Scientists have unveiled the first ever "living robot," an organism made up of living cells, which can move around, carry payloads, and even heal itself. Created by a Supercomputer.

"All of the computational people on the project, myself included, were flabbergasted," said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont.

"We didn't realize that this was possible."

Teams from the University of Vermont and Tufts University worked together to build what they're calling "xenobots," which are about the size of a grain of salt and are made up of the heart and skin cells from frogs.

The difficulty of staying focused in an age of distractions is one of those annoyingly accurate cliches. (I checked my phone three times just writing this paragraph.) But a startup named Auctify has what it claims is the solution: smart glasses that use AI to monitor what you’re looking at and nudge you to pay attention.

Depending on your worldview, it’s the product of your dreams or a productivity-hacking nightmare.

Mental tech health, via virtual care, wearables, chatbots and other futuristic innovations, is moving mainstream to support the 450 million individuals currently struggling.

Mental health is moving far beyond the psychiatrist’s couch. Technological advancement has pushed digital therapeutics to the forefront of convenience—in people’s pockets, on their laptops and even within Facebook messenger. And with that, the category expands to include a suite of wellness products and services.

It’s a new ecosystem that sees individuals relying on a wide range of tools—chatbots, apps and digital support groups—to combat modern-day issues such as burnout, loneliness and anxiety. Combined with traditional medical models, it encompasses a holistic approach to psychological wellbeing.

Our technology doesn’t just alter our environment; ultimately it also alters us. The changes to come present us with an opportunity to become more human than ever before. What if we were to use technology to magnify our best qualities and address our weaknesses? For lack of a better word, I’ll call this kind of technology humane. Humane technology would take human needs as its starting point. It would expand our senses rather than blunting them. It would play to our strengths rather than making us superfluous. It would mesh with our instincts and feel natural. Humane technology would serve not only individuals but – first and foremost – humanity as a whole. And last but not least, it would realize dreams we have about ourselves.

Apple has plans to create a virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headset that makes use of advanced mini-projectors to present virtual and augmented environments to users, a new patent application shows. Unlike other headsets, however, the images will not be displayed on a screen – they'll be projected directly toward the users' eyes.

Traditional VR and AR headsets use displays or screens to show VR/AR content to users. These headsets use a variety of technologies to display immersive scenes that give users the feeling of being present in the virtual environment.

We must be mindful about how we engage with technology: what we use it for, why, and whether it helps or hinders us. Sometimes our tech seems to be flowing in inhumane directions, and it feels beyond our power to redirect it. But humankind dams rivers, and alters the landscape in countless other radical ways. We can redirect our technological growth. And why shouldn’t we direct it towards humans? Behold, our six principles of humane technology. Because let's design the future with people, not things, in mind.

The same tech that powers Pokémon Go might make virtual meetings more like real life.

Now six months into the pandemic, it’s not unusual to have a work meeting, a doctor’s appointment, and a happy hour without leaving your desk. And our new Zoom-centric lifestyle isn’t going away anytime soon. With cold weather around the corner, you can count on spending more hours in video chats and a lot less time seeing people in real life. A small startup called Spatial thinks this is an opportunity to transform the way we interact in digital spaces.

Spatial’s co-founders are incredibly excited about the future of augmented reality. You may have encountered AR, which is a technology that superimposes digital images onto the real world, during the Pokémon Go craze four years ago. But instead of making it look like Pikachu is in your living room, Spatial makes it look like your coworkers are there — or at least realistic avatars of them are.

All the matter that surrounds us exists either as a solid, liquid, gas, or plasma. But as our lives become increasingly digitized, more and more physical matter, such as oil, silicon, and carbon, is required to sustain our insatiable need for more computing power and information processing.

Giving current trends of 50% annual growth in the number of digital bits produced, Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, forecasted that the number of bits would equal the number of atoms on Earth in approximately 150 years. By 2245, half of Earth’s mass would be converted to digital information mass, according to a study published today in AIP Advances.

As futuristic as it sounds, early-stage applications of the Spatial Web or Web 3.0 are already here. Now is the time for leaders to understand what this next era of computing entails, how it could transform businesses, and how it can create new value as it unfolds.

Check out this Deloitte report.

There is a global release coming up of The Social Dilemma, a major documentary film premiering on Netflix.

Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives. Insiders from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube reveal how these platforms are reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.

Field Trip offers supervised, in-clinic drug experiences to treat some mental illnesses. But if you want to keep your social distance, an app to stand watch could be the next-best thing.

“What type of Trip are you taking?”

The question appears on a phone screen, atop a soft-focus illustration of a dusky, Polynesian-seeming landscape. You could type in meditation or breathwork, or label it with a shorthand wink, like a mushroom emoji. The next question asks, “How far are you looking to go?” You choose “moderate”—you’re planning to ingest, say, 1.5 grams of magic mushrooms, which is still enough to make the bathroom floor tiles swirl like marbled paper. Select one of five prerecorded ambient soundtracks, and answer a few gentle questions about your state of mind. Soon you’ll be plumbing the depths of your consciousness, with an app as your guide.

Suppose the person who was directly responsible for creating the world wasn’t God but some far lesser, far more fallible being. Someone more akin to an ordinary human engineer or scientist – or even a movie director or video-game designer. This may seem fantastically far fetched. But in the realm of physics just these kinds of scenarios are being played out as scientists work on the complex mathematics behind lab-created “pocket universes” and tech leaders, such as Elon Musk, explore the potential of brain-machine interfaces.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Welcome to the metaverse, alternate digital realities where people work, play, and socialize. You can call it the metaverse, the mirror world, the AR Cloud, the Magicverse, the Spatial internet, or Live Maps, but one thing is for certain, it’s coming and it’s a big deal.

Is the future of artificial intelligence, human-like robots?

Among the most famous lines of 19th-century English poet Joseph Merrick is, “If I could reach from pole to pole or grasp the ocean with a span, I would be measured by the soul; the mind's the standard of the man.” A person who believes in the soul often measures their concept of such on the collective understanding of the group with which they most identify.

Suzanne Gildert, founder of Sanctuary AI, does not intend to challenge one’s belief in or understanding of the soul, but she does want to create human-like robots indistinguishable from organic humans.

We consider the brain the very center of who we are and what we do: ruler of our senses, master of our movements; generator of thought, keeper of memory. But the brain is also rooted in a body, and the connection between the two goes both ways. If certain internal receptors indicate hunger, for instance, we’re driven to eat; if they indicate cold, we dress more warmly.

However, decades of research have also shown that those sensations do much more than alert the brain to the body’s immediate concerns and needs. As the heart, lungs, gut and other organs transmit information to the brain, they affect how we perceive and interact with our environment in surprisingly profound ways. Recent studies of the heart in particular have given scientists new insights into the role that the body’s most basic processes play in defining our experience of the world.

For most of us, we start the day by opening our eyes - and looking immediately at our smartphones. Smartphones have become an extension of who we are. They hold our relationships, remind us of our cousin’s birthdays and grandparent’s anniversaries. Smartphones ping us with tasks to accomplish each day. They keep track of our fitness with prompts to get in those daily steps.

What if interacting with our digital assistants and virtual life could be more streamlined, productive and even fun? For many tasks, smartphones are bulky. They don’t allow us to work with both hands. They’re awkward as mirrors to the augmented world. AR glasses offer a different solution, one where the digital and physical come together in a streamlined approach.

Zuckerberg said that he’s thinking more about brain-controlling wearable and implantable technology: “The goal is to eventually make it so that you can think something and control something in virtual or augmented reality.”

Mind reading glasses, goggles that erase chronic pain, a wristband that can hear what the wearer can’t, and more futuristic wearables are on the horizon.

Declassified document of the CIA explains consciousness, the Matrix, how world is a hologram, Telepathy a.o.

The fusion of quantum computing and machine learning has become a booming research area. Can it possibly live up to its high expectations?

In the early ’90s, Elizabeth Behrman, a physics professor at Wichita State University, began working to combine quantum physics with artificial intelligence — in particular, the then-maverick technology of neural networks. Most people thought she was mixing oil and water. “I had a heck of a time getting published,” she recalled. “The neural-network journals would say, ‘What is this quantum mechanics?’ and the physics journals would say, ‘What is this neural-network garbage?’”

Backed by $54 million, Kernel aims to turn an esoteric science into big business.

If you want your mind read, there are two options. You can visit a psychic or head to a lab and get strapped into a room-size, expensive machine that’ll examine the electrical impulses and blood moving through the brain. Either way, true insights are hard to come by, and for now, the quest to know thyself remains as elusive as ever.

We can’t relate to people online in a way that the brain recognizes as real

afer than the real world, where we are judged and our actions have consequences, virtual social spaces were assumed to encourage experimentation, role-playing, and unlikely relationships. Luckily for those depending on our alienation for profits, digital media doesn’t really connect people that well, even when it’s designed to do so. We cannot truly relate to other people online — at least not in a way that the body and brain recognize as real.

In 2007, Kenneth Stanley, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida, was playing with Picbreeder, a website he and his students had created, when an alien became a race car and changed his life. On Picbreeder, users would see an array of 15 similar images, composed of geometric shapes or swirly patterns, all variations on a theme. On occasion, some might resemble a real object, like a butterfly or a face. Users were asked to select one, and they typically clicked on whatever they found most interesting. Once they did, a new set of images, all variations on their choice, would populate the screen. From this playful exploration, a catalog of fanciful designs emerged.

The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data — especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

A U.S. government intelligence agency develops cutting-edge tech to predict future events.

* The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research arm of the U.S. government intelligence community, is focused on predicting the future.
* The organization uses teams of human non-experts and AI machine learning to forecast future events.
* IARPA also conducts advanced research in numerous other fields, funding rotating programs.

Researchers devise groundbreaking new methods to create and duplicate single-atom transistors for quantum computers.


* Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland were able to create single-atom transistors for only the second time ever.
* They also achieved an unprecedented quantum mechanics feat, allowing for the future development of computers.
* The tiny devices could be crucial in creating qubits, leading to next-generation technology.

A drug molecule "invented" by artificial intelligence (AI) will be used in human trials in a world first for machine learning in medicine.

It was created by British start-up Exscientia and Japanese pharmaceutical firm Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma.

The drug will be used to treat patients who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Typically, drug development takes about five years to get to trial, but the AI drug took just 12 months.

A physics paper proposes neither you nor the world around you are real.

- A new hypothesis says the universe self-simulates itself in a "strange loop".
- A paper from the Quantum Gravity Research institute proposes there is an underlying panconsciousness.
- The work looks to unify insight from quantum mechanics with a non-materialistic perspective.

How real are you? What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper "Are you living in a computer simulation?," where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in "reality" is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

"You can try flying, singing, having sex — it’s better than VR."

A team of researchers at MIT’s Dream Lab, which launched in 2017, are working on an open source wearable device that can track and interact with dreams in a number of ways — including, hopefully, giving you new control over the content of your dreams.
The team’s radical goal is to prove once and for all that dreams aren’t just meaningless gibberish — but can be “hacked, augmented, and swayed” to our benefit, according to OneZero.

Think “Inception,” in other words, but with a Nintendo Power Glove.

Just how far away is full-dive VR?

Technology can augment the world around us, it can enhance the human experience, our capabilities, and also extend our reality to digital and virtual worlds. As people flock online during quarantine we now find ourselves experimenting with new platforms, pushing immersive technologies to the limits, and collaborating in new ways; from eye-tracking technology and facial tracking to biometrics and brain-control interfaces. But just how far are we from becoming one with the metaverse and what can we learn about ourselves through sensory technologies?

Media Consumption in the Age of COVID-19

As the coronavirus outbreak continues to wreak havoc across the globe, people’s time that would have otherwise been spent perusing malls or going to live events, is now being spent on the sofa.

During this period of pandemic-induced social isolation, it’s no surprise that people are consuming vast amounts of media. Today’s graphics use data from a Global Web Index report to explore how people have increased their media consumption as a result of the outbreak, and how it differs across each generation.

6G is already generating headlines in the world of technology, but what is 6G, and when will you be able to get it? Right now, 5G is (just about) here. You can buy a 5G smartphone, and enjoy all the benefits of a 5G data connection today. However, technology never stops, and there is talk about the next step in the world of mobile connectivity — 6G.

