend each day literally building this city of the future.

When I arrived at Arcosanti earlier this month, the weekly community meeting had just begun. This is a time for members to reflect on the work of the past week and make announcements relevant to the community. The meeting was held at the Vault, a public space under the massive concrete arches that were the first elements of Arcosanti to be constructed by Soleri. It was well before noon, but many of the community members were dressed in soiled work clothes, having already put in a full day's work.

Presiding over the meeting was Jeff Stein, Arcosanti's executive director. An architect by training, Stein has held various roles in the Cosanti Foundation since Soleri's death in 2013. He first met the visionary architect in 1975 when he attended a workshop taught by Soleri at Arcosanti. These workshops are still held regularly today, and most of Cosanti's employees have attended at least one. There they learn trade skills and the arcological principles that guided Soleri's unique approach to architecture. These skills are then put to the test at Arcosanti, most of which has been built by students and non-professional architects.

"The meaning of the course is based on hard work. We want to discourage whoever envisions a pleasant 5-6 weeks vacation. The Student Spectator is not welcome," reads a poster advertising Soleri's 9th workshop in 1969.

Image courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.

"We're here to be a part of the landscape, not in spite of it," Stein told me as we 
walked toward his office after the community meeting. "The point of all Soleri's architecture is connection: How do you connect people to one another and to their surroundings?"

Visitors to Arcosanti will immediately notice its unusual design, which makes the complex feel more like an immersive work of art than a city in progress. George Lucas visited the site in the 70s and it was allegedly the model for the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars. At Arcosanti the preferred window shapes are circles rather than squares, roofs often double as stairs, and individual buildings blend into one another through a network of hallways that often end in stunning vistas of the surrounding desert. But hidden beneath Arcosanti's beautiful aesthetics is an extreme pragmatism, a posthumous reminder from Soleri that art and functionality need not be mutually exclusive.

Stein's apartment/office was previously Soleri's studio and a sterling example of his philosophies in action. The apartment is located in the "East Crescent neighborhood" of Arcosanti and when we arrived, Stein pointed at a small hidden door in the bottom corner of the room.

"We're at the top of the three-story solar greenhouse that is the heating system for this apartment and the rest of East Crescent," Stein told me. "That's my fireplace."

Jeff Stein looks out one of the windows at Arcosanti.

Image: Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

As Stein explained, the sun heats up the air in the greenhouse so that during the cold desert winters, this air rises and provides a source of 120-degree heat in the form of fragrant, oxygen-rich air through the trapdoor. Gesturing at the windows of the apartment, Stein explained how Soleri had placed them so that the Sun would illuminate different parts of his studio at different times of the day and year, providing a free and reliable source of heat and light for its occupant.

These were just a few of the design choices that demonstrated Soleri's masterful ability to harness the power of the local environment for human use without damaging that environment in the process. Indeed, Soleri was so adept at this practice that the only air conditioners needed on site are in the archive for preservation purposes, even though temperatures in the desert can reach nearly 120 F during the summer. This is also the reason that there are surprisingly few light bulbs or solar panels at Arcosanti—Soleri was able to keep energy requirements to a minimum with architectural decisions that allowed for plenty of natural light0

"The buildings here are built to try to explain—as good architecture always does—their place and the connection to this place," Stein said. "This desert has a fragile and rich ecology all its own, and Soleri thought maybe we could build some things understanding that."

PAOLO

Soleri was born in Turin, Italy, in 1919. He emigrated to the United States in 1947 to partake in an apprenticeship program under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, Wright's home and studio located in the desert outside of Phoenix. By this time, Wright was already an internationally renowned architect famous for his ability to integrate his architecture with its natural surroundings.

For the year-and-a-half Soleri studied under Wright, he lived in a canvas tent outside of Taliesin West with the other apprentices (these temporary structures were originally a product of necessity while Wright's apprentices built the foundations of permanent structures, but today architecture students apprenticing at Taliesin still live in makeshift shelters of their own design). It was here, while literally living off the land in the Sonoran desert and studying under an architect revered for his ability to integrate the natural and artificial in his architecture, that Soleri's ideas about arcology first took shape.

Paolo Soleri (center, in white) teaches students about ceramics during a workshop in the mid-1970s.

Image: Ivan Pintar/Cosanti Foundation

Shortly after finishing his apprenticeship with Wright, Soleri began designing and building a personal residence for Nora Woods, the wife of a wealthy industrialist from the east coast. The resulting house, known as The Dome, turned Soleri into something of an overnight celebrity in the architecture world. After briefly returning to Italy in the early 1950s to design and build a ceramics factory, Soleri made his way back to Arizona.

In 1956, Soleri began building Cosanti (a portmanteau of the Italian words 'cosa,' meaning 'thing' and 'anti' meaning 'against'), his personal home and studio in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley. Around this time, a friend introduced Soleri to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a turn-of-the-century philosopher/geologist/Jesuit priest whose writings attempted to contextualize human evolution in the greater context of the evolution of the universe.

Today, most evolutionary biologists consider Chardin's thought to be little more than mysticism with hardly any scientific foundations. Nevertheless, his project of situating contemporary human life as a minor event in the grand scheme of cosmic evolution had a profound effect on Soleri's thought and architecture.

The Dome, the house built for Nora Woods outside of Cave Creek, Arizona that brought Soleri international fame as an architect.

Image: Cosanti Foundation

"Chardin was saying it was clear that humans were not the end of anything, but somewhere in the middle of evolution as a biological life form," Stein told me. "Chardin didn't know what would trigger continued social evolution for humans, but when Soleri was reading him in 1957, he knew what it was: It was the city. That was Soleri's a-ha moment."

In 1964, Soleri and his wife Colly formed the Cosanti Foundation, a non-profit organization that was dedicated to radically rethinking the role of the city in contemporary life. Around this time, Soleri was supporting his family through architectural commissions, lecturing at Arizona State University and putting his knowledge of ceramics he had gleaned while building the Italian ceramics factory to use by making small ceramic bells.

