Greetings everyone, I am running a very unique digital conference time-slotted for participants in Asia, AUS, NZ etc on April 9, 5pm Sydney time, see details below, with 2 very well known Futurist colleagues, Ross Dawson and Shara Evans, on the Future of Work. We are using the Zoom platform again, and have room for up to 500 people; right now we’re at 280 signups but it’s filling up quickly so please sign up soonest:)
Quantum computers will revolutionize information technology, ushering in an era where certain types of calculations will be performed with almost unimaginable speed. Practical applications will include healthcare disciplines such as molecular biology and drug discovery; big data mining; financial services such as portfolio analysis and fraud detection; and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The federal government is helping to create an environment in which quantum computing innovation and experimentation can flourish. The National Quantum Initiative Act puts $1.2 billion into the quantum research budgets of the Energy Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The law also outlines a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications.
Meanwhile, The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is working to ensure that economic growth opportunities and opportunities for improving the world are baked into quantum policies and systems.
Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, which has been cited by organizations like The New York Times and has been instrumental in governmental policy decision-making, offered a massive revision to his model on Wednesday.
Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve.
However, after just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured. Now, the epidemiologist predicts, hospitals will be just fine taking on COVID-19 patients and estimates 20,000 or far fewer people will die from the virus itself or from its agitation of other ailments, as reported by New Scientist Wednesday.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an American oncologist and bioethicist who is senior fellow at the Center for American Progress as well as Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, said on MSNBC on Friday, March 20, that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told him it would probably take 8–10 weeks to get ventilator production started at his factories (he’s working on this at Tesla and SpaceX).
The mission of healthy life extension, or healthy longevity promotion, raises a broad variety of questions and tasks, relating to science and technology, individual and communal ethics, and public policy, especially health and science policy. Despite the wide variety, the related questions may be classified into three groups. The first group of questions concerns the feasibility of the accomplishment of life extension. Is it theoretically and technologically possible? What are our grounds for optimism? What are the means to ensure that the life extension will be healthy life extension? The second group concerns the desirability of the accomplishment of life extension for the individual and the society, provided it will become some day possible through scientific intervention.
How will then life extension affect the perception of personhood? How will it affect the availability of resources for the population? Yet, the third and final group can be termed normative. What actions should we take? Assuming that life extension is scientifically possible and socially desirable, and that its implications are either demonstrably positive or, in case of a negative forecast, they are amenable – what practical implications should these determinations have for public policy, in particular health policy and research policy, in a democratic society? Should we pursue the goal of life extension? If yes, then how? How can we make it an individual and social priority? Given the rapid population aging and the increasing incidence and burden of age-related diseases, on the pessimistic side, and the rapid development of medical technologies, on the optimistic side, these become vital questions of social responsibility. And indeed, these questions are often asked by almost any person thinking about the possibility of human life extension, its meaning for oneself, for the people in one’s close circle, for the entire global community. Many of these questions are rather standard, and the answers to them are also often quite standard. Below some of those frequently asked questions and frequently given answers are given, with specific reference to the possibility and desirability of healthy human life extension, and the normative actions that can be undertaken, by the individual and the society, to achieve this goal.
Your questions answered — an update (11−03−2020): Professor Neil Ferguson on the current status of the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak, case numbers, intervention measures and challenges countries are currently facing.