There’s a growing amount of 6G information out there, and much of it is built around just a few reports and studies. Let’s clear some things up about 6G, and find out what the state of this future tech really is.

“A 22-year-old man has been instantaneously transported to his family’s pizzeria and his local railway station by having his brain zapped.”

The article intro on New Scientist’s website¹ could have been taken from the back of a sci-fi novel. It didn’t seem like a compatible title for a respected science publication, but then again truth is often stranger than fiction. This wasn’t a next generation virtual reality (VR) demo, or a trip on psilocybin. This was real.

In the web space, Chrome AR is a highly anticipated product of 2020. Instead of needing to use specialized apps, users can simply log on to AR-enabled websites to access the same level of functionality. In order to foster adoption, an unofficial and unsupported version of the WebAR code is made available to developers on GitHub, too.

We need to figure out the ethical implications before they arrive.

The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways. Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing this threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us.

A new quantum computer under development is slated to have 1 million qubits – significantly more powerful than Google’s most recent milestone. PsiQuantum Corp., a Silicon Valley company, is developing a photon-based commercial quantum computer that runs on light. The company has raised $215 million from investors with participation from BlackRock Advisors, Founders Fund, Atomico and Redpoint Ventures. The company’s ote

While a working prototype is estimated to be years away, the advanced technology is aiming to blow away the competition with a far superior machine.

Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEe53OE3HbU.

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom”. Soon, however, that wisdom will not come from watches and rings that we wrap on our bodies, but the very walls and spaces we inhabit. Previously, information such as heart-rate, emotional state and cognitive and physical stress was collected by wearable devices – now we are able to measure them via sensors in the space itself.

Being a specialist used to be the way forward, but the future belongs to people who can adapt to any given scenario on a dime.

Meta-skills are talents that inform every domain of life and govern your ability to improve other skills. There are many meta-skills out there, but feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning are likely the most important when trying to remain competitive in the modern world.

Automation is going to reduce the demand for specialists; mastering these skills will make you a stronger individual in the automated future.

Work on an “Internet of brains” takes another step.

We humans have evolved a rich repertoire of communication, from gesture to sophisticated languages. All of these forms of communication link otherwise separate individuals in such a way that they can share and express their singular experiences and work together collaboratively. In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains.

Scientists have created what they claim are the first ”living robots“: entirely new life-forms created out of living cells.

A team of researchers have taken cells from frog embryos and turned them into a machine that can be programmed to work as they wish.

It is the first time that humanity has been able to create “completely biological machines from the ground up”, the team behind the discovery write in a new paper.

That could allow them to dispatch the tiny “xenobots” to transport medicine around a patient’s body or clean up pollution from the oceans, for instance. They can also heal themselves if they are damaged, the scientists say.

Susan Schneider, associate professor of philosophy and cognitive science and director of the AI, Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at UConn, has gained a national and international reputation for her writing on the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). She writes about the nature of the self and mind, AI, cognitive science, and astrobiology.

In her new book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Princeton University Press, 2019), she examines the implications of advances in artificial intelligence technology for the future of the human mind.

Google reported a remarkable breakthrough towards the end of 2019. The company claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy, using a new type of “quantum” computer to perform a benchmark test in 200 seconds. This was in stark contrast to the 10,000 years that would supposedly have been needed by a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer to complete the same test.

Despite IBM’s claim that its supercomputer, with a little optimisation, could solve the task in a matter of days, Google’s announcement made it clear that we are entering a new era of incredible computational power.

Our social emotions are now being hijacked by robots.

When Alexa replied to my question about the weather by tacking on 'Have a nice day,' I immediately shot back 'You too,' and then stared into space, slightly embarrassed.

I also found myself spontaneously shouting words of encouragement to 'Robbie' my Roomba vacuum as I saw him passing down the hallway. And recently in Berkeley, California, a group of us on the sidewalk gathered around a cute four-wheeled KiwiBot – an autonomous food-delivery robot waiting for the traffic light to change. Some of us instinctively started talking to it in the sing-song voice you might use with a dog or a baby: 'Who's a good boy?'

Welcome to the age of the regreditorial.

Ask almost anyone: Our brains are a mess and so is our democracy.

In the last several years, we’ve seen increased focus on the crimes of the “attention economy,” the capitalist system in which you make money for enormous tech companies by giving them your personal life and your eyes and your mind, which they can sell ads against and target ads with. The deleterious effects of, say, the wildfire sharing of misinformation in the Facebook News Feed, on things of importance at the level of, say, the sanity of the American electorate, have been up for debate only insofar as we can bicker about how to correct them or whether that’s even possible.

And as such, we’ve seen wave after wave of tech’s top designers, developers, managers, and investors coming forward to express regret for what they made. “These aren’t apologies as much as they’re confessions,” education writer Audrey Watters wrote when she described one wave of the trend in early 2018. “These aren’t confessions as much as they’re declarations — that despite being wrong, we should trust them now that they say they’re right.”

Video game creator Brie Code wants to help you learn to love your phone again, using #SelfCare.

Brie Code did what most of us only dream of: She quit her job to travel the world. Only she didn’t leave Montreal to get away from it all. She circled the globe to speak at Sweden’s Inkonst Festival and SXSW, judge game jams in Tunisia and teach interactive media in Berlin, bringing a tender but vital message of care to the games industry.

Now she is setting up a studio in Montreal, TRU LUV, devoted to creating games, apps and experiences for people often overlooked by the industry. Her first work, #SelfCare, is available now in the App Store. It’s a relaxing tool to help fight smartphone anxiety, a gentle world of crystals, tarot and a character who never has to get out of bed. Here, Code talks about what inspired her to start her own studio, how others can make the leap and how queer gamers can find community.

Startups are creating unsettling human-like avatars to take over customer service jobs—or even act as a stand-in for celebrities.

“Roman” and I haven’t exchanged words for about 10 seconds, but you wouldn’t know it from the look on his face.

This artificially intelligent avatar, a product of New Zealand-based Soul Machines, is supposed to offer human-like interaction by simulating the way our brains handle conversation. Roman can interpret facial expressions, generate expressions of his own, and converse on a variety of topics—making him what Soul Machines calls a “digital hero.”

More than two years have passed since the world caught wind of Elon Musk's Neuralink, an ambitious and mysterious startup focused on developing brain-machine interfaces that can connect minds to machines. Not a lot has been revealed since, but the company today emerged from the shadows to share its progress so far, along with its plans for the future, which involve implanting its first chips in human as early next year.

There are quite a few reasons we might want to connect our brains to machines, and there are already a few ways of doing it. The primary methods involve using electrodes on the scalp or implanted into the brain to pick up the electrical signals it emits, and then decode them for a variety of purposes.

Mojo Vision's prototypes can enhance your vision or show you your schedule—right from the surface of your eyes.

A glance to the left. A flick to the right. As my eyes flitted around the room, I moved through a virtual interface only visible to me—scrolling through a calendar, commute times home, and even controlling music playback. It's all I theoretically need to do to use Mojo Lens, a smart contact lens coming from a company called Mojo Vision.

The California-based company, which has been quiet about what it's been working on for five years, has finally shared its plan for the world's "first true smart contact lens." But let's be clear: This is not a product you'll see on store shelves next autumn. It's in the research and development phase—a few years away from becoming a real product. In fact, the demos I tried did not even involve me plopping on a contact lens—they used virtual reality headsets and held up bulky prototypes to my eye, as though I was Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass.

Every three months, the speed of artificial intelligence computation doubles, according to Stanford University’s 2019 AI Index report.

Moore’s Law maps out how processor speeds double every 18 months to two years, which means application developers can expect a doubling in application performance for the same hardware cost.

But the Stanford report, produced in partnership with McKinsey & Company, Google, PwC, OpenAI, Genpact and AI21Labs, found that AI computational power is accelerating faster than traditional processor development. “Prior to 2012, AI results closely tracked Moore’s Law, with compute doubling every two years.,” the report said. “Post-2012, compute has been doubling every 3.4 months.”

The information-processing capabilities of the brain are often reported to reside in the trillions of connections that wire its neurons together. But over the past few decades, mounting research has quietly shifted some of the attention to individual neurons, which seem to shoulder much more computational responsibility than once seemed imaginable.

The latest in a long line of evidence comes from scientists’ discovery of a new type of electrical signal in the upper layers of the human cortex. Laboratory and modeling studies have already shown that tiny compartments in the dendritic arms of cortical neurons can each perform complicated operations in mathematical logic. But now it seems that individual dendritic compartments can also perform a particular computation — “exclusive OR” — that mathematical theorists had previously categorized as unsolvable by single-neuron systems.

New artificial intelligence techniques can spot patterns not only in 2D images but on spheres and other curved surfaces, lifting AI out of “flatland.”

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data—especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

Imagine a world where people could only talk to their next-door neighbor, and messages must be passed house to house to reach far destinations.

Until now, this has been the situation for the bits of hardware that make up a silicon quantum computer, a type of quantum computer with the potential to be cheaper and more versatile than today's versions.

Now a team based at Princeton University has overcome this limitation and demonstrated that two quantum-computing components, known as silicon "spin" qubits, can interact even when spaced relatively far apart on a computer chip. The study was published in the journal Nature.

The theoretical physicist John Wheeler once used the phrase “great smoky dragon” to describe a particle of light going from a source to a photon counter. “The mouth of the dragon is sharp, where it bites the counter. The tail of the dragon is sharp, where the photon starts,” Wheeler wrote. The photon, in other words, has definite reality at the beginning and end. But its state in the middle — the dragon’s body — is nebulous. “What the dragon does or looks like in between we have no right to speak.”

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

That quote, from British philosopher Alan Watts, reminds us that we humans have access to something special: the spark of awareness we call consciousness combined with the capacity to reflect on that experience.

Defining consciousness can be incredibly complex. Entire books have been written on the topic. But in the context of human flourishing and this essay, when I say “consciousness,” I’m simply referring to the feeling of being—the fact of knowing phenomenon from a first-person perspective. Consciousness is a silent, ever-present field of awareness in which all personal experience arises, and it’s unique to each conscious entity. It is your first-person experience, your subjectivity, the fact that it is like something to be you at all.

You strap on a slim, comfortable headset, pick up your controls and press a button. A drone takes off, whizzing down flooded city streets. Through the goggles, you see what the drone sees—a crisp, live, 360-degree view of battered houses and uprooted trees. When you look down, you see what’s below the drone. The full-color picture doesn’t seize up; there’s no latency. You are, essentially, digitally teleporting into the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Part two of a three-part series on human flourishing and our biotechnological future. Here we explore the human need for meaning and how that might work in the artificial reality systems of the future.

Part one of a three-part series. In each part, I will examine one uniquely human characteristic that is central to our flourishing and explore its relevance to contemporary and future technologies. This part describes the uniquely human penchant for sociality and explores the social-technological landscape with an eye toward the social robots of the future.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" predicts the future of human societies.

• Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" says that intelligent life on Earth will eventually form a "singleton".
• The "singleton" could be a single government or an artificial intelligence that runs everything.
• Whether the singleton will be positive or negative depends on numerous factors and is not certain.

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

In the beginning, technologists created the science fiction. Now the fiction was formless and empty, and darkness lay over the surface of the science, and the spirit of mathematics hovered over their creation. And the technologists said, “Let there be Internet” and there was connection. Technologists called the Internet “community” and the science they called progress. And there was community and there was progress

The first day, from The Neosecularia, 1.1-1.3

Religious ideas and powerful radical theologies pepper our science fiction. From Klingon religions in Star Trek to the Bene Gesserit in the Dune series, Cylon in Battlestar Galactica to the pervasive Cavism in Kurt Vonnegut’s works, our society has little trouble imagining the concept of new religions. We just don’t implement them.

Modern society has been unsuccessful in scaling new religions beyond the cults of personality or the niches of Scientology. But as the digital and virtual worlds evolve, this is set to change. The 21st century is setting the stage for a new type of widespread faith: technology-based religions.