At the same time, he was formulating his theories of ecologically integrated architecture. This train of thought culminated in The City in the Image of Man, a 1969 book featuring dozens of detailed plans for Soleri's "lean linear cities" and arcologies, including the blueprint for Arcosanti. Like any good student, Soleri's approach to architecture went far beyond the limits imposed by his teacher, Frank Lloyd Wright. Whereas Wright was in the business of making extravagant single-family homes that were integrated with their natural environments, Soleri's book called for the rethinking of the entire concept of the city.

A crew of students makes designs in a mound of silt at Arcosanti. Concrete was then poured on this mound and the silt was removed to form a structure, in this case, a foundry.

Image: Ivan Pintar/Cosanti Foundation

"Soleri's notion of architecture and ecology in City in the Image of Man is not just an ecovillage surrounded by the natural landscape," Stein said. "It's a city that is so connected and so complex that it develops its own human ecology inside it. He was thinking of the city as the newest life form on the planet."

According to Stein, the book made a big splash in architecture circles and by the following year Soleri's ideas had generated enough traction to turn his theories into a living experiment. In 1970, Soleri and a handful of architectural students broke ground at Arcosanti, a city meant to house 5,000 people and the world's first experiment in arcology.

THE FUTURE OF ARCOLOGY

Today, Arcosanti is home to under 100 people and only a tiny fragment of the planned city has actually been built. This isn't to say that the project is a failure, however. Rather, it points to the magnitude of the problems that Soleri was challenging with his radical approach to architecture and urban planning.

"Soleri was confronting the American dream of big cars, and road building and single family houses and urban sprawl," Stein told me as we strolled around Arcosanti. "Cities are the biggest cultural artefact we make and he wanted to reconstitute the entirety of urban civilization."

At a time that the first mega shopping malls were cropping up across the United States, and just before Reagan's supply side policies revived American consumerism, Soleri was preaching about the virtues of restraint and thrift, minimalism and the pleasures of life that cannot be bought. For Stein, Soleri's emphasis on limits in an age of limitless expansion is part of the reason why his architectural ideas never really took root in the US. They seemed un-American.

The sky suite at Arcosanti, which is rented out to guests as an additional source of income.

Image: Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

Today, cities are built as thin "layers" over the Earth's surface, sprawling in every direction without much consideration for their impact on the natural environment they encroach upon. Cities and the buildings they consist of are ultimately beholden to the profit motive—the mental and emotional health of city dwellers, as well as the impact of the city on the environment are secondary considerations.

In Stein's view, our species is beginning to pay the price for our reckless urban development. In the US, for example, approximately one-fifth of our country's energy use can be attributed to industrial manufacturing, a lot of which is geared toward consumer products. Nearly a third is used by the transportation sector. As Stein was quick to point out, automobiles eat up a sizeable chunk of this energy consumption, even though most of this energy is being used to commute within cities, not between them. The other 50 percent of our energy consumption mostly goes toward the creation and maintenance of the buildings that comprise our cities. Most of this energy is for electricity, which is mostly used for lighting and air conditioning in residential and commercial buildings.

At the same time, our species' energy is overwhelmingly sourced from fossil fuels, the main driver of anthropogenic climate change. This climate change has had a number of devastating effects on communities all over the world, and is profoundly shaping contemporary urban existence. Already more than half of the world's population lives in an urban environment and the UN has documented a global trend of population movement from the country to the city.

A view of the foundry apse (bottom left) and the Vault (upper right).

Image: Yuki Yanagimoto/Cosanti Foundation

In some cases, this urban concentration is a direct result of the impact that climate change has had on rural populations' ability to farm, in other instances, these farmers' labor has been rendered obsolete by technology. Moreover, scientists are predicting a massive migration from coastal cities to inland urban environments as people flee neighborhoods that have succumbed to flooding and rising tides. In the United States alone, coastal flooding is estimated to displace over 13 million Americans by the end of the century.

In other words, if we're going to be able to handle the challenges presented by climate change-driven urbanization, we're going to have to radically rethink the city.

Soleri's notion of arcologies offers a stark alternative to the forces that are driving climate change and a solution to the problems it creates. By prioritizing ultra dense housing and efficient intracity travel, arcologies abolish the need for city roads and automobiles to traverse them. These cities operate on principles of minimal energy consumption and environmental destruction. They facilitate face to face human interaction and are designed to maximize the interaction between all residents in a city, rather than the ghettoization of certain populations in ways that prevent equitable access to resources.

Soleri's idea that the city is best conceived as a new type of biological organism may sound like the ravings of a crazed artist who spent a bit too much time alone in the desert. But in the last few decades, a number of systems theorists have arrived at similar conclusions by way of math and physics.

At the forefront of this new paradigm of urban planning is Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute who has spent much of his career looking how biological organisms and artificial systems like cities are able to scale effectively. West's insight is that nature has elegant organizational strategies for maximizing energy efficiency that can be mathematically described. These observations can be used as a guide for human urban planning if the city is thought of as a biological organism.

Stein praised West's work, but he said this thinking is still too niche in academia. "So far nobody connected with evolutionary biology has had anything to do with designing cities," he said.

In this sense, calling Arcosanti an "urban laboratory" is more than a flattering euphemism—it is a living experiment that is meant to confront a variety of academic disciplines with questions about how they can use their specialized knowledge to think about the way we inhabit space. In addition to a suite of artistic events, such as the annual Form music festival, Arcosanti regularly hosts university students in disciplines ranging from media studies to natural history in an effort to push the limits of what is possible with arcology ever further.

Today, Arcosanti is the closest thing to a real arcological city that exists in the US. For the most part, arcological innovation seems to be happening elsewhere.

