All About Transhumanism

Apparently there’s a Transhumanist Party and they’re running a candidate in this year’s presidential election.  I’m not necessarily endorsing this party here, just putting it up because it’s relevant. 

A new technique developed by UCSF scientists for building organoids (tiny models of human tissues) more precisely turns human cells into the biological equivalent of LEGO bricks. Called DNA Programmed Assembly of Cells (DPAC), it allows researchers in hours to create arrays of thousands of custom-designed organoids, such as models of human mammary glands containing several hundred cells each.

“It is a project called M - it is indeed an assistant to which you can ask just about any question or to solve any problem.

Some of the questions may require human expertise - so whenever the machine can't answer a question it is sent to human trainers and then the machine can learn to do a better job next time. As we get more experienced with the service, we will be able to build machines that do more automatically and scale the service to more people.

What we are hoping to do is take this digital assistant idea to the next level. If you think about Siri, Cortana, Google Now - most of the answers they provide are scripted. Someone has imagined the possible answers and figured out a tree of possibilities. If you go outside of the script, the machines responds with a joke or tries to get out of it.

First brain-to-brain ‘telepathy’ communication via the Internet

The first brain-to-brain telepathy-like communication between two participants via the Internet has been performed by University of Washington researchers.

The experiment used a question-and-answer game. The goal is for the “inquirer” to determine which object the “respondent” is looking at from a list of possible objects. The inquirer sends a question (e.g., “Does it fly?) to the respondent, who answers “yes” or “no” by mentally focusing on one of two flashing LED lights attached to the monitor. The respondent is wearing an electroencephalography (EEG) helmet.

By focusing on the “yes” light, the EEG device generates send a signal to the inquirer via the Internet to activate a magnetic coil positioned behind the inquirer’s head, which stimulates the visual cortex and causes the inquirer to see a flash of light (known as a “phosphene”). A “no” signal works the same way, but is not strong enough to activate the coil.

This system, called GeoS, uses a combination of computer vision to interpret diagrams, natural language processing to read and understand text, and a geometric solver, achieving 49 percent accuracy on official SAT test questions.