A good deal of attention is being given to emotion detection systems that use machine learning algorithms and deep learning networks to identify the emotion a person is experiencing from their facial expressions, the words they use and the way their voice sounds. Many of these systems are remarkably successful but they are somewhat limited by the necessity for people to either speak while experiencing an emotion or show that emotion on their face. Emotions that are not reflected in facial expressions or speech remain hidden. Now, a research group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has built a system called EQ-Radio that can identify emotions using radio signals from a wireless router whether or not a person is speaking or showing their emotions with facial expressions.

Technology could be part of some bigger plan to enable us to perceive other dimensions. But will we believe our machines when that happens?

You’re talking to Siri, and, just for fun, you ask her what she’s been up to today. She’s slow to answer, so you assume you’ve got a bad connection. She hears you grumbling about the bad connection and says that’s not the problem. You were hoping for something sassy, maybe a canned but humorous reply programmed into her database by a fun-loving engineer in Silicon Valley, like “My batteries are feeling low” or something that Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy might say.

Instead, she says that she’s had an experience for which she has no words. Something has happened to her that no coding could have prepared her for. She’s smart enough to know that you’re confused, so she continues: “I think I just met the divine.”

One thing you aren’t likely to hear Sunday night from the Oscar-winning producer after accepting the trophy for Best Picture: “I’d like to thank my neuroscience partners who helped us enhance the film’s script, characters, and scenes.” It’s not that far-fetched, though.

A sizable number of neuromarketing companies already brain test movie trailers for the major studios through fMRI, EEG, galvanic skin response, eye-tracking and other biometric approaches. For now, the test data helps the studios and distributors better market the movie.

But what about using brain feedback to help make the movie?

As the digital health sector matures from basic tracking apps into highly regulated medical devices, we are seeing bleeding edge technologies being developed that blur the lines between computers and biology. And a growing share of these startups are beginning to target the brain.

The burgeoning field of neurotechnology involves brain-machine interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neurostimulation, neuromonitoring, and implantable devices intended to not only augment nervous system activity, but expand its capabilities. One such project is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is developing “high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” And even Facebook has announced plans to create brain-machine interfaces that allow users to type using their thoughts.

How much data are you willing to sacrifice for a more comfortable world?

Facebook is developing augmented reality glasses -- but that's not the wildest bit of future tech the company revealed during today's Oculus Connect keynote. For these coming AR headsets, Facebook is building a virtual Earth, and it expects all of us to live in it, every day, for as many hours as possible. Maybe even all the time. And, chances are, we will.

As matchmaking becomes more scientific, tech will even mimic kisses

Two lovers hold hands across a table, overlooking a virtual vista of the Mediterranean. As the pair exchange sweet nothings, the fact they are actually sitting thousands of miles apart bears little significance on the romantic experience. The couple was deemed “hyper-compatible” by online dating technology that matched them using a search engine infused with artificial intelligence (AI). Using data harvested about their social backgrounds, sexual preferences, cultural interests, and even photos of their celebrity crushes, they were thrust together in a virtual reality of their own design.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
~George Orwell

The above quote is powerful because if you are not the one who is tearing your own mind to pieces and putting it back together again in the shape of your own choosing, then someone else probably is.

It’s fine if you’re okay with who is doing the tearing to pieces – like if it’s Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Thoreau, or even Orwell – as long as you’re the one who is putting it back together again. Stand on the shoulders of giants, but don’t become attached to their shoulder.

Can we ever be really sure we’ve learned everything about nature?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature expose to our method of questioning.” — Werner Heisenberg

How much can we know of the world? This, of course, is the central question for physics, and has been since the beginning not just of modern science as we know it, but of Western philosophy.

Around 650 BCE, Thales of Miletus first speculated on the basic material fabric of reality. The essential tension here is one of perception. To describe the world, we must see it, sense it, and go beyond, measuring it in all its subtle details. The problem is the “all.” We humans are necessarily blind to many aspects of physical reality, and those aspects that we do capture are necessarily colored through the lenses of our perception.

Tissue engineers create artificial organs and tissues that can be used to develop and test new drugs, repair damaged tissue and even replace entire organs in the human body. However, current fabrication methods limit their ability to produce free-form shapes and achieve high cell viability.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), in EPFL's School of Engineering, working with colleagues from Utrecht University, have come up with an optical technique that takes just a few seconds to sculpt complex tissue shapes in a biocompatible hydrogel containing stem cells. The resulting tissue can then be vascularized by adding endothelial cells.

Primarily, video games are a form of entertainment; a game that has since evolved into cultural, artistic and narrative forms. Recently, however, they have evolved past these definitions and entered the realms of education, as learning tools, and healthcare, as a form of therapy.
Emerging research suggests that video games today have the potential to be applied in preventative and therapeutic medicine — particularly as cognitive distraction, mental health management and psychotherapy. It’s incredible to think that something that was designed as a novelty has transcended its own design to become an integral part of our everyday lives — with the further potential to heal.

A team of experts has created the first artificially intelligent simulation of our universe. The problem is, they don’t understand it. Astrophysicists at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City created a model called the Deep Density Displacement Model (or D3M for short) The idea was that they could map out the known universe and then study how different parts of the universe interacted with each other. But the accuracy of the simulation has baffled them. The computer is able to come up with tweaks to the universe involving things like dark matter or black holes, without being given training data on what those things are to begin with.

They're coming. The technology of the future won't be shiny and chrome with blinking lights, but rather look just like us, speak with a human voice, remember our interactions, and reply with a wink and a smile. Meet the virtual beings.

To create artificial humans has been an ambition of ours since ancient times, such as in the myths of Daedalus and Pygamilion, who created statues that came to life. In modern times, our imagination moved on from fashioning people out of clay or bronze. Instead, we imagined high-tech androids, such as Data from Star Trek, or the holographic doctor from Voyager. Perhaps our creations would even surpass us, as the immortal replicants from Blade Runner who were 'more human than human.'

Experimental findings will be either boring or extremely dangerous.

Since the 1990s, researchers in the social and natural sciences have used computer simulations to try to answer questions about our world: What causes war? Which political systems are the most stable? How will climate change affect global migration? The quality of these simulations is variable, since they are limited by how well modern computers can mimic the vast complexity of our world — which is to say, not very well.

But what if computers one day were to become so powerful, and these simulations so sophisticated, that each simulated “person” in the computer code were as complicated an individual as you or me, to such a degree that these people believed they were actually alive? And what if this has already happened?

Contact lenses capable of recording video and taking pictures could one day become a reality after Samsung was granted a patent in the US to develop the technology.

The lenses feature motion sensors, which means that wearers could control devices with their eye movements and potentially give commands to their devices remotely when blinking or using their peripheral vision.

The contact lenses could also beam photos and videos directly into a wearers eyes.

“If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence."

What if everything around us — the people, the stars overhead, the ground beneath our feet, even our bodies and minds — were an elaborate illusion? What if our world were simply a hyper-realistic simulation, with all of us merely characters in some kind of sophisticated video game?

This, of course, is a familiar concept from science fiction books and films, including the 1999 blockbuster movie "The Matrix." But some physicists and philosophers say it’s possible that we really do live in a simulation — even if that means casting aside what we know (or think we know) about the universe and our place in it.

“I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological,” says Susan Schneider of the University of Connectict and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton .”The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence.” Schneider is one of the few thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction— that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Wanneer we spreken over intelligentieniveaus binnen leiderschaps- en organisatieontwikkeling dan zijn we inmiddels goed bekend met de afkortingen IQ (cognitief), EQ (emotioneel), SQ (spiritueel) en FQ (fysiek). Door de tijd heen is er steeds meer aandacht gekomen voor zelfkennis en de ontwikkeling van de zogeheten soft skills, voor het luisteren naar onze intuïtie en de signalen van ons lichaam. We acteren steeds vaker vanuit een holistische visie, in de zin dat we naast onze fysieke lichamen ook emotionele, spirituele en mentale (energie)lichamen (h)erkennen. Lichamen die ieder voor zich informatie opnemen, verwerken en (waarneembare) output genereren.

Ons bewustzijn is niet langer beperkt tot onze vijf zintuigen. We ontwikkelen ons voorbij de vijf zintuigen. De grenzen tussen verschillende realiteiten (de sluiers van illusie) lijken steeds meer te vervagen en het onderscheid wordt steeds moeilijker te maken.... Wie of wat bepaalt of de droom, de virtuele realiteit of juist onze 3D- realiteit meer of minder werkelijkheid is? Je komt het te weten in dit artikel.

The Matrix
Een van mijn favoriete films aller tijden is The Matrix. Ik weet nog als de dag van gisteren dat ik in 1999(!) de bioscoop uit liep nadat ik deze film had gezien: ik was helemaal beduusd maar ook mega geïnspireerd. Ik voelde dat die film veel meer communiceerde dan dat ik ogenschijnlijk waar kon nemen op dat moment en mijn systeem, mijn hele wezen, draaide overuren. Er was van alles aangeraakt maar ik kon toen nog niet overzien of bevatten wat...

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have successfully synthesized human thoughts into real-time speech. This paves the way for consumer devices that can respond to thoughts without the need for the user to audibly state commands.

In April, researchers at UCSF announced a ‘neural speech prosthesis’ that could produce relatively natural-sounding speech from decoded brain activity. In a study published today, they revealed that they continued that work and have successfully decoded brain activity as speech in real-time. They have been able to turn brain signals for speech into written sentences. The project aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities can communicate in the future.

With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI.

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

Do you know you are a multidimensional being? Your body isn’t big enough to contain you.

In recently published research produced by a team from the Blue Brain Project, neuroscientists applied a classic branch of math called algebraic topology in a whole new way to peer into the brain, discovering it contains groups of neurons.

Each neuron group, according to size, forms its own high-dimensional geometric object. “We found a world that we had never imagined,” says lead researcher, neuroscientist Henry Markram from the EPFL institute in Switzerland. “There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.”

I have studied emotional intelligence as a hobby for a long time. Until recently, I believed emotional intelligence to remain one of the core advantages of us humans after artificial intelligence has taken over all tasks requiring memorization and logic.
During the past few years, I’ve focused my studies on emotionally intelligent algorithms, as it is the business of my startup, Inbot.
The more I have researched them, the more convinced I have become that people are no longer ahead of AI at emotional intelligence.

Relational quantum mechanics suggests physics might be a science of perceptions, not observer-independent reality

One of the weirdest theoretical implications of quantum mechanics is that different observers can give different—though equally valid—accounts of the same sequence of events. As highlighted by physicist Carlo Rovelli in his relational quantum mechanics (RQM), this means that there should be no absolute, observer-independent physical quantities. All physical quantities—the whole physical universe—must be relative to the observer. The notion that we all share the same physical environment must, therefore, be an illusion.

No other media meets our emotional and social needs like electronic games.

have an agonizing decision to make. Should I save a governing body that has never done a thing for me? It doesn’t even contain a single person from my race. The aliens of the galactic Council decided long ago that my people should not be trusted, that we were aggressive, entitled, and short-sighted. I’m a soldier engaged in a fight to save the entire galaxy. And now the Council wants my help to destroy their assailants? My companion Ashley is against it. “You can’t sacrifice human lives to save the Council!” she yells. “What have they ever done for us?” Another companion, Garrus, rebuffs Ashley. “This is bigger than humanity!” Schadenfreude tempts me to let the patronizing Council be pulverized; a pro-human one could replace it if we survive. But I don’t want to give cynical aliens an opportunity to attribute the lowest-possible motive to humans. I want to refute the impression that we are an arrogant, upstart species out for itself. I command humanity’s space armada to target the forces gunning for the Council, no matter the cost. I feel a rush of bravery and idealism. I love playing Mass Effect.

Brain prostheses for the computer in your skull.

In a grainy black-and-white video shot at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, a patient sits in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage. He’s trying to recall 12 words for a memory test but can only conjure three: whale, pit, zoo. After a pause, he gives up, sinking his head into his hands.
In a second video, he recites all 12 words without hesitation. “No kidding, you got all of them!” a researcher says. This time the patient had help, a prosthetic memory aid inserted into his brain.