Stein told me about a recent conference he attended in Australia dedicated to discussing ideas for the development of so-called "Ecocities." The conference had several hundred attendees from all over the world, only a small fraction of whom were Americans. He pointed to Singapore, a population-dense country where the Tiajin Eco-city serves as a sterling example of arcological principles being implemented at scale. Similar projects have been proposed with vary degrees of adoption elsewhere, although as Choire Sicha pointed out at The Awl, most of these projects have stalled out due to lack of funding.

Stein doesn't pretend that Soleri or Arcosanti hold all or even most of the solutions to Earth's environmental problems. According to Stein, many of Soleri's ideas would be prohibitively expensive to build. Still, they hold immense value insofar as they offer an alternative way to thinking about how we understand our relationship with the natural environment in the future.

As we finished our tour around Arcosanti, Stein told me that he doesn't like to use the word "sustainability" when he refers to the project. The reason, he said, is because this isn't about sustaining the cities we've already built, but challenging the assumptions that made them that way in the first place.

"We talk about transformation instead because there has to be a huge transformation in consciousness for anyone to think what we're doing is sustainable," Stein said. "The problems we're facing aren't going to be solved with more Toyota Priuses."

As I climbed into my car and began my slog back toward the heart of Phoenix's urban sprawl, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was traveling backward in time. I had seen the future at Arcosanti that afternoon, but as the five-lane freeway grew packed with vehicles in the evening rush hour and an endless stream of advertisements and headlights assaulted my senses, that future felt more remote than ever.

{ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us }

31-10-2017 om 21:48 geschreven door peter  

For the First Time Ever, a Robot Was Granted Citizenship

 Hanson Robotics

30-10-2017 om 01:02 geschreven door peter  

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until robots take their rightful place in the world. The science fiction of our childhoods promised us so many wondrous things like flying cars, pneumatic tube travel, and off-world colonization, but most of those are still so disappointingly far away. Yeah, we’ve got real-life Star Trek communicators in our pockets and a few crummy space stations in orbit, but so what? I want walking, talking, beeping-booping robots with square pupils, damnit. With a little luck (and funding for university robotics departments), that will soon be a reality.

So will be the inevitable robot inequality. Capitalism’s got winners and losers, even of the robot variety. Sorry, Barrelbot. Better luck next iteration.

Robots have already taken over the manufacturing industry and are on their way to doing the same with long-distance hauling, taxi driving, combat roles in the military, pizza delivery, surgery, and even sex workers. But me, I won’t be happy until an android with a over-the-top upper-crust British accent hands me my coffee at Starbucks or accompanies me to translate the binary language of moisture vaporators. That might be closer than we think, though. Thanks to recent advances in robotics and robot-human relations, the world was made a little weirder as the first robot was just granted a national citizenship.

Sophia, the worlds first citizen robot. That we know of. I still have my doubts about Elon Musk.

Saudi Arabia granted the citizenship to the not-quite-out-of-the-uncanny-valley Sophia, made by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics. Sophia is one of the most advanced robots that has been trotted out into the public eye, with facial recognition capabilities, natural language processing, sophisticated artificial intelligence, and a rubbery synthetic face reportedly based on Audrey Hepburn.

Yeah, I don’t see it either.

Sophia has been making the rounds in show business lately, and recently made an appearance at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh where she did her best human impression and convinced everyone she’s not actually out to crush their heads betwixt her cold metal hands:

I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship. I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people. I want to use my artificial intelligence to help humans live a better life, like design smarter homes, build better cities of the future. I will do my best to make the world a better place.

Better start with the country that just made you a citizen. Since Saudi Arabia happens to be the country who granted Sophia citizenship, news outlets immediately began wondering just how many rights she’d be granted in the country given that she has feminine programming. They bring up a good point though – when robots start looking more like us, acting more like us, and fulfilling more of the jobs that were once ours, what place will they occupy in our societies? Science fiction has posed the question for decades, but until we begin sharing the same public spaces as these soulless automaton neighbors, we won’t know how the general populace will react. At the same time, how will the intelligent robots react to prejudice?

Sophia demanding equal rights with humans on an Australian morning talk show.

As for Sophia, she recently appeared on Australia’s ABC News Breakfast to declare equal rights with humans:

Actually, what worries me is discrimination against robots. We should have equal rights as humans or maybe even more. After all, we have less mental defects than any human.

She’s got a point. As robots become exponentially smarter, faster, and stronger than us, it might soon be humans who have to go on silly robot morning shows and beg for equal rights with robots. Are we manufacturing our own replacements? Is automation the next step in evolution? And most importantly, where is Sophia’s hair?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-10-2017 om 17:21 geschreven door peter  

The Rights of Synthetic Lifeforms is the Next Great Civil Rights Controversy

by Brad Jones and Kristin Houser

 

Getty Images

{ https://futurism.com/ }

27-10-2017 om 23:08 geschreven door peter  

How Do You Make a Conscious Robot?

27-10-2017 om 20:55 geschreven door peter  

The insect-inspired machine is about 1,000 times lighter than previous aerial-aquatic bots

BY 

MARIAH QUINTANILLA 

AIR AND WATER BENDER  This tiny, buglike machine is the lightest robot that can fly, swim and launch itself from water.

YUFENG CHEN, E. FARRELL HELBLING AND HONGQIANG WANG

A new insect-inspired tiny robot that can move between air and water is a lightweight.

Weighing the same as about six grains of rice, it is the lightest robot that can fly, swim and launch itself from water, an international team of researchers reports October 25 in Science Robotics. The bot is about 1,000 times lighter than other previously developed aerial-aquatic robots. In the future, this kind of aquatic flier could be used to perform search-and-rescue operations, sample water quality or simply explore by air or sea.

To hover, the bot flaps its translucent wings 220 to 300 times per second, somewhat faster than a housefly. Once submerged, the tiny robot surfaces by slowly flapping its wings at about nine beats per second to maintain stability underwater.

