Creators of artificial intelligence measure how well machines can imitate human qualities like empathy, listening, affirmation, and love. Don’t reciprocate, says Sherry Turkle. Turkle’s latest book is “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age”

“I have very strong feelings about a future in which robots become the kind of conversational agent that pretend to have emotional lives. Shortly after I finished we can make reclaiming conversation I was interviewed for an article in the New York Times about Hello Barbie. So Hello Barbie comes out of the box and says, now I’m just paraphrasing, the jest hi I’m Hello Barbie. I have a sister. You have a sister. I kind of hate my sister. I’m jealous of your sister. Do you hate your sister? Let’s talk about how we feel about our sisters. In other words it just kind of knows stuff about you and is ready to talk about the arc of a human life and sibling rivalry as though it had a life, a mother, the feelings of jealousy about a sister and was ready to relate to you on that basis. And it doesn’t. It’s teaching pretend empathy. It’s asking you to relate to an object that has pretend empathy.”

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Can Pretend to Love Us, But is that Dangerous for Children?” »

Great news! The AgeMeter campaign (https://www.lifespan.io/agemeter) has been extended by 2 weeks; partly because the project lead Elliott Small has been called in by FEMA to help with Hurricane Harvey. We are also happy to announce 2 sources of matching funds to help carry this important project to victory)!

Please check the campaign updates or our post for all the details: http://www.leafscience.org/fighting-aging-and-hurricane-harvey/

Using the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning the project is developing a free to use application to help speed up research and reduce animal suffering.

For more info and to find out how you can help please visit:

https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/mouseage-photographic-aging-clock-in-mice/

Hyder Jaffrey, head of strategic funding and fintech innovation at UBS, stated: “We have been in discussions with central banks and regulators and we will continue that over the next 12 months with the aim of a limited ‘go live’ at the back end of 2018.”

‘Utility settlement coin’ aims to launch next year for blockchain settlements.

Nanomachines which can drill into cancer cells, killing them in just 60 seconds, have been developed by scientists.

The tiny spinning molecules are driven by light, and spin so quickly that they can burrow their way through cell linings when activated.

In one test conducted at Durham University the nanomachines took between one and three minutes to break through the outer membrane of prostate cancer cell, killing it instantly.

Continue reading “Nanomachines that drill into cancer cells killing them in just 60 seconds developed by scientists” »

It could give you amazing capabilities, like being able to see your own cells.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey gives his opinion on this, and explains how people can help support research at the SENS Research Foundation.

This video is presented by LEAF. Please support our work by becoming a “Lifespan Hero”: http://lifespan.io/hero

Panel: Dr. Alexandra Stolzing, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Oliver Medvedik, Elena Milova, Keith Comito, Steve Hill and Alen Akhabaev.

To help you understand the significance of this, in terms of cameras, we’re looking at 6 times more than the total number of our global population today. And in terms of sensors, we’re looking at 133 times more than the total number of our global population.

To quote economics theorist Jeremy Rifkin at length:

While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has never been an inherent right. Indeed, for all of human history, until the modern era, life was lived more or less publicly, as befits the most social species on Earth. As late as the sixteenth century, if an individual was to wander alone aimlessly for long periods of time in daylight, or hide away at night, he or she was likely to be regarded as possessed. In virtually every society that we know of before the modern era, people bathed together in public, often urinated and defecated in public, ate at communal tables, frequently engaged in sexual intimacy in public, and slept huddled together en masse.

Continue reading “Social Experiment Known as Privacy Won’t Survive the Future” »