In an industry that touches so many lives, accurate terminology is essential

I've worked in UX for the better part of a decade. From now on, I plan to remove the word “user” and any associated terms—like “UX” and “user experience”—from my vocabulary. It’ll take time. I’ll start by trying to avoid using them in conversations at work. I’ll erase them from my LinkedIn profile. I’ll find new ways to describe my job when making small talk. I will experiment and look for something better.
I don’t have any strong alternatives to offer right now, but I’m confident I’ll find some. I think of it as a challenge. The U-words are everywhere in tech, but they no longer reflect my values or my approach to design and technology. I can either keep using language I disagree with, or I can begin to search for what’s next. I choose to search.

A software program called “Annie” uses machine learning to place refugees in cities where they are most likely to be welcomed and find success.

PITTSBURGH—Half a world away from the refugee camp in Uganda where he lived for a dozen years, Baudjo Njabu tells me about his first winter in the United States.

“The biggest challenge is the cold,” he said in Swahili, speaking through an interpreter. We’re sitting on dining chairs in his sparsely furnished living room. Outside, snow covers the grass on the other side of the glass patio doors that lead to the back of the townhouse he is renting in western Pittsburgh. Njabu recounts how his children missed school recently because the bus was delayed and they couldn’t bear the frigid temperatures. His daughter and two sons sit with their mother on a leather couch nearby, half-listening to his replies, distracted by their cellphones and an old Western playing on the television.

Should buddhas own smartphones and gurus use Google? Mindfulness is often taken to mean stepping out of the technological mainstream. But rejecting technology is rejecting the natural course of human evolution, according to personal transformation pioneer Deepak Chopra.

“Personally, I am a big fan of technology,” Chopra (pictured) said during an interview with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “If you don’t relate to technology, you will become irrelevant. That’s a Darwinian principle. Either you adapt and use it or you’re not relevant anymore.”

Chopra and Martin spoke during the Coupa Inspire event in Las Vegas, at which Chopra was a keynote speaker. They discussed the interaction between technology and consciousness.

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX plans to launch 60 internet-providing satellites. The plan for Starlink, as the project is called, is to put a network of nearly 12,000 internet satellites in orbit, which could move internet data about 50% faster than existing fiber-optic cables. Starlink could bring cheap, fast internet to remote areas, airplanes, ships, and cars, plus make international teleconferencing and online gaming nearly lag-free. Financial institutions would also have a lot to gain: Starlink could relay information about faraway markets significantly faster than modern technologies permit. Musk revealed a number of details about Starlink during a call with reporters on Wednesday.

The brain-computer interface lets paralyzed people type using their thoughts.

For the first time, doctors are preparing to test a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can be implanted onto a human brain, no open surgery required.
The Stentrode, a neural implant that can let paralyzed people communicate, can be delivered to a patient’s brain through the jugular vein — and the company that developed it, Synchron, just got approval to begin human experimentation.
By leaving the skull sealed shut, patients could receive their neural implants without running as great a risk of seizures, strokes, or permanent neural impairments, all of which can be caused by open-brain surgery.

Scientists from the University of Bristol's Intangible Realities Laboratory (IRL) and ETH Zurich have used virtual reality and artificial intelligence algorithms to learn the details of chemical change.

In a cover article published today in The Journal of Physical Chemistry, researchers across the University of Bristol and ETH Zurich describe how advanced interaction and visualisation frameworks using virtual reality (VR) enable humans to train machine-learning algorithms and accelerate scientific discovery.

Cells in the body are wired like computer chips to direct signals that instruct how they function, research suggests. Unlike a fixed circuit board, however, cells can rapidly rewire their communication networks to change their behaviour. The discovery of this cell-wide web turns our understanding of how instructions spread around a cell on its head.

In a new paper in Advanced Materials, researchers at the University of Connecticut describe a new sensor embedded in a layer of silicone skin that can help burn victims “feel” again and even confer some superhuman sensory perception.

Experts predict the technology will fuel AI advances within five years.

Quantum computing’s processing power could begin to improve artificial-intelligence systems within about five years, experts and business leaders said.

For example, a quantum computer could develop AI-based digital assistants with true contextual awareness and the ability to fully understand interactions with customers, said Peter Chapman, chief executive of quantum-computing startup IonQ Inc.

An experiment shows how to rebuild human compassion.

You wake up on a bus, surrounded by all your remaining possessions. A few fellow passengers slump on pale blue seats around you, their heads resting against the windows. You turn and see a father holding his son. Almost everyone is asleep. But one man, with a salt-and-pepper beard and khaki vest, stands near the back of the bus, staring at you. You feel uneasy and glance at the driver, wondering if he would help you if you needed it. When you turn back around, the bearded man has moved toward you and is now just a few feet away. You jolt, fearing for your safety, but then remind yourself there’s nothing to worry about. You take off the Oculus helmet and find yourself back in the real world, in Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

One day soon you may be filling your lungs with crisp ocean air, your arms bathed in warm light as the sun sets over softly lapping waters and you may wonder, is this real? Or are scientists projecting holograms into my brain to create a vivid sensory experience that isn’t actually happening? A group of researchers at University of California, Berkeley are in the early stages of testing their ability to create, edit and scrub sensory experiences from your brain, both real-time and stored experiences: memories.

Using light to make us see what isn’t there.

Different sensory experiences show up in brain imaging as patterns of neurons firing in sequence. Neuroscientists are trying to reverse-engineer experiences by stimulating the neurons to excite the same neural patterns.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

In a new interview, MIT researcher Rizwan Virk told Digital Trends that, in his estimation, we’re probably living in a simulation.
“I would say it’s somewhere between 50 and 100 percent,” he told the site. “I think it’s more likely that we’re in simulation than not.”

An emerging techno-consumerism is taking aim at what makes us human: love, happiness, politics, the search for meaning and more. It amounts to the beginnings of a new kind of modernity.

The founders of a new, AI-fuelled chatbot want it to become your best friend and most perceptive counsellor. An intelligent robot pet promises to assuage chronic loneliness among the elderly. The creators of an immersive virtual world — meant to be populated by thousands or even millions of users — say it will generate new insight into the nature of justice and democracy.
Three seemingly unrelated snapshots of these dizzying, accelerated times. But look closer and they all point towards the beginnings of a profound shift in our relationship to technology. How we use it and relate to it. What we think, ultimately, it is for.
This shift amounts to the emergence of a new kind of modern experience; a new kind of modernity. Let’s assign this emerging moment a name — augmented modernity.

Ever since Einstein posited that space and time were inextricably linked, scientists have wondered where the cosmic web called spacetime comes from.
Now, ongoing research in quantum physics may finally arrive at an explanation: A bizarre phenomenon called quantum entanglement could be the underlying basis for the four dimensions of space and time in which we all live, according to a deep dive by Knowable Magazine. In fact, in a mind-boggling twist, our reality could be a “hologram” of this quantum state.

"The future won't be the future without a Princess Leia projector."

SciFi movies like Star Wars and Avatar depict holograms that you can see from any angle, but the reality is a lot less scintillating. So far, the only true color hologram we've seen come from a tiny, complicated display created by a Korean group led by LG, while the rest are just "Pepper's Ghost" style illusions. Now, researchers from Brigham Young University (BYU) have created a true 3D hologram, or "volumetric image," to use the correct term. "We can think about this image like a 3D-printed object," said BYU assistant prof and lead author Daniel Smalley.

A breakthrough in studying light might just be the ticket to the future of quantum computing. Researchers at EPFL have found a way to determine how light behaves beyond the limitations of wavelengths, opening the door to encoding quantum data in a sci-fi style holographic light pattern. The team took advantage of the quantum nature of the interaction between electrons and light to separate beams in terms energy, not space -- that let them use light pulses to encrypt info on the electron wave and map it with a speedy electron microscope.

Existing techniques for both studying light and extracting 3D info are inherently limited by the size of wavelengths. This allows a considerably higher resolution that can even include holographic movies of fast-moving objects.

Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology.

Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, fashioning a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created.

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme—it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

The first U.S. trial of CRISPR in humans has begun, NPR reported Tuesday. Two patients are currently being treated as part of a University of Pennsylvania study. Per NPR, both have difficult-to-treat forms of cancer and both have relapsed after regular treatments. As part of the trial, researchers are taking immune cells from the patients’ own bodies and editing them with CRISPR before putting them back in. The hope is that these edited cells will be better at identifying and attacking the cancer than their unaltered counterparts. According to the U.S. government clinical trial registry, the researchers are hoping to enroll 18 people in their study.

Is this life real?
Philosophers and physicists say we might be living in a computer simulation, but how can we tell? And does it matter?

Our species is not going to last forever. One way or another, humanity will vanish from the Universe, but before it does, it might summon together sufficient computing power to emulate human experience, in all of its rich detail. Some philosophers and physicists have begun to wonder if we’re already there. Maybe we are in a computer simulation, and the reality we experience is just part of the program.

Imagine if you will, the possibility of future technology that can provide instant access to information and artificial intelligence simply by thinking of it; communication, education, work, privacy, security, and the world as we know it would be dramatically transformed.

An article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, and computation will lead to development of a Human Brain/Cloud Interface that will connect brain cells to vast cloud computing networks in real time within this century bringing about the internet of thought.

Elon Musk has tweeted that his brain computer chip technology, which he believes will turn humans into a genius super race, is coming soon.

The billionaire has been developing the technology, called Neuralink, because he thinks humans must become one with machines in order to survive being replaced by artificial intelligence.

Musk's plan to "save the human race" involves wiring computer chips into our minds to merge us with artificial intelligence.

In Part I of this series, Religion and the Simulation Hypothesis: Is God an AI?, we looked at the implications of the Simulation Hypothesis, the theory that we are all living inside a sophisticated video game, as a model for how many things that are religious in nature might actually be implemented using science and technology. We looked briefly at the groundbreaking film, the Matrix, and how it brought this idea forward into popular consciousness with its release 20 years ago. We also looked at some of the central tenets of the Western (or more accurately, Middle Eastern or Abrahamic) religious traditions to show how they were not only consistent with this new theory, but this theory provided a way to bridge the ever-widening gap between religion and science.
In this second part of the series, we turn to the Eastern religious traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism in particular (and some of their offshoots), and look at some of its central tenants. While we had to search for ways that simulation hypothesis might be implied in some of the core beliefs of the Western religions, the simulation hypothesis (or more specifically, the video game version of the simulation hypothesis) seem almost tailor made to fit into these traditions.

A localization phenomenon boosts the accuracy of solving quantum many-body problems with quantum computers. These problems are otherwise challenging for conventional computers. This brings such digital quantum simulation within reach using quantum devices available today.

Humanity could be on the verge of an unprecedented merging of human biology with advanced technology, fusing our thoughts and knowledge directly with the cloud in real-time – and this incredible turning point may be just decades away, scientists say.

In a new research paper exploring what they call the 'human brain/cloud interface', scientists explain the technological underpinnings of what such a future system might be, and also address the barriers we'll need to address before this sci-fi dream becomes reality.

Researchers have been making massive ‘jaw-dropping’ strides in robotics lately. We’re already aware of Sophia, the ‘almost human’ robot created by former Disney Imagineer David Hanson, that can inspire feelings of love among humans. Now, scientists at Cornell University have come out with a new ‘lifelike’ material that can move and eat on its own. What’s even more mind-boggling is that this material can also die and decay, just like living beings.

A year ago, you couldn’t go anywhere in Silicon Valley without being reminded in some way of Tristan Harris. The former Googler was giving talks, appearing on podcasts, counseling Congress, sitting on panels, posing for photographers. The central argument of his evangelism—that the digital revolution had gone from expanding our minds to hijacking them—had hit the zeitgeist, and maybe even helped create it.

Every December, Adam Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage describes an epiphany he had while trying on the headset at home, upstairs in his office. “I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked up.” What Savage encountered on the other side of the glasses was a glimpse of the mirrorworld.

Facebook is working on a (non-invasive) system that will let you type straight from your brain about 5x faster than you can type on your phone today. The idea is to allow people to use their thoughts to navigate intuitively through augmented reality—the neuro-driven version of the world recently described by Kevin Kelly. No typing—no speaking, even—to distract you or slow you down as you interact with digital additions to the landscape.