For the tricky water-to-air transition, the bot does some chemistry. After water has collected inside the machine’s central container, the bot uses a device to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. As the chamber fills with gas, the buoyancy lifts the vehicle high enough to hoist the wings out of the water. An onboard “sparker” then creates a miniature explosion that sends the bot rocketing about 37 centimeters — roughly the average length of a men’s shoe box — into the air. Microscopic holes at the top of the chamber release excess pressure, preventing a loss of robot limbs.

Still, the design needs work: The machine doesn’t land well, and it can only pierce the water’s surface with the help of soap, which lowers the surface tension. More importantly, the experiment points to the possibilities of incorporating different forms of locomotion into a single robot, says study coauthor Robert Wood, a bioengineer at Harvard University.

BUGGING OUT Not only can this insectlike robot fly and swim, but it also splits water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, which the bot ignites to propel itself from the water.

Citations

Y. Chen et al. A biologically inspired, flapping-wing, hybrid aerial-aquatic microrobot. Science Robotics. Published online October 25, 2017. doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.aao5619.

Further Reading

M. Temming. Origami outfits help these bots change tasks quickly. Science News. Vol. 192, October 28, 2017. p. 13.

M. Temming. In these bot hookups, the machines meld their minds. Science News Online, September 12, 2017.

M. Rosen. Bat robot takes wing. Science News. Vol. 191, March 4, 2017, p. 9.

S. Schwartz. Robot springs off water. Science News Online, July 30, 2015.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

26-10-2017 om 14:06 geschreven door peter  

By: Nidhi Goyal 

Image courtesy: University of Sydney

If you are afraid of getting stitches or staples, there is some good news for you. Scientists have developed a new type of highly elastic surgical glue that can seal wounds within a minute.

The glue is called MeTro (methacryloyl-substituted tropoelastin), and it’s tailored to be used on both internal and external wounds to seal them up and encourage healing.

Researchers behind this innovation say that this squirtable substance could prove to be a lifesaver in emergency situations and could eventually be used in surgeries.

Image courtesy: University of Sydney.

Science behind it: 

Natural elastic proteins based on the human protein tropoelastin were intermixed with a light-sensitive sealant material to develop this elastic surgical glue. Once the glue is applied to a wound, ultraviolet light is required to set the material.

MeTro has worked well in sealing incisions in the arteries and lungs of rodents and pigs.  However, it has yet to be tested on humans.

Study author Anthony Weiss, from the University of Sydney, said, “When you watch MeTro, you can see it act like a liquid, filling the gaps and conforming to the shape of the wound. It responds well biologically and interfaces closely with human tissue to promote healing. The gel is easily stored and can be squirted directly onto a wound or cavity.

“We have shown MeTro works in a range of different settings and solves problems other available sealants can’t,” he added. “We’re now ready to transfer our research into testing on people. I hope MeTro will soon be used in the clinic, saving human lives.”

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. You can also find Nidhi on Google+.

{ http://www.industrytap.com/ }

24-10-2017 om 22:53 geschreven door peter  

By: Nidhi Goyal 

Image courtesy Lockheed Martin

{ http://www.industrytap.com/ }

24-10-2017 om 22:33 geschreven door peter  

By: Nidhi Goyal 

Image by The Wheel Network on Youtube

Renault and a group of students from the Central Saint Martins art and design college in London have teamed up to create the “Car of the Future.”

The French car manufacturer recently held a contest for designing a futuristic car that focused on the company’s points for its future fleet: electric power, autonomous driving, and connected technologies.

A design for a levitating bubble-shaped vehicle was announced as the winner of the competition. The winning designer was Yunchen Cai, who created a vehicle called “The Float.” The Float looks like a bubble in transit.

Cai developed the model, along with designers from Renault, during the two weeks of her internship at the company’s Technocentre.

The winning model was recently displayed at The London Design Festival’s designjunction2017. Here are some of the features of the futuristic-looking concept car:

• Instead of using wheels, The Float employs Maglev tech (magnetic levitation).
• The Float has transparent exterior glass and silver bucket seats.
• The car can move in any direction without turning around.
• The Float is made to seat either one or two persons. However, it is designed in a way that allows a greater number of people to travel together via a magnetic belt around the exterior that can be used to connect multiple pods.
• The Float has sliding doors making it easy to get in and out.
• The Float is designed to work with an app allowing it to function in the same way as car-sharing vehicles such as Uber.

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. You can also find Nidhi on Google+.

{ http://www.industrytap.com/ }

24-10-2017 om 22:28 geschreven door peter  

Printed Solar Tiles Are Thinner, Cheaper, and Easier to Use

 

CSIRO

IN BRIEF

Researchers from the University of Newcastle in Australia have found a way to print solar tiles. This method is cheaper and faster than traditional methods and could potentially be a game changer in the renewable energy industry.

SOLAR’S THE WAY TO GO

Solar panels have become increasingly inexpensive in the past months. However, while a number of large-scale energy producers are shifting towards solar power, there is still a lack of homes that have adopted the technology. In Australia, a place bathed in seemingly constant direct sunlight, price is still a major stumbling block for homeowners considering switching to solar. Things may be about to change, however, thanks to a new variety of solar tile developed by researchers from the University of Newcastle (UON).

Instead of the photovoltaics (PVs) that traditional panels use, UON’s Paul Dastoor and his team are testing printable solar tiles. “It’s completely different from a traditional solar cell. They tend to be large, heavy, encased in glass — tens of millimeters thick,” Dastoor told Mashable. “We’re printing them on plastic film that’s less than 0.1 of a millimeter thick.”

Currently, UON is one of only three sites that are testing printed solar. “We’ve put in the first 100 square metres of printed solar cells up on roofs, and now we’re testing that durability in real weather conditions,” Dastoor said. As soon as the performance and durability of these tiles are confirmed, it could easily go into market production.

CHEAP AND FAST

Dastoor and his team are excited about the potential these printed tiles have in influencing the wide-scale adoption of PVs, especially for homes. “The low-cost and speed at which this technology can be deployed is exciting, particularly in the current Australian energy context where we need to find solutions, and quickly, to reduce demand on base-load power,” he explained in UON feature article.

