Lifeboat Foundation

For the moment, massive job losses from automation and artificial intelligence are a largely theoretical worry. But tax economists and lawyers are thinking through the economic circumstances in which robot taxes might make sense and the tricky legal decisions and definitions needed to implement them.

A debate is heating up over whether businesses should pay up when they replace human workers with machines.

US$30 Million to Seed Hundreds of Bold, Innovative Ideas for Human Longevity! — On this ideaXme (https://radioideaxme.com/) episode, I am joined by Dr. Victor Dzau, President of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (https://nam.edu/initiatives/grand-challenge-healthy-longevity/) to talk about the potential of their Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge — eNag #ideaXme #VictorDzau #Wellness #Health #NationalAcademyOfMedicine #NAM #NAS #NIH #FDA #Duke #Cardiology #Longevity #Biotechnology #Regeneration #LifeExtension #Aging #Challenges #Prizes #Competitions #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage

Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Dr. Victor Dzau, President of the United States National Academy of Medicine (NAM)and of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Continue reading “A US $30 million fund to promote bold ideas for aging populations: Dr Victor Dzau” »

Whenever someone refers me to a story with alarming facts that should surprise or outrage any thinking human, my spider-sense is activated. Does the story make sense? Is it plausible? If the message contains evidence of being repeated (or forwarded to more than two friends), then whatever is claimed is almost certain to be false.

If the subject is important to me—or if there is any chance that it might influence my view of the world, I check it at Snopes. The reputable web site confirms or debunks many urban legends and all sorts of viral web hype.

You never know what you might learn at Snopes. You can easily be lured into a rabbit hole, digging into the site beyond whatever prompted your visit in the first place.

Fact-checking can be fun! For example:

Continue reading “50 Year Lie: Sugar industry blames fats” »

The private revolution in space is upon us.

At Roswell we have developed the first Molecular Electronics chip. We utilized advances in semiconductor technology, nano-fabrication and bio-sensors to create standard CMOS chips that directly integrate sensor molecules into the CMOS integrated circuits.

Going “on-chip” to deploy bio-sensors provides unprecedented economics, precision, portability, and scalability. Our first chip is designed to read DNA; future chips will be designed for protein detection and other diverse bio-sensing applications.

Germany’s supreme court recently ruled that an old policy that suspended payments if individuals didn’t actively search for work was unconstitutional.

That might explain things…

There may soon be serious financial and legal ramifications to the proliferation of deepfake technology. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that a UK energy company’s chief executive was tricked into wiring €200,000 to a Hungarian supplier because he believed his boss was instructing him to do so. Instead, it was a thief using deepfake tech.

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.