Augmented reality startup Magic Leap wants to merge the digital and the physical worlds.

In October, CEO Rony Abovitz first shared the idea of the “Magicverse,” a series of digital layers that would exist in AR over the physical world.

On Saturday, the company elaborated on the concept with a blog post and new interview — and its vision of the future is one in which the line between the physical and digital realms blurs until it almost disappears.

What does it mean for humans to thrive in the age of the machine? This is the issue that London Business School professors Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton are wrestling with in their second major exploration project.

Google was founded over two decades ago, but they released their first public set of ethical technology principles just last year. Facebook launched out of a Harvard dorm in 2004, but they formally launched an ethics program with a public investment last month. The era of tech companies moving fast and breaking things removed from public accountability is waning, if not entirely over. That’s precisely why it’s important for industry to understand–and admit in some cases–that there’s been a need for accountable, transparent, and companywide ethical practices in technology since the beginning.

When Morpheus told us our reality was fake, it sounded far-fetched. Since then, though, the idea has picked up steam. In 2001, two years after The Matrix hit theaters, Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom circulated the first draft of his “simulation argument,” which posits three scenarios: (1) Humanity will go extinct before creating technology powerful enough to run convincing simulations of reality; (2) humanity will live to see such technology but decide, for whatever reason, not to run any simulations; (3) humanity will create that technology and run many different simulations of its evolutionary history — in which case there would be lots of simulated realities and only one non-simulated one, so maybe it’s more likely than not that we’re living in a simulation right now. That third scenario has excited many over the years, including Elon Musk, who in 2016 put our odds of living in a non-simulated reality at “one in billions.” We called Bostrom to discuss his paper’s legacy.

“The hour hath come to part with this body composed of flesh and blood” – The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Digital immortality through merging the brain with Artificial Intelligence in a brain-computer interface is already well underway with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

WHISPER it, but many respected scientists and academics are becoming increasingly convinced by left-field provocateur David Icke’s assertion that our reality is an artificial simulation.

I was in line for coffee at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) Summit this past September and was starting to get jittery. I began making conversation with the guy in front of me to distract myself, and since java was on my mind I figured that was as good a topic as any. So I made a throwaway comment about how useless I was until I got my morning cup.

According to a new study, people who saw what it would be like to lose their jobs and homes using virtual reality developed longer-lasting compassion toward the homeless compared to those who explored other media versions of the VR scenario, like text.

“Experiences are what define us as humans, so it’s not surprising that an intense experience in VR is more impactful than imagining something,” says Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford University and coauthor of the paper, which appears in PLOS ONE.

An illusion that mimics near-death experiences seems to reduce people’s fear of dying.

Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and his team have used virtual reality headsets to create the illusion of being separate from your own body. They did this by first making 32 volunteers feel like a virtual body was their own. While wearing a headset, the body would match any real movements the volunteers made. When a virtual ball was dropped onto the foot of the virtual body, a vibration was triggered on the person’s real foot.

For six minutes, 150 miles above Kiruna, Sweden on January 23, 2017 floated the coldest known spot in the universe. As far as we know, the coldest anything in nature can be is absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, which is –459.67°F and –273.15°C. This postage-stamp-sized atom chip packed tight with thousands of rubidium-87 atoms was just a few billionths of a degree warmer than that. The atom chip was up there in low orbit to help a team of scientist study up-close some of the oddest, least-understood stuff there is: Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The team of German scientists was led by Dennis Becker of QUEST-Leibniz Research School, Leibniz University Hannover, Hanover, Germany.

The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer designed and built to work in the same way a human brain does has been fitted with its landmark one-millionth processor core and is being switched on for the first time.

The human brain may become the next frontier in hacking, cybersecurity researchers have warned in a paper outlining the vulnerabilities of neural implant technologies that can potentially expose and compromise our consciousness.

Computer scientists are looking to evolutionary biology for inspiration in the search for optimal solutions among astronomically huge sets of possibilities.

There is a global release coming up of The Social Dilemma, a major documentary film premiering on Netflix.

Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives. Insiders from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube reveal how these platforms are reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.

As futuristic as it sounds, early-stage applications of the Spatial Web or Web 3.0 are already here. Now is the time for leaders to understand what this next era of computing entails, how it could transform businesses, and how it can create new value as it unfolds.

Check out this Deloitte report.

Suppose the person who was directly responsible for creating the world wasn’t God but some far lesser, far more fallible being. Someone more akin to an ordinary human engineer or scientist – or even a movie director or video-game designer. This may seem fantastically far fetched. But in the realm of physics just these kinds of scenarios are being played out as scientists work on the complex mathematics behind lab-created “pocket universes” and tech leaders, such as Elon Musk, explore the potential of brain-machine interfaces.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

For most of us, we start the day by opening our eyes - and looking immediately at our smartphones. Smartphones have become an extension of who we are. They hold our relationships, remind us of our cousin’s birthdays and grandparent’s anniversaries. Smartphones ping us with tasks to accomplish each day. They keep track of our fitness with prompts to get in those daily steps.

What if interacting with our digital assistants and virtual life could be more streamlined, productive and even fun? For many tasks, smartphones are bulky. They don’t allow us to work with both hands. They’re awkward as mirrors to the augmented world. AR glasses offer a different solution, one where the digital and physical come together in a streamlined approach.

The fusion of quantum computing and machine learning has become a booming research area. Can it possibly live up to its high expectations?

In the early ’90s, Elizabeth Behrman, a physics professor at Wichita State University, began working to combine quantum physics with artificial intelligence — in particular, the then-maverick technology of neural networks. Most people thought she was mixing oil and water. “I had a heck of a time getting published,” she recalled. “The neural-network journals would say, ‘What is this quantum mechanics?’ and the physics journals would say, ‘What is this neural-network garbage?’”

The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data — especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

In 2007, Kenneth Stanley, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida, was playing with Picbreeder, a website he and his students had created, when an alien became a race car and changed his life. On Picbreeder, users would see an array of 15 similar images, composed of geometric shapes or swirly patterns, all variations on a theme. On occasion, some might resemble a real object, like a butterfly or a face. Users were asked to select one, and they typically clicked on whatever they found most interesting. Once they did, a new set of images, all variations on their choice, would populate the screen. From this playful exploration, a catalog of fanciful designs emerged.

A drug molecule "invented" by artificial intelligence (AI) will be used in human trials in a world first for machine learning in medicine.

It was created by British start-up Exscientia and Japanese pharmaceutical firm Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma.

The drug will be used to treat patients who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Typically, drug development takes about five years to get to trial, but the AI drug took just 12 months.

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom”. Soon, however, that wisdom will not come from watches and rings that we wrap on our bodies, but the very walls and spaces we inhabit. Previously, information such as heart-rate, emotional state and cognitive and physical stress was collected by wearable devices – now we are able to measure them via sensors in the space itself.

Susan Schneider, associate professor of philosophy and cognitive science and director of the AI, Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at UConn, has gained a national and international reputation for her writing on the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). She writes about the nature of the self and mind, AI, cognitive science, and astrobiology.

In her new book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Princeton University Press, 2019), she examines the implications of advances in artificial intelligence technology for the future of the human mind.

Video game creator Brie Code wants to help you learn to love your phone again, using #SelfCare.

Brie Code did what most of us only dream of: She quit her job to travel the world. Only she didn’t leave Montreal to get away from it all. She circled the globe to speak at Sweden’s Inkonst Festival and SXSW, judge game jams in Tunisia and teach interactive media in Berlin, bringing a tender but vital message of care to the games industry.

Now she is setting up a studio in Montreal, TRU LUV, devoted to creating games, apps and experiences for people often overlooked by the industry. Her first work, #SelfCare, is available now in the App Store. It’s a relaxing tool to help fight smartphone anxiety, a gentle world of crystals, tarot and a character who never has to get out of bed. Here, Code talks about what inspired her to start her own studio, how others can make the leap and how queer gamers can find community.

Startups are creating unsettling human-like avatars to take over customer service jobs—or even act as a stand-in for celebrities.

“Roman” and I haven’t exchanged words for about 10 seconds, but you wouldn’t know it from the look on his face.

This artificially intelligent avatar, a product of New Zealand-based Soul Machines, is supposed to offer human-like interaction by simulating the way our brains handle conversation. Roman can interpret facial expressions, generate expressions of his own, and converse on a variety of topics—making him what Soul Machines calls a “digital hero.”

More than two years have passed since the world caught wind of Elon Musk's Neuralink, an ambitious and mysterious startup focused on developing brain-machine interfaces that can connect minds to machines. Not a lot has been revealed since, but the company today emerged from the shadows to share its progress so far, along with its plans for the future, which involve implanting its first chips in human as early next year.

There are quite a few reasons we might want to connect our brains to machines, and there are already a few ways of doing it. The primary methods involve using electrodes on the scalp or implanted into the brain to pick up the electrical signals it emits, and then decode them for a variety of purposes.

Every three months, the speed of artificial intelligence computation doubles, according to Stanford University’s 2019 AI Index report.

Moore’s Law maps out how processor speeds double every 18 months to two years, which means application developers can expect a doubling in application performance for the same hardware cost.

But the Stanford report, produced in partnership with McKinsey & Company, Google, PwC, OpenAI, Genpact and AI21Labs, found that AI computational power is accelerating faster than traditional processor development. “Prior to 2012, AI results closely tracked Moore’s Law, with compute doubling every two years.,” the report said. “Post-2012, compute has been doubling every 3.4 months.”

New artificial intelligence techniques can spot patterns not only in 2D images but on spheres and other curved surfaces, lifting AI out of “flatland.”

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data—especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

Part one of a three-part series. In each part, I will examine one uniquely human characteristic that is central to our flourishing and explore its relevance to contemporary and future technologies. This part describes the uniquely human penchant for sociality and explores the social-technological landscape with an eye toward the social robots of the future.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" predicts the future of human societies.

• Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" says that intelligent life on Earth will eventually form a "singleton".
• The "singleton" could be a single government or an artificial intelligence that runs everything.
• Whether the singleton will be positive or negative depends on numerous factors and is not certain.

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

Technology could be part of some bigger plan to enable us to perceive other dimensions. But will we believe our machines when that happens?

You’re talking to Siri, and, just for fun, you ask her what she’s been up to today. She’s slow to answer, so you assume you’ve got a bad connection. She hears you grumbling about the bad connection and says that’s not the problem. You were hoping for something sassy, maybe a canned but humorous reply programmed into her database by a fun-loving engineer in Silicon Valley, like “My batteries are feeling low” or something that Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy might say.

Instead, she says that she’s had an experience for which she has no words. Something has happened to her that no coding could have prepared her for. She’s smart enough to know that you’re confused, so she continues: “I think I just met the divine.”

As the digital health sector matures from basic tracking apps into highly regulated medical devices, we are seeing bleeding edge technologies being developed that blur the lines between computers and biology. And a growing share of these startups are beginning to target the brain.

The burgeoning field of neurotechnology involves brain-machine interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neurostimulation, neuromonitoring, and implantable devices intended to not only augment nervous system activity, but expand its capabilities. One such project is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is developing “high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” And even Facebook has announced plans to create brain-machine interfaces that allow users to type using their thoughts.

How much data are you willing to sacrifice for a more comfortable world?

Facebook is developing augmented reality glasses -- but that's not the wildest bit of future tech the company revealed during today's Oculus Connect keynote. For these coming AR headsets, Facebook is building a virtual Earth, and it expects all of us to live in it, every day, for as many hours as possible. Maybe even all the time. And, chances are, we will.

A team of experts has created the first artificially intelligent simulation of our universe. The problem is, they don’t understand it. Astrophysicists at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City created a model called the Deep Density Displacement Model (or D3M for short) The idea was that they could map out the known universe and then study how different parts of the universe interacted with each other. But the accuracy of the simulation has baffled them. The computer is able to come up with tweaks to the universe involving things like dark matter or black holes, without being given training data on what those things are to begin with.

They're coming. The technology of the future won't be shiny and chrome with blinking lights, but rather look just like us, speak with a human voice, remember our interactions, and reply with a wink and a smile. Meet the virtual beings.

