Lifeboat Foundation

I’m excited to see I’m the fourth most searched 3rd party presidential candidate. Thanks for your support of a science, longevity, and technology platform as an alternative to the establishment. If this continues a nonreligious transhumanist could end up #4 or #5 in the final elections, and even get enough votes (maybe a million or more) to push the US election one way or the other if it’s close.

So much about the 2016 presidential election is unprecedented. But perhaps nothing is more unusual than the electorate’s level of dissatisfaction with both major parties’ likely nominees.

An NBC News-SurveyMonkey poll released earlier this week found that, while Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton maintains her lead in a head-to-head match-up with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, neither candidate is popular with the public at large.

Continue reading “Majority of Americans dislike both Trump and Clinton as interest in third-party spikes online” »

Biography:
Stuart Russell received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics. He has published over 150 papers on a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, and global seismic monitoring. His books include “The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction”, “Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality” (with Eric Wefald), and “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (with Peter Norvig).

Abstract:
Autonomous weapons systems select and engage targets without human intervention; they become lethal when those targets include humans. LAWS might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate enemy combatants in a city, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. The artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics communities face an important ethical decision: whether to support or oppose the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).

Continue reading “Lethal Autonomous Weapons” »

This new SF Weekly story is one of the best long features on transhumanism I’ve ever read. It covers a myriad of futurist subjects. It’s out in print today too.

When John Lennon released “Imagine” in 1971, his lyrics about a brotherhood of man living life in peace struck many people as a simple, even anodyne, response to the Vietnam War. Although politically liberal, Lennon was no doctrinal Marxist — only three years earlier, his song “Revolution” had shrugged off people who “go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.” But the song struck many evangelical Christians as ghoulish, and for some, “Imagine” eventually came to be a sort of national anthem for the repressively secular, globalist state that was thought to be emerging: the anti-Christian New World Order that later became talk-radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ fever dream.

Left Behind, a series of 16 books written between 1995 and 2007 that details a possible end-of-the-world scenario, starting from when all good Christians go to heaven in an instant (the Rapture) until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, specifically calls out “Imagine” as a weapon in Satan’s arsenal of seductive propaganda. The Antichrist in Left Behind is a suave, cosmopolitan Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia — the product of the fused sperm of two gay atheist academics, as it happens — who uses the global confusion in the aftermath of the Rapture to become Secretary General of the U.N. and eventually dictator of a world government that tattoos its citizens with the Mark of the Beast, damning them for eternity.

Continue reading “The Future Is Now for the Transhumanist Party” »

Steve Forbes sits across Brian Singer, a partner at William Blair, as Blair explains the potential of blockhain encryption to empower individuals. He also explains why credit card companies are beginning to embrace a technology that undermines their high fees.

https://youtu.be/CecpCepnkAU

Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:

When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.

In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.

Continue reading “Space exploration will spur transhumanism and mitigate existential risk” »

The question breaks down into two parts:

1. For what public benefit? —and—
2. No, it cannot be achieved in this way

Governments are in the business of regulating certain activities—hopefully in an effort to serve the public good. In the case of business methods and activities, their goal is to maintain an orderly marketplace; one that is fair, safe and conducive to economic growth.

But regulation that lacks a clear purpose or a reasonable detection and enforcement mechanism is folly. Such regulation risks making government seem arbitrary, punitive or ineffective.

«— This is money. It is not a promissory note, a metaphor, an analogy or an abstract representation of money in some account. It is the money itself. Unlike your national currency, it does not require an underlying asset or redemption guarantee.

Continue reading “Can Bitcoin be defeated by legislation?” »

New story and video on transhumanism from Vocativ:

His name is Zoltan Istvan, and he’s running on the Transhumanist ticket.

Continue reading “The transhumanist presidential candidate wants you to live forever” »

1st P-band radar in space will measure the amount of biomass and carbon locked in the world’s forests and how this changes over time — Biomass satellite will provide support to United Nations treaties, notably the Reduction of Emissions due to Deforestation and Forest Degradation

Airbus Defence and Space, the world’s second largest space company has signed a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to build its next Earth Explorer mission, the Biomass satellite. Biomass is due to launch in 2021 and will measure forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes for five years.

The spacecraft will carry the first space-borne P-band synthetic aperture radar to deliver exceptionally accurate maps of tropical, temperate and boreal forest biomass that are not obtainable by ground measurement techniques. The mission will collect frequent information on global forests to determine the distribution of above-ground biomass in these forests and measure annual changes. The 5-year mission will see at least eight growth cycles in the worlds’ forests.

Continue reading “Airbus Defence and Space signs contract to build Biomass – the European Space Agency’s forest mission” »

My new article for Newsweek on the future of transhumanist civil rights:

Transhumanists like presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan believe a new civil rights age is looming.