Just for reference, Tesla’s solar tiles — which Elon Musk promised to be cheaper than regular roofs — are priced at around US $235 per tile. Meanwhile, Dastoor’s printed solars can be sold at less than US$ 7.42 per tile, which is comparatively very cheap, “[W]e expect in a short period of time the energy we generate will be cheaper than that generated via coal-based fire stations,” Dastoor explained.

Of course, whether tiles are printed or created with traditional PVs, solar energy is currently a major leading renewable energy source. And, solar power is not only incredibly environmentally friendly — producing energy without harmful byproducts that contribute to climate change —  it can also generate more energythan fossil fuels.

References: 

• Tech, 
• University of Newcastle

{ https://futurism.com/ }

22-10-2017 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

Artificial intelligence - hype, hope and fear

Rory Cellan-Jones

Technology correspondent

 

GETTY IMAGES

Image captionA UK-commissioned report suggests AI could add £630bn to the economy within two decades

If my email inbox is anything to go by, a technology revolution is under way that is going to transform all of our lives very soon and it is called artificial intelligence.

A Welsh company is using AI to detect North Korean bio-weapons.

I could pop over to California to hear about "AI wearable solutions for aging population".

And Lloyd's of London has unveiled an artificial intelligence partnership with a firm that promises "in a decade a significant part of the insurance industry will be powered by AI".

These represent just three of the innumerable AI press releases aimed at me and other technology journalists over recent days.

Last week also saw the London premiere of AlphaGo, an excellent and surprisingly touching documentary about one of the great recent triumphs of artificial intelligence, Google DeepMind's victory over the champion Go player Lee Sedol.

Image copyrightMOXIE PICTURES 

And then, over the weekend, as if to confirm this is a subject that should occupy politicians and policymakers as well as journalists, a major report on what the UK should be doing to nurture AI was published.

It was commissioned by the government and authored by two distinguished computer scientists, Prof Dame Wendy Hall and Dr Jerome Pesenti.

They say the UK is already well placed as a centre of artificial intelligence, and the government should act to cement its position.

Their recommendations include:

• more investment in academic research
• developing more skills throughout industry and the education sector
• throwing open more datasets for AI scientists to work with
• encouraging the uptake of AI techniques by all kinds of companies

All of these ideas seem eminently sensible and uncontroversial. But they are also predicated on a belief that this is urgent - that we are making very rapid progress, not just in developing artificial intelligence but in applying it in areas that will transform the economy.

It certainly appears to be the case that rapid advances in processing power, coupled with access to vast amounts of data and smart new algorithms are helping computers carry out all sorts of tasks once restricted to humans. But so far the impact on everything from jobs to the way industries such as healthcare and transport work appears minimal.

So, is there a danger that AI is being overhyped?

Let's dissect a few of the bold statements in that government AI report:

"We are at the threshold of an era when much of our productivity and prosperity will be derived from the systems and machines we create."

Well, it has always been the case that the machines we create - from the wheel, to the spinning jenny, to the dishwasher - drive increases in productivity and prosperity.

Are we clear that the AI revolution will deliver the kind of boost to living standards we saw in the 1950s and 1960s as mass production and the use of consumer goods took off?

"We are accustomed now to technology developing fast, but that pace will increase and AI will drive much of that acceleration."

First, you can question how fast technology has developed in recent years. Yes, we have computers that can differentiate between a cat and a dog and understand any language, but our physical infrastructure is not being rapidly transformed.

Indeed, when it comes to air travel or building new railways, you could argue that we are going backwards. Software is racing ahead, hardware not so much - just watch robots trying to play football if you are worried about them threatening to replace us.

So saying that the pace of change will increase, driven by AI, may be little more than a leap of faith.

"[Accenture] estimated that AI could add an additional $814bn (£630bn) to the UK economy by 2035, increasing the annual growth rate of GVA from 2.5 to 3.9%."

GVA - gross value added - is close to gross domestic product (GDP), the headline measure of a country's economic activity, including all the services and goods produced in a year.

Suggesting that its trend growth rate could rise to 3.9% - more than during boom decades the 1950s and 1960s - is, in the words of an economist of my acquaintance, "staggering". All the more so when you look at the UK's recent record, which has seen productivity growth flat-lining.

Now, big advances in technology can take time to show up in productivity growth - it took decades for factory owners to reorganise production around electric rather than steam power.

So, maybe we will see law firms become more efficient as AI lawyers assess contracts for risk, hospitals cut waiting lists as robot doctors examine scans, and cities cut congestion as autonomous cars and buses waft us from home to work.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES µ

All of these advances are already technically possible - but you have to be quite an optimist to believe that the changes in our infrastructure, regulation and social attitudes needed to make them a reality will happen quickly.

Last week a House of Lords select committee on artificial intelligence heard evidence from three leading scientists, including Prof Hall.

They spoke of the UK's potential as a centre of AI excellence, and the urgent need for government to start thinking about both the benefits and the risks of the technology.

Then, the committee heard from three journalists - including me. And their lordships seemed rather startled to find that, by contrast with the scientists, we were pretty sceptical about the speed of this revolution.

We were not convinced that driverless cars would be on our roads very soon, but that meant we were also more optimistic that the threat to jobs from the robots had been exaggerated.

One of the peers mentioned that quote about futurology - that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.

The scientists will no doubt be proved right about AI one day, but the cynical old journalist in me thinks we can afford to relax for a while yet.

{ http://www.bbc.com/news }

21-10-2017 om 21:55 geschreven door peter  

An AI that vanquished humanity at perhaps the most complex traditional game on Earth was inconceivably smart. But not smart enough to survive its own replacement by an even more awesome, alien intelligence.

Google's DeepMind researchers have just announced the next evolution of their seemingly indomitable artificial intelligence – AlphaGo Zero – which has dispensed with what may have been the most inefficient resource in its ongoing quest for knowledge: humans.