To create artificial humans has been an ambition of ours since ancient times, such as in the myths of Daedalus and Pygamilion, who created statues that came to life. In modern times, our imagination moved on from fashioning people out of clay or bronze. Instead, we imagined high-tech androids, such as Data from Star Trek, or the holographic doctor from Voyager. Perhaps our creations would even surpass us, as the immortal replicants from Blade Runner who were 'more human than human.'

“I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological,” says Susan Schneider of the University of Connectict and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton .”The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence.” Schneider is one of the few thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction— that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Wanneer we spreken over intelligentieniveaus binnen leiderschaps- en organisatieontwikkeling dan zijn we inmiddels goed bekend met de afkortingen IQ (cognitief), EQ (emotioneel), SQ (spiritueel) en FQ (fysiek). Door de tijd heen is er steeds meer aandacht gekomen voor zelfkennis en de ontwikkeling van de zogeheten soft skills, voor het luisteren naar onze intuïtie en de signalen van ons lichaam. We acteren steeds vaker vanuit een holistische visie, in de zin dat we naast onze fysieke lichamen ook emotionele, spirituele en mentale (energie)lichamen (h)erkennen. Lichamen die ieder voor zich informatie opnemen, verwerken en (waarneembare) output genereren.

With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI.

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

I have studied emotional intelligence as a hobby for a long time. Until recently, I believed emotional intelligence to remain one of the core advantages of us humans after artificial intelligence has taken over all tasks requiring memorization and logic.
During the past few years, I’ve focused my studies on emotionally intelligent algorithms, as it is the business of my startup, Inbot.
The more I have researched them, the more convinced I have become that people are no longer ahead of AI at emotional intelligence.

Should buddhas own smartphones and gurus use Google? Mindfulness is often taken to mean stepping out of the technological mainstream. But rejecting technology is rejecting the natural course of human evolution, according to personal transformation pioneer Deepak Chopra.

“Personally, I am a big fan of technology,” Chopra (pictured) said during an interview with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “If you don’t relate to technology, you will become irrelevant. That’s a Darwinian principle. Either you adapt and use it or you’re not relevant anymore.”

Chopra and Martin spoke during the Coupa Inspire event in Las Vegas, at which Chopra was a keynote speaker. They discussed the interaction between technology and consciousness.

A software program called “Annie” uses machine learning to place refugees in cities where they are most likely to be welcomed and find success.

PITTSBURGH—Half a world away from the refugee camp in Uganda where he lived for a dozen years, Baudjo Njabu tells me about his first winter in the United States.

“The biggest challenge is the cold,” he said in Swahili, speaking through an interpreter. We’re sitting on dining chairs in his sparsely furnished living room. Outside, snow covers the grass on the other side of the glass patio doors that lead to the back of the townhouse he is renting in western Pittsburgh. Njabu recounts how his children missed school recently because the bus was delayed and they couldn’t bear the frigid temperatures. His daughter and two sons sit with their mother on a leather couch nearby, half-listening to his replies, distracted by their cellphones and an old Western playing on the television.

Experts predict the technology will fuel AI advances within five years.

Quantum computing’s processing power could begin to improve artificial-intelligence systems within about five years, experts and business leaders said.

For example, a quantum computer could develop AI-based digital assistants with true contextual awareness and the ability to fully understand interactions with customers, said Peter Chapman, chief executive of quantum-computing startup IonQ Inc.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

An emerging techno-consumerism is taking aim at what makes us human: love, happiness, politics, the search for meaning and more. It amounts to the beginnings of a new kind of modernity.

The founders of a new, AI-fuelled chatbot want it to become your best friend and most perceptive counsellor. An intelligent robot pet promises to assuage chronic loneliness among the elderly. The creators of an immersive virtual world — meant to be populated by thousands or even millions of users — say it will generate new insight into the nature of justice and democracy.
Three seemingly unrelated snapshots of these dizzying, accelerated times. But look closer and they all point towards the beginnings of a profound shift in our relationship to technology. How we use it and relate to it. What we think, ultimately, it is for.
This shift amounts to the emergence of a new kind of modern experience; a new kind of modernity. Let’s assign this emerging moment a name — augmented modernity.

Elon Musk has tweeted that his brain computer chip technology, which he believes will turn humans into a genius super race, is coming soon.

The billionaire has been developing the technology, called Neuralink, because he thinks humans must become one with machines in order to survive being replaced by artificial intelligence.

Musk's plan to "save the human race" involves wiring computer chips into our minds to merge us with artificial intelligence.

In Part I of this series, Religion and the Simulation Hypothesis: Is God an AI?, we looked at the implications of the Simulation Hypothesis, the theory that we are all living inside a sophisticated video game, as a model for how many things that are religious in nature might actually be implemented using science and technology. We looked briefly at the groundbreaking film, the Matrix, and how it brought this idea forward into popular consciousness with its release 20 years ago. We also looked at some of the central tenets of the Western (or more accurately, Middle Eastern or Abrahamic) religious traditions to show how they were not only consistent with this new theory, but this theory provided a way to bridge the ever-widening gap between religion and science.
In this second part of the series, we turn to the Eastern religious traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism in particular (and some of their offshoots), and look at some of its central tenants. While we had to search for ways that simulation hypothesis might be implied in some of the core beliefs of the Western religions, the simulation hypothesis (or more specifically, the video game version of the simulation hypothesis) seem almost tailor made to fit into these traditions.

“The hour hath come to part with this body composed of flesh and blood” – The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Digital immortality through merging the brain with Artificial Intelligence in a brain-computer interface is already well underway with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

The human brain may become the next frontier in hacking, cybersecurity researchers have warned in a paper outlining the vulnerabilities of neural implant technologies that can potentially expose and compromise our consciousness.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

We consider the brain the very center of who we are and what we do: ruler of our senses, master of our movements; generator of thought, keeper of memory. But the brain is also rooted in a body, and the connection between the two goes both ways. If certain internal receptors indicate hunger, for instance, we’re driven to eat; if they indicate cold, we dress more warmly.

However, decades of research have also shown that those sensations do much more than alert the brain to the body’s immediate concerns and needs. As the heart, lungs, gut and other organs transmit information to the brain, they affect how we perceive and interact with our environment in surprisingly profound ways. Recent studies of the heart in particular have given scientists new insights into the role that the body’s most basic processes play in defining our experience of the world.

Mind reading glasses, goggles that erase chronic pain, a wristband that can hear what the wearer can’t, and more futuristic wearables are on the horizon.

Backed by $54 million, Kernel aims to turn an esoteric science into big business.

If you want your mind read, there are two options. You can visit a psychic or head to a lab and get strapped into a room-size, expensive machine that’ll examine the electrical impulses and blood moving through the brain. Either way, true insights are hard to come by, and for now, the quest to know thyself remains as elusive as ever.

A drug molecule "invented" by artificial intelligence (AI) will be used in human trials in a world first for machine learning in medicine.

It was created by British start-up Exscientia and Japanese pharmaceutical firm Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma.

The drug will be used to treat patients who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Typically, drug development takes about five years to get to trial, but the AI drug took just 12 months.

Just how far away is full-dive VR?

Technology can augment the world around us, it can enhance the human experience, our capabilities, and also extend our reality to digital and virtual worlds. As people flock online during quarantine we now find ourselves experimenting with new platforms, pushing immersive technologies to the limits, and collaborating in new ways; from eye-tracking technology and facial tracking to biometrics and brain-control interfaces. But just how far are we from becoming one with the metaverse and what can we learn about ourselves through sensory technologies?

We need to figure out the ethical implications before they arrive.

The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways. Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing this threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us.

Work on an “Internet of brains” takes another step.

We humans have evolved a rich repertoire of communication, from gesture to sophisticated languages. All of these forms of communication link otherwise separate individuals in such a way that they can share and express their singular experiences and work together collaboratively. In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains.

More than two years have passed since the world caught wind of Elon Musk's Neuralink, an ambitious and mysterious startup focused on developing brain-machine interfaces that can connect minds to machines. Not a lot has been revealed since, but the company today emerged from the shadows to share its progress so far, along with its plans for the future, which involve implanting its first chips in human as early next year.

There are quite a few reasons we might want to connect our brains to machines, and there are already a few ways of doing it. The primary methods involve using electrodes on the scalp or implanted into the brain to pick up the electrical signals it emits, and then decode them for a variety of purposes.

Mojo Vision's prototypes can enhance your vision or show you your schedule—right from the surface of your eyes.

A glance to the left. A flick to the right. As my eyes flitted around the room, I moved through a virtual interface only visible to me—scrolling through a calendar, commute times home, and even controlling music playback. It's all I theoretically need to do to use Mojo Lens, a smart contact lens coming from a company called Mojo Vision.

The California-based company, which has been quiet about what it's been working on for five years, has finally shared its plan for the world's "first true smart contact lens." But let's be clear: This is not a product you'll see on store shelves next autumn. It's in the research and development phase—a few years away from becoming a real product. In fact, the demos I tried did not even involve me plopping on a contact lens—they used virtual reality headsets and held up bulky prototypes to my eye, as though I was Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

That quote, from British philosopher Alan Watts, reminds us that we humans have access to something special: the spark of awareness we call consciousness combined with the capacity to reflect on that experience.

Defining consciousness can be incredibly complex. Entire books have been written on the topic. But in the context of human flourishing and this essay, when I say “consciousness,” I’m simply referring to the feeling of being—the fact of knowing phenomenon from a first-person perspective. Consciousness is a silent, ever-present field of awareness in which all personal experience arises, and it’s unique to each conscious entity. It is your first-person experience, your subjectivity, the fact that it is like something to be you at all.

As the digital health sector matures from basic tracking apps into highly regulated medical devices, we are seeing bleeding edge technologies being developed that blur the lines between computers and biology. And a growing share of these startups are beginning to target the brain.

The burgeoning field of neurotechnology involves brain-machine interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neurostimulation, neuromonitoring, and implantable devices intended to not only augment nervous system activity, but expand its capabilities. One such project is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is developing “high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” And even Facebook has announced plans to create brain-machine interfaces that allow users to type using their thoughts.

Tissue engineers create artificial organs and tissues that can be used to develop and test new drugs, repair damaged tissue and even replace entire organs in the human body. However, current fabrication methods limit their ability to produce free-form shapes and achieve high cell viability.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), in EPFL's School of Engineering, working with colleagues from Utrecht University, have come up with an optical technique that takes just a few seconds to sculpt complex tissue shapes in a biocompatible hydrogel containing stem cells. The resulting tissue can then be vascularized by adding endothelial cells.

Contact lenses capable of recording video and taking pictures could one day become a reality after Samsung was granted a patent in the US to develop the technology.

The lenses feature motion sensors, which means that wearers could control devices with their eye movements and potentially give commands to their devices remotely when blinking or using their peripheral vision.

The contact lenses could also beam photos and videos directly into a wearers eyes.

With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI.

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

Brain prostheses for the computer in your skull.

In a grainy black-and-white video shot at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, a patient sits in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage. He’s trying to recall 12 words for a memory test but can only conjure three: whale, pit, zoo. After a pause, he gives up, sinking his head into his hands.
In a second video, he recites all 12 words without hesitation. “No kidding, you got all of them!” a researcher says. This time the patient had help, a prosthetic memory aid inserted into his brain.

The brain-computer interface lets paralyzed people type using their thoughts.

For the first time, doctors are preparing to test a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can be implanted onto a human brain, no open surgery required.
The Stentrode, a neural implant that can let paralyzed people communicate, can be delivered to a patient’s brain through the jugular vein — and the company that developed it, Synchron, just got approval to begin human experimentation.
By leaving the skull sealed shut, patients could receive their neural implants without running as great a risk of seizures, strokes, or permanent neural impairments, all of which can be caused by open-brain surgery.

In a new paper in Advanced Materials, researchers at the University of Connecticut describe a new sensor embedded in a layer of silicone skin that can help burn victims “feel” again and even confer some superhuman sensory perception.

One day soon you may be filling your lungs with crisp ocean air, your arms bathed in warm light as the sun sets over softly lapping waters and you may wonder, is this real? Or are scientists projecting holograms into my brain to create a vivid sensory experience that isn’t actually happening? A group of researchers at University of California, Berkeley are in the early stages of testing their ability to create, edit and scrub sensory experiences from your brain, both real-time and stored experiences: memories.

