Two dozen leading experts in the brain recently converged for a daylong meeting at Stanford University. The meeting focused on a review of the current state of research and scientific knowledge related to software products and approaches that aim to defend against age-related cognitive decline. This meeting follows a similar meeting held five years ago which resulted in the 2008 Expert Consensus on Brain Health.
Science is not magic, no matter what the movies might tell us. It operates under very real, and very palpable constraints. One of these is money. You can’t just recite equations like they’re incantations, and pull change out of the ether. It takes time, and time costs money.
An interesting series of discussions have appeared throughout the blogosphere over the last few days focused on the question of economics in a future dominated by Artificially Intelligence. An article by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones magazine ignited the debate claiming the human race would soon be out of work.
You take your dog (or hyena) to the neighborhood park for a walk, and there it frolics with other beasts on the cybernetic meadow and through the ShrubPlugs. And pets are many-times cross-petted. Is everyone updating their Facebook timelines and flirting on Twitter?
“We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible….I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society.”
If Abundance is the wonderful Future Possible, what are we going to need to have, be and do to get there? What follows are our initial explorations of a thesis that proposes that Abundance and Flow might just be flip sides of the same coin
London Futurists are very fortunate that the lead editor of this book, Amnon Eden, will be presenting a summary of some key arguments about Singularity hypotheses, in our meeting on 11th May. He will be joined as a speaker by David Pearce, who has been actively involved behind the scenes in the planning of the book, and who contributed two articles in the book.
Eating less helps you live longer, but eating less is hard. One line of experiment suggests that eating less of just one protein component, methionine, is sufficient to extend life span, perhaps as effectively as though less calories were being consumed. It’s an intriguing idea, though the research is fraught with contradictions, and to separate methionine from other protein components is not easy or cheap.