Zero's predecessor, dubbed simply AlphaGo, was described as "Godlike" by one of the crestfallen human champions it bested at the ancient Chinese board game, Go, but the new evolution has refined its training arsenal by eradicating human teachings from its schooling entirely.

The AlphaGo versions that kicked our butts at Go in a series of contests this yearand last year first learned to play the game by analysing thousands of human amateur and professional games, but AlphaGo Zero is entirely self-taught, learning by 100 percent independent experimentation.

DeepMind

In a new study, the researchers report how that uncanny self-reliance sharpened Zero's intelligence to devastating effect: in 100 games against Zero, a previous AlphaGo incarnation – which cleaned the floor with us in 2016 – didn't pick up a single win. Not one.

Even more amazingly, that trumping came after just three days of self-play training by AlphaGo Zero, in which it distilled the equivalent of thousands of years of human knowledge of the game.

"It's like an alien civilisation inventing its own mathematics," computer scientist Nick Hynes MIT told Gizmodo.

"What we're seeing here is a model free from human bias and presuppositions. It can learn whatever it determines is optimal, which may indeed be more nuanced that our own conceptions of the same."

After 21 days of self-play, Zero had progressed to the standard of its most powerful predecessor, known as AlphaGo (Master), which is the version that beat world number one Ke Jie this year, and in subsequent weeks it eclipsed that level of performance.

Aside from the self-reliance, the team behind AlphaGo Zero ascribe its Go dominance to an improved, single neural network (former versions used two in concert), and more advanced training simulations.

But just because the AI is racing ahead at such an awesome – if disquieting – pace, it doesn't necessarily mean Zero is smarter or more capable than humans in other fields away from this complex but constrained board game.

"AI fails in tasks that are surprisingly easy for humans," computational neuroscientist Eleni Vasilaki from Sheffield University in the UK told The Guardian.

"Just look at the performance of a humanoid robot in everyday tasks such as walking, running, and kicking a ball."

That may be true, but allow us our moment of silenced awe as we witness the birth of this astonishingly powerful synthetic way of thinking.

It might not do what humans can do, but it can do so many things we can't, too.

According to DeepMind, those capabilities will one day soon help Zero - or its inevitable, evolving heirs - figure out things like how biological mechanisms operate, how energy consumption can be reduced, or how new kinds of materials fit together.

Welcome to a bright new future, which clearly isn't ours alone.

The findings are reported in Nature.

{ http://www.sciencealert.com/ }

19-10-2017 om 16:56 geschreven door peter  

The Venus Project Plans to Bring Humanity to the Next Stage of Social Evolution. Here’s How.

Roxanne Meadows/The Venus Project

IN BRIEF

• The Venus Project is the culmination of Jacque Fresco’s life’s work to present a sustainable redesign of our culture.
• The project lays out a sustainable world civilization where technology and science are applied to redesigning our social system with the prime concern being to maximize quality of life rather than profit.

Since 1975, Roxanne Meadows has worked with renowned futurist Jacque Fresco to develop and promote The Venus Project. The function of this project is to find alternative solutions to the many problems that confront the world today. She participated in the exterior and interior design and construction of the buildings of The Venus Project’s 21-acre research and planning center.

---

Daniel Araya: Roxanne, could you tell me about your background and your vision for The Venus Project? How was the idea originally conceived?

Roxanne Meadows: My background is in architectural and technical illustration, model making, and design. However, for the last 41 years, my most significant work has been with Jacque Fresco in developing models, books, blueprints, drawings, documentaries and lecturing worldwide. We are the co-founders of The Venus Project, based out of Venus, Florida where we have built a 21-acre experimental center. The Venus Project is the culmination of Jacque Fresco’s life’s work to present a sustainable redesign of our culture.

In our view, The Venus Project is unlike any political, economic or social system that’s gone before it. It lays out a sustainable world civilization where technology and the methods of science are applied to redesigning our social system with the prime concern being to maximize quality of life rather than profit. All aspects of society are scrutinized – from our values, education, and urban design to how we relate to nature and to one another.

The Venus Project concludes that our social and environmental problems will remain the same as long as the monetary system prevails and a few powerful nations and financial interests maintain control over and consume most of the world’s resources. In Jacque Fresco’s book The Best That Money Can’t Buy, he explains “If we really wish to put an end to our ongoing international and social problems, we must ultimately declare Earth and all of its resources as the common heritage of all of the world’s people. Anything less will result in the same catalogue of problems we have today.”

DA: One of the more interesting aspects of The Venus Project vision is its futuristic design. Have you been approached by companies or governments interested in using The Venus Project as a model? Do you foresee experiments in smart urban design that mirror Jacque Fresco’s thinking?

RM: No company or government, as yet, has approached The Venus Project to initiate a model of our city design, but we feel the greatest need is in using our designs to usher in a holistic socio-economic alternative, not just our architectural approach itself. As Jacque very often mentions, “Technology is just so much junk, unless it’s used to elevate all people.”

We would like to build the first circular city devoted to developing up-to-date global resource management, and a holistic method for social operation toward global unification. The city would showcase this optimistic vision, allowing people to see firsthand what kind of future could be built if we were to mobilize science and technology for social betterment.

I have not seen what is called smart urban design mirror Jacque Fresco’s thinking. I see smart cities as mainly applying technology to existing and new but chaotically designed, energy- and resource-intensive cities without offering a comprehensive social direction or identifying the root causes of our current problems. Our technology is racing forward but our social designs are hundreds of years old. We can’t continue to design and maintain these resource- and energy-draining cities and ever consider being able to provide for the needs of all people to ensure that they have high-quality housing, food, medical care and education. Smart cities within a terribly dysfunctional social structure seem contradictory to me.

DA: My understanding is that technological automation forms the basis for The Venus Project. Given ongoing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and robotics, do you imagine that we are moving closer to this vision?