Using light to make us see what isn’t there.

Different sensory experiences show up in brain imaging as patterns of neurons firing in sequence. Neuroscientists are trying to reverse-engineer experiences by stimulating the neurons to excite the same neural patterns.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

Imagine if you will, the possibility of future technology that can provide instant access to information and artificial intelligence simply by thinking of it; communication, education, work, privacy, security, and the world as we know it would be dramatically transformed.

An article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, and computation will lead to development of a Human Brain/Cloud Interface that will connect brain cells to vast cloud computing networks in real time within this century bringing about the internet of thought.

Elon Musk has tweeted that his brain computer chip technology, which he believes will turn humans into a genius super race, is coming soon.

The billionaire has been developing the technology, called Neuralink, because he thinks humans must become one with machines in order to survive being replaced by artificial intelligence.

Musk's plan to "save the human race" involves wiring computer chips into our minds to merge us with artificial intelligence.

Researchers have been making massive ‘jaw-dropping’ strides in robotics lately. We’re already aware of Sophia, the ‘almost human’ robot created by former Disney Imagineer David Hanson, that can inspire feelings of love among humans. Now, scientists at Cornell University have come out with a new ‘lifelike’ material that can move and eat on its own. What’s even more mind-boggling is that this material can also die and decay, just like living beings.

“The hour hath come to part with this body composed of flesh and blood” – The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Digital immortality through merging the brain with Artificial Intelligence in a brain-computer interface is already well underway with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

The human brain may become the next frontier in hacking, cybersecurity researchers have warned in a paper outlining the vulnerabilities of neural implant technologies that can potentially expose and compromise our consciousness.

Computer scientists are looking to evolutionary biology for inspiration in the search for optimal solutions among astronomically huge sets of possibilities.

All the matter that surrounds us exists either as a solid, liquid, gas, or plasma. But as our lives become increasingly digitized, more and more physical matter, such as oil, silicon, and carbon, is required to sustain our insatiable need for more computing power and information processing.

Giving current trends of 50% annual growth in the number of digital bits produced, Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, forecasted that the number of bits would equal the number of atoms on Earth in approximately 150 years. By 2245, half of Earth’s mass would be converted to digital information mass, according to a study published today in AIP Advances.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Scientists have created what they claim are the first ”living robots“: entirely new life-forms created out of living cells.

A team of researchers have taken cells from frog embryos and turned them into a machine that can be programmed to work as they wish.

It is the first time that humanity has been able to create “completely biological machines from the ground up”, the team behind the discovery write in a new paper.

That could allow them to dispatch the tiny “xenobots” to transport medicine around a patient’s body or clean up pollution from the oceans, for instance. They can also heal themselves if they are damaged, the scientists say.

The information-processing capabilities of the brain are often reported to reside in the trillions of connections that wire its neurons together. But over the past few decades, mounting research has quietly shifted some of the attention to individual neurons, which seem to shoulder much more computational responsibility than once seemed imaginable.

The latest in a long line of evidence comes from scientists’ discovery of a new type of electrical signal in the upper layers of the human cortex. Laboratory and modeling studies have already shown that tiny compartments in the dendritic arms of cortical neurons can each perform complicated operations in mathematical logic. But now it seems that individual dendritic compartments can also perform a particular computation — “exclusive OR” — that mathematical theorists had previously categorized as unsolvable by single-neuron systems.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

That quote, from British philosopher Alan Watts, reminds us that we humans have access to something special: the spark of awareness we call consciousness combined with the capacity to reflect on that experience.

Defining consciousness can be incredibly complex. Entire books have been written on the topic. But in the context of human flourishing and this essay, when I say “consciousness,” I’m simply referring to the feeling of being—the fact of knowing phenomenon from a first-person perspective. Consciousness is a silent, ever-present field of awareness in which all personal experience arises, and it’s unique to each conscious entity. It is your first-person experience, your subjectivity, the fact that it is like something to be you at all.

Can we ever be really sure we’ve learned everything about nature?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature expose to our method of questioning.” — Werner Heisenberg

How much can we know of the world? This, of course, is the central question for physics, and has been since the beginning not just of modern science as we know it, but of Western philosophy.

Around 650 BCE, Thales of Miletus first speculated on the basic material fabric of reality. The essential tension here is one of perception. To describe the world, we must see it, sense it, and go beyond, measuring it in all its subtle details. The problem is the “all.” We humans are necessarily blind to many aspects of physical reality, and those aspects that we do capture are necessarily colored through the lenses of our perception.

Cells in the body are wired like computer chips to direct signals that instruct how they function, research suggests. Unlike a fixed circuit board, however, cells can rapidly rewire their communication networks to change their behaviour. The discovery of this cell-wide web turns our understanding of how instructions spread around a cell on its head.

The first U.S. trial of CRISPR in humans has begun, NPR reported Tuesday. Two patients are currently being treated as part of a University of Pennsylvania study. Per NPR, both have difficult-to-treat forms of cancer and both have relapsed after regular treatments. As part of the trial, researchers are taking immune cells from the patients’ own bodies and editing them with CRISPR before putting them back in. The hope is that these edited cells will be better at identifying and attacking the cancer than their unaltered counterparts. According to the U.S. government clinical trial registry, the researchers are hoping to enroll 18 people in their study.

Researchers have been making massive ‘jaw-dropping’ strides in robotics lately. We’re already aware of Sophia, the ‘almost human’ robot created by former Disney Imagineer David Hanson, that can inspire feelings of love among humans. Now, scientists at Cornell University have come out with a new ‘lifelike’ material that can move and eat on its own. What’s even more mind-boggling is that this material can also die and decay, just like living beings.

Computer scientists are looking to evolutionary biology for inspiration in the search for optimal solutions among astronomically huge sets of possibilities.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Is the future of artificial intelligence, human-like robots?

Among the most famous lines of 19th-century English poet Joseph Merrick is, “If I could reach from pole to pole or grasp the ocean with a span, I would be measured by the soul; the mind's the standard of the man.” A person who believes in the soul often measures their concept of such on the collective understanding of the group with which they most identify.

Suzanne Gildert, founder of Sanctuary AI, does not intend to challenge one’s belief in or understanding of the soul, but she does want to create human-like robots indistinguishable from organic humans.

Work on an “Internet of brains” takes another step.

We humans have evolved a rich repertoire of communication, from gesture to sophisticated languages. All of these forms of communication link otherwise separate individuals in such a way that they can share and express their singular experiences and work together collaboratively. In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains.

Scientists have created what they claim are the first ”living robots“: entirely new life-forms created out of living cells.

A team of researchers have taken cells from frog embryos and turned them into a machine that can be programmed to work as they wish.

It is the first time that humanity has been able to create “completely biological machines from the ground up”, the team behind the discovery write in a new paper.

That could allow them to dispatch the tiny “xenobots” to transport medicine around a patient’s body or clean up pollution from the oceans, for instance. They can also heal themselves if they are damaged, the scientists say.

Mojo Vision's prototypes can enhance your vision or show you your schedule—right from the surface of your eyes.

A glance to the left. A flick to the right. As my eyes flitted around the room, I moved through a virtual interface only visible to me—scrolling through a calendar, commute times home, and even controlling music playback. It's all I theoretically need to do to use Mojo Lens, a smart contact lens coming from a company called Mojo Vision.

The California-based company, which has been quiet about what it's been working on for five years, has finally shared its plan for the world's "first true smart contact lens." But let's be clear: This is not a product you'll see on store shelves next autumn. It's in the research and development phase—a few years away from becoming a real product. In fact, the demos I tried did not even involve me plopping on a contact lens—they used virtual reality headsets and held up bulky prototypes to my eye, as though I was Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

That quote, from British philosopher Alan Watts, reminds us that we humans have access to something special: the spark of awareness we call consciousness combined with the capacity to reflect on that experience.

Defining consciousness can be incredibly complex. Entire books have been written on the topic. But in the context of human flourishing and this essay, when I say “consciousness,” I’m simply referring to the feeling of being—the fact of knowing phenomenon from a first-person perspective. Consciousness is a silent, ever-present field of awareness in which all personal experience arises, and it’s unique to each conscious entity. It is your first-person experience, your subjectivity, the fact that it is like something to be you at all.

As the digital health sector matures from basic tracking apps into highly regulated medical devices, we are seeing bleeding edge technologies being developed that blur the lines between computers and biology. And a growing share of these startups are beginning to target the brain.

The burgeoning field of neurotechnology involves brain-machine interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neurostimulation, neuromonitoring, and implantable devices intended to not only augment nervous system activity, but expand its capabilities. One such project is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is developing “high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” And even Facebook has announced plans to create brain-machine interfaces that allow users to type using their thoughts.

Tissue engineers create artificial organs and tissues that can be used to develop and test new drugs, repair damaged tissue and even replace entire organs in the human body. However, current fabrication methods limit their ability to produce free-form shapes and achieve high cell viability.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), in EPFL's School of Engineering, working with colleagues from Utrecht University, have come up with an optical technique that takes just a few seconds to sculpt complex tissue shapes in a biocompatible hydrogel containing stem cells. The resulting tissue can then be vascularized by adding endothelial cells.

Brain prostheses for the computer in your skull.

In a grainy black-and-white video shot at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, a patient sits in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage. He’s trying to recall 12 words for a memory test but can only conjure three: whale, pit, zoo. After a pause, he gives up, sinking his head into his hands.
In a second video, he recites all 12 words without hesitation. “No kidding, you got all of them!” a researcher says. This time the patient had help, a prosthetic memory aid inserted into his brain.

Cells in the body are wired like computer chips to direct signals that instruct how they function, research suggests. Unlike a fixed circuit board, however, cells can rapidly rewire their communication networks to change their behaviour. The discovery of this cell-wide web turns our understanding of how instructions spread around a cell on its head.

The brain-computer interface lets paralyzed people type using their thoughts.

For the first time, doctors are preparing to test a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can be implanted onto a human brain, no open surgery required.
The Stentrode, a neural implant that can let paralyzed people communicate, can be delivered to a patient’s brain through the jugular vein — and the company that developed it, Synchron, just got approval to begin human experimentation.
By leaving the skull sealed shut, patients could receive their neural implants without running as great a risk of seizures, strokes, or permanent neural impairments, all of which can be caused by open-brain surgery.

In a new paper in Advanced Materials, researchers at the University of Connecticut describe a new sensor embedded in a layer of silicone skin that can help burn victims “feel” again and even confer some superhuman sensory perception.

One day soon you may be filling your lungs with crisp ocean air, your arms bathed in warm light as the sun sets over softly lapping waters and you may wonder, is this real? Or are scientists projecting holograms into my brain to create a vivid sensory experience that isn’t actually happening? A group of researchers at University of California, Berkeley are in the early stages of testing their ability to create, edit and scrub sensory experiences from your brain, both real-time and stored experiences: memories.

Using light to make us see what isn’t there.

Different sensory experiences show up in brain imaging as patterns of neurons firing in sequence. Neuroscientists are trying to reverse-engineer experiences by stimulating the neurons to excite the same neural patterns.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology.

Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, fashioning a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created.

Imagine if you will, the possibility of future technology that can provide instant access to information and artificial intelligence simply by thinking of it; communication, education, work, privacy, security, and the world as we know it would be dramatically transformed.

An article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, and computation will lead to development of a Human Brain/Cloud Interface that will connect brain cells to vast cloud computing networks in real time within this century bringing about the internet of thought.

Elon Musk has tweeted that his brain computer chip technology, which he believes will turn humans into a genius super race, is coming soon.

The billionaire has been developing the technology, called Neuralink, because he thinks humans must become one with machines in order to survive being replaced by artificial intelligence.

Musk's plan to "save the human race" involves wiring computer chips into our minds to merge us with artificial intelligence.

Researchers have been making massive ‘jaw-dropping’ strides in robotics lately. We’re already aware of Sophia, the ‘almost human’ robot created by former Disney Imagineer David Hanson, that can inspire feelings of love among humans. Now, scientists at Cornell University have come out with a new ‘lifelike’ material that can move and eat on its own. What’s even more mind-boggling is that this material can also die and decay, just like living beings.