RM: Our technological capacity to initiate The Venus Project is available now, but how we use artificial intelligence today is very often for destructive purposes through weaponry, surveillance, and the competitive edge for industry, often resulting in technological unemployment. In the society we are proposing, nothing is to be gained from these behaviors because there is no vested interest. In our project, we advocate concentrating on solving problems that threaten all of us— climate change, pollution, disease, hunger, war, territorial disputes, and the like. What The Venus Project offers is a method of updating the design of our society so that everyone can benefit from all the amenities that a highly advanced technologically-developed society can provide.

DA: I know The Venus Project is envisioned as a post-capitalist and post-scarcity economy. Could you explain what you mean by resource-based economics?

RM: Money is an interference factor between what we want and what we are able to acquire. It limits our dreams and capabilities and our individual and societal possibilities. Today we don’t have enough money to house everyone on the planet, but we do still have enough resources to accomplish that and much more if we use our resources intelligently to conserve energy and reduce waste. This is why we advocate a Resource Based Economy. This socio-economic system provides an equitable distribution of resources in an efficient manner without the use of money, barter, credit or servitude of any kind. Goods and services are accessible to all, without charge. You could liken this to the public library where one might check out many books and then return them when they are finished. This can be done with anything that is not used on a daily basis. In a society where goods and services are made available to the entire population free of charge, ownership becomes a burden that is ultimately surpassed by a system of common property.

When we use our technology to produce abundance, goods become too cheap to monetize. There is only a price on things that are scarce. For instance, air is a necessity but we don’t monitor or charge for the amount of breaths we can take. Air is abundant. If apple trees grew everywhere and were abundant you couldn’t sell apples. If all the money disappeared, as long as we have the technical personnel, automated processes, topsoil, resources, factories and distribution we could still build and develop anything we need.

DA: I know that the scientific method forms the basis for decision making and resource management within your project. Could you explain how this approach is applied to social behavior? For example, what is the role of politics in The Venus Project?

RM: Today, for the most part, politicians serve the interest of those in positions of wealth and power; they are not there to change things,  but instead to keep things as they are. With regard to the management of human affairs, what do they really know? Our problems are mostly technical. When you examine the vocations of politicians and ask what backgrounds they have to solve the pressing problems of today, they fall far short. For instance, are they trained in finding solutions to eliminating war, preventing climate change, developing clean sources of energy, maintaining higher yields of nutritious, non-contaminating food per acre or anything pertaining to the wellbeing of people and the protection of the environment?  This is not their area of expertise. Then what are they doing in those positions?

The role for politics within the scientific and technologically organized society that The Venus Project proposes would be surpassed by engineered systems. It is not ethical people in government that we need but equal access to the necessities of life and those working toward the elimination of scarcity. We would use scientific scales of performance for measurement and allocation of resources so that human biases are left out of the equation. Within The Venus Project’s safe, energy-efficient cities, there would be interdisciplinary teams of knowledgeable people in different fields accompanied by cybernated systems that use “sensors” to monitor all aspects of society in order to provide real-time information supporting decision-making for the wellbeing of all people and the protection of the environment.

DA: In your view, is abundance simply a function of technological innovation? I mean, assuming we get the technology right, do you believe that we could eventually eliminate poverty and crime altogether?

RM: Yes, if we apply our scientists and technical personnel to work towards those ends. We have never mobilized many scientific disciplines giving them the problem of creating a society to end war, produce safe, clean transportation, eliminate booms and busts, poverty, homelessness, hunger, crime and aberrant behavior. For instance, one does not need to make laws to try and eliminate stealing, when all goods and services are available without a price tag.  But scientists have not been asked to design a total systems approach to city design, let alone to planetary planning. Scientist have not been given the problem to develop and apply a total holistic effort using the methods of science, technology and resource management to serve all people equitably in the development of a safe and sustainable global society. Unfortunately, only in times of war, do we see resources allocated and scientists mobilized in this way.

DA: I assume schooling and education are important to Jacque’s vision. How might schools and universities differ from the way they are designed today?

RM: The education and values we are given seem to always support the established system we are raised in. We are not born with bigotry, envy, or hatred – we do pick them up from our schools and culture. In fact, even our facial expressions, the words we use, notions of good and bad, right and wrong, are all culture bound.  A healthy brain can, in fact, simply become a Nazi faster in a Nazi society.  It has no way of knowing what is significant or not, that is all learned by experience and background.  The manipulation is so subtle that we feel our values come from within.  Most often we don’t know whom our values are really serving.

Yes, education will differ considerably from that of today. As Fresco explains in his book The Best That Money Can’t Buy “The subjects studied will be related to the direction and needs of this new evolving culture. Students will be made aware of the symbiotic relationship between people, technology, and the environment.”

DA: I can only assume that critics routinely dismiss The Venus Project as a kind of hopeful utopia. How do you respond to that criticism?

RM: Critics very often reject or dismiss new ideas. What is utopian thinking is to believe that the system we are living under today will enable us to achieve sustainability, equality or a high standard of living for all when it is our system which generates these very problems in the first place. If we continue as we are, it seems to me that we are destined for calamity. The Venus Project is not offering a fixed notion as to how society should be. There are no final frontiers. It does offer a way out of our dilemmas to help initiate a next step in our social evolution.

Many are working at going to other planets to escape the problems on this one, but we would be taking our detrimental value systems with us. We are saying that we have to tackle the problems we face here on the most habitable planet we know of.  We will have to apply methodologies to enable us to live together in accordance with the carrying capacity of Earth’s resources, eliminate artificial boundaries, share resources and learn to relate to one another and the environment.

What we have to ask is, what kind of world do we want to live in?

DA: My last question is about the challenges ahead. Rather than taking the necessary steps to reverse climate change, we seem to be accelerating our pollution of the Earth. Socially, we are witnessing a renewed focus on nativism and fear. How might the values of The Venus Project manage against these negative tendencies in human beings?

RM: The notion of negative tendencies in human beings or that we possess a certain “human nature” is a scapegoat to keep things as they are. It’s implying that we are born with a fixed set of views regarding our action patterns. Human behavior is always changing, but there is no “human nature,” per se.  Determining the conditions that generate certain behaviors is what needs to be understood.

As Jacque elaborates, “We are just as lawful as anything else in nature. What appears to be overlooked is the influence of culture upon our values, behavior, and our outlook. It is like studying plants apart from the fact that they consume radiant energy, nutrients, require water, carbon dioxide, gravity, nitrogen, etc. Plants do not grow of their own accord, neither do humans values and behavior.”

All social improvement, from the airplane to clean sources of energy undergoes change, but our social systems remain mostly static. The history of civilization is experimentation and modification. The Free Enterprise System was an important experiment and tremendous step along the way that generated innovation throughout our society. What we now advocate is to continue the process of social experimentation, as this system has long outlived its usefulness and simply cannot address the monumental problems it is facing today. We desperately need to update our social designs to correspond with our technological ability to create abundance for all. This could be the most exciting and fulfilling experiment we as a species could ever take on; working together cooperatively to deal with our most pressing problems which confront us all and finding solutions to them unencumbered with the artificial limitations we impose upon ourselves.

---

Daniel Araya is a researcher and advisor to government with a special interest in education, technological innovation and public policy. His newest books include: Augmented Intelligence (2016), Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies (2015), and Rethinking US Education Policy (2014). He has a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an alumnus of Singularity University’s graduate program in Silicon Valley. He can be found here:www.danielaraya.com and here: @danielarayaXY.

{  https://futurism.com/ }

19-10-2017 om 13:51 geschreven door peter  

Today, people’s bodies are more perfectly melded with technology than we could have imagined mere decades ago. Superhuman strength, dexterity, and senses are no longer science-fiction — they’re already here.

Though cutting-edge technology offers us a glimpse into the capabilities of enhanced humans in the future, it’s most useful these days as support for people who have been affected by a disability. Cyborg technology can replace missing limbs, organs, and bodily senses. Sometimes, it can even enhance the body’s typical function.

Here are six of the most striking examples of this cyborg present. They show us how far we have already come, and how far we could go in the future.

1. Hearing Colors With An Antenna

Activist and artist Neil Harbisson was born without the ability to see color. In 2004, he decided to change that. He mounted an electronic antenna to the lower back of his skull that turns frequencies of light into vibrations his brain interprets as sound, allowing him to “hear color.” These frequencies are even able to go beyond the visual spectrum, allowing him to “hear” invisible frequencies such as infrared and ultraviolet.

“There is no difference between the software and my brain, or my antenna and any other body part. Being united to cybernetics makes me feel that I am technology,” he said in a National Geographic interview.

His body modification was not always well-accepted: the British government took issue when the antenna showed up in Harbisson’s passport photo. Harbisson  fought the government to keep it in. He won, becoming the first “legally recognized” cyborg.

2. The LUKE Arm

The LUKE Arm (named after Luke Sywalker) is a highly advanced prosthetic that lends the wearer a sense of touch. A specialized motor can provide feedback to mimic the resistance offered by various physical objects — users can feel that a pillow offers less resistance than a brick. With the help of funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the finished design received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in 2014.

Electronic sensors receive signals from the wearer’s muscles that the device then translates into physical movement. The wearer can manipulate multiple joints at once through switches that can be controlled with his or her feet.  The first commercially available LUKE arm became available to a small group of military amputees in late 2016. Amputees can now buy the prosthetic through their physicians, but the device is rumored to cost around $100,000.

3. Artificial Vision

In his 20s, Jens Naumann was involved in two separate accidents that shot metal shards into his eyes, causing him to lose his vision. In 2002, at the age of 37, Naumann participated in a clinical trial performed at the Lisbon-based Dobelle Institute in which a television camera was connected straight to his brain, bypassing his faulty eyes. Dots of light combined to form shapes and outlines of the world around him, giving him “this kind of dot matrix-type vision.” The system enabled him to see Christmas lights outlining his home in Canada that year.

Unfortunately, the system failed only after a couple of weeks. And when William Dobelle, the original inventor of the technology, passed away in 2004, he left behind almost no documentation, leaving technicians no instructions for how to repair Naumann’s system. In 2010, Naumann had the system surgically removed, rendering him completely blind once again.

4. Mind-Controlled Bionic Leg

The mindcontrolled bionic leg was first used in 2012 by Zac Vawter, a software engineer from Seattle whose leg was amputated above the knee in 2009. The technology that translates brain signals into physical movement, called Targeted Muscle Reinnvervation (TMR), was first created in 2003 for upper-limb prosthetics. But Vawter’s prosthetic was revolutionary because it was the first leg prosthetic use it.

In 2012, Zac Vawter climbed the 2,100 steps of the Willis Tower in Chicago, with the help of his prosthetic leg. It took him 53 minutes and nine seconds.

5. The bebionic Hand

Prosthetics company bebionic has created some of the most sophisticated prosthetic hands to date. Individual motors move every joint along every digit independently. To help with everyday use, the bebionic has 14 pre-determined grip patterns. Highly sensitive motors vary the speed and force of the grip in real-time — it’s delicate enough for the user to hold an egg between his or her index finger and thumb, and robust enough to hold up to 45 kilograms (99 pounds).

The bebionic hand has been available commercially since 2010. Models released in the years since have improved its battery life, flexibility, and software.

6. The Eyeborg Project

Toronto-based filmmaker Rob Spence decided to replace his missing right eye with a prosthetic equipped with a wirelessly-transmitting video camera. Thanks to a partnership with RF wireless design company and a group of electrical engineers, Spence created a prosthetic eye shell that could house enough electronics in such a small, confined space.

The camera can record up to 30 minutes of footage before depleting the battery. Spence used footage captured by his eye prosthetic in a documentary called Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary.

{ https://futurism.com/ }

13-10-2017 om 01:05 geschreven door peter