Humanity could be on the verge of an unprecedented merging of human biology with advanced technology, fusing our thoughts and knowledge directly with the cloud in real-time – and this incredible turning point may be just decades away, scientists say.

In a new research paper exploring what they call the 'human brain/cloud interface', scientists explain the technological underpinnings of what such a future system might be, and also address the barriers we'll need to address before this sci-fi dream becomes reality.

I was in line for coffee at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) Summit this past September and was starting to get jittery. I began making conversation with the guy in front of me to distract myself, and since java was on my mind I figured that was as good a topic as any. So I made a throwaway comment about how useless I was until I got my morning cup.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
~George Orwell

The above quote is powerful because if you are not the one who is tearing your own mind to pieces and putting it back together again in the shape of your own choosing, then someone else probably is.

It’s fine if you’re okay with who is doing the tearing to pieces – like if it’s Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Thoreau, or even Orwell – as long as you’re the one who is putting it back together again. Stand on the shoulders of giants, but don’t become attached to their shoulder.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

An emerging techno-consumerism is taking aim at what makes us human: love, happiness, politics, the search for meaning and more. It amounts to the beginnings of a new kind of modernity.

The founders of a new, AI-fuelled chatbot want it to become your best friend and most perceptive counsellor. An intelligent robot pet promises to assuage chronic loneliness among the elderly. The creators of an immersive virtual world — meant to be populated by thousands or even millions of users — say it will generate new insight into the nature of justice and democracy.
Three seemingly unrelated snapshots of these dizzying, accelerated times. But look closer and they all point towards the beginnings of a profound shift in our relationship to technology. How we use it and relate to it. What we think, ultimately, it is for.
This shift amounts to the emergence of a new kind of modern experience; a new kind of modernity. Let’s assign this emerging moment a name — augmented modernity.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Is the future of artificial intelligence, human-like robots?

Among the most famous lines of 19th-century English poet Joseph Merrick is, “If I could reach from pole to pole or grasp the ocean with a span, I would be measured by the soul; the mind's the standard of the man.” A person who believes in the soul often measures their concept of such on the collective understanding of the group with which they most identify.

Suzanne Gildert, founder of Sanctuary AI, does not intend to challenge one’s belief in or understanding of the soul, but she does want to create human-like robots indistinguishable from organic humans.

More than two years have passed since the world caught wind of Elon Musk's Neuralink, an ambitious and mysterious startup focused on developing brain-machine interfaces that can connect minds to machines. Not a lot has been revealed since, but the company today emerged from the shadows to share its progress so far, along with its plans for the future, which involve implanting its first chips in human as early next year.

There are quite a few reasons we might want to connect our brains to machines, and there are already a few ways of doing it. The primary methods involve using electrodes on the scalp or implanted into the brain to pick up the electrical signals it emits, and then decode them for a variety of purposes.

Part one of a three-part series. In each part, I will examine one uniquely human characteristic that is central to our flourishing and explore its relevance to contemporary and future technologies. This part describes the uniquely human penchant for sociality and explores the social-technological landscape with an eye toward the social robots of the future.

Tissue engineers create artificial organs and tissues that can be used to develop and test new drugs, repair damaged tissue and even replace entire organs in the human body. However, current fabrication methods limit their ability to produce free-form shapes and achieve high cell viability.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), in EPFL's School of Engineering, working with colleagues from Utrecht University, have come up with an optical technique that takes just a few seconds to sculpt complex tissue shapes in a biocompatible hydrogel containing stem cells. The resulting tissue can then be vascularized by adding endothelial cells.

With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI.

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

Brain prostheses for the computer in your skull.

In a grainy black-and-white video shot at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, a patient sits in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage. He’s trying to recall 12 words for a memory test but can only conjure three: whale, pit, zoo. After a pause, he gives up, sinking his head into his hands.
In a second video, he recites all 12 words without hesitation. “No kidding, you got all of them!” a researcher says. This time the patient had help, a prosthetic memory aid inserted into his brain.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

Imagine if you will, the possibility of future technology that can provide instant access to information and artificial intelligence simply by thinking of it; communication, education, work, privacy, security, and the world as we know it would be dramatically transformed.

An article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, and computation will lead to development of a Human Brain/Cloud Interface that will connect brain cells to vast cloud computing networks in real time within this century bringing about the internet of thought.

Elon Musk has tweeted that his brain computer chip technology, which he believes will turn humans into a genius super race, is coming soon.

The billionaire has been developing the technology, called Neuralink, because he thinks humans must become one with machines in order to survive being replaced by artificial intelligence.

Musk's plan to "save the human race" involves wiring computer chips into our minds to merge us with artificial intelligence.

Humanity could be on the verge of an unprecedented merging of human biology with advanced technology, fusing our thoughts and knowledge directly with the cloud in real-time – and this incredible turning point may be just decades away, scientists say.

In a new research paper exploring what they call the 'human brain/cloud interface', scientists explain the technological underpinnings of what such a future system might be, and also address the barriers we'll need to address before this sci-fi dream becomes reality.

“The hour hath come to part with this body composed of flesh and blood” – The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Digital immortality through merging the brain with Artificial Intelligence in a brain-computer interface is already well underway with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

Computer scientists are looking to evolutionary biology for inspiration in the search for optimal solutions among astronomically huge sets of possibilities.

“I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological,” says Susan Schneider of the University of Connectict and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton .”The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence.” Schneider is one of the few thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction— that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Primarily, video games are a form of entertainment; a game that has since evolved into cultural, artistic and narrative forms. Recently, however, they have evolved past these definitions and entered the realms of education, as learning tools, and healthcare, as a form of therapy.
Emerging research suggests that video games today have the potential to be applied in preventative and therapeutic medicine — particularly as cognitive distraction, mental health management and psychotherapy. It’s incredible to think that something that was designed as a novelty has transcended its own design to become an integral part of our everyday lives — with the further potential to heal.

“If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence."

What if everything around us — the people, the stars overhead, the ground beneath our feet, even our bodies and minds — were an elaborate illusion? What if our world were simply a hyper-realistic simulation, with all of us merely characters in some kind of sophisticated video game?

This, of course, is a familiar concept from science fiction books and films, including the 1999 blockbuster movie "The Matrix." But some physicists and philosophers say it’s possible that we really do live in a simulation — even if that means casting aside what we know (or think we know) about the universe and our place in it.

Relational quantum mechanics suggests physics might be a science of perceptions, not observer-independent reality

One of the weirdest theoretical implications of quantum mechanics is that different observers can give different—though equally valid—accounts of the same sequence of events. As highlighted by physicist Carlo Rovelli in his relational quantum mechanics (RQM), this means that there should be no absolute, observer-independent physical quantities. All physical quantities—the whole physical universe—must be relative to the observer. The notion that we all share the same physical environment must, therefore, be an illusion.

In a new interview, MIT researcher Rizwan Virk told Digital Trends that, in his estimation, we’re probably living in a simulation.
“I would say it’s somewhere between 50 and 100 percent,” he told the site. “I think it’s more likely that we’re in simulation than not.”

In Part I of this series, Religion and the Simulation Hypothesis: Is God an AI?, we looked at the implications of the Simulation Hypothesis, the theory that we are all living inside a sophisticated video game, as a model for how many things that are religious in nature might actually be implemented using science and technology. We looked briefly at the groundbreaking film, the Matrix, and how it brought this idea forward into popular consciousness with its release 20 years ago. We also looked at some of the central tenets of the Western (or more accurately, Middle Eastern or Abrahamic) religious traditions to show how they were not only consistent with this new theory, but this theory provided a way to bridge the ever-widening gap between religion and science.
In this second part of the series, we turn to the Eastern religious traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism in particular (and some of their offshoots), and look at some of its central tenants. While we had to search for ways that simulation hypothesis might be implied in some of the core beliefs of the Western religions, the simulation hypothesis (or more specifically, the video game version of the simulation hypothesis) seem almost tailor made to fit into these traditions.

An illusion that mimics near-death experiences seems to reduce people’s fear of dying.

Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and his team have used virtual reality headsets to create the illusion of being separate from your own body. They did this by first making 32 volunteers feel like a virtual body was their own. While wearing a headset, the body would match any real movements the volunteers made. When a virtual ball was dropped onto the foot of the virtual body, a vibration was triggered on the person’s real foot.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

That quote, from British philosopher Alan Watts, reminds us that we humans have access to something special: the spark of awareness we call consciousness combined with the capacity to reflect on that experience.

Defining consciousness can be incredibly complex. Entire books have been written on the topic. But in the context of human flourishing and this essay, when I say “consciousness,” I’m simply referring to the feeling of being—the fact of knowing phenomenon from a first-person perspective. Consciousness is a silent, ever-present field of awareness in which all personal experience arises, and it’s unique to each conscious entity. It is your first-person experience, your subjectivity, the fact that it is like something to be you at all.

Should buddhas own smartphones and gurus use Google? Mindfulness is often taken to mean stepping out of the technological mainstream. But rejecting technology is rejecting the natural course of human evolution, according to personal transformation pioneer Deepak Chopra.

“Personally, I am a big fan of technology,” Chopra (pictured) said during an interview with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “If you don’t relate to technology, you will become irrelevant. That’s a Darwinian principle. Either you adapt and use it or you’re not relevant anymore.”

Chopra and Martin spoke during the Coupa Inspire event in Las Vegas, at which Chopra was a keynote speaker. They discussed the interaction between technology and consciousness.

The first U.S. trial of CRISPR in humans has begun, NPR reported Tuesday. Two patients are currently being treated as part of a University of Pennsylvania study. Per NPR, both have difficult-to-treat forms of cancer and both have relapsed after regular treatments. As part of the trial, researchers are taking immune cells from the patients’ own bodies and editing them with CRISPR before putting them back in. The hope is that these edited cells will be better at identifying and attacking the cancer than their unaltered counterparts. According to the U.S. government clinical trial registry, the researchers are hoping to enroll 18 people in their study.

Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology.

Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, fashioning a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created.

Researchers have been making massive ‘jaw-dropping’ strides in robotics lately. We’re already aware of Sophia, the ‘almost human’ robot created by former Disney Imagineer David Hanson, that can inspire feelings of love among humans. Now, scientists at Cornell University have come out with a new ‘lifelike’ material that can move and eat on its own. What’s even more mind-boggling is that this material can also die and decay, just like living beings.

I was in line for coffee at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) Summit this past September and was starting to get jittery. I began making conversation with the guy in front of me to distract myself, and since java was on my mind I figured that was as good a topic as any. So I made a throwaway comment about how useless I was until I got my morning cup.

We consider the brain the very center of who we are and what we do: ruler of our senses, master of our movements; generator of thought, keeper of memory. But the brain is also rooted in a body, and the connection between the two goes both ways. If certain internal receptors indicate hunger, for instance, we’re driven to eat; if they indicate cold, we dress more warmly.

However, decades of research have also shown that those sensations do much more than alert the brain to the body’s immediate concerns and needs. As the heart, lungs, gut and other organs transmit information to the brain, they affect how we perceive and interact with our environment in surprisingly profound ways. Recent studies of the heart in particular have given scientists new insights into the role that the body’s most basic processes play in defining our experience of the world.

Being a specialist used to be the way forward, but the future belongs to people who can adapt to any given scenario on a dime.

Meta-skills are talents that inform every domain of life and govern your ability to improve other skills. There are many meta-skills out there, but feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning are likely the most important when trying to remain competitive in the modern world.

Automation is going to reduce the demand for specialists; mastering these skills will make you a stronger individual in the automated future.

Our social emotions are now being hijacked by robots.

When Alexa replied to my question about the weather by tacking on 'Have a nice day,' I immediately shot back 'You too,' and then stared into space, slightly embarrassed.

I also found myself spontaneously shouting words of encouragement to 'Robbie' my Roomba vacuum as I saw him passing down the hallway. And recently in Berkeley, California, a group of us on the sidewalk gathered around a cute four-wheeled KiwiBot – an autonomous food-delivery robot waiting for the traffic light to change. Some of us instinctively started talking to it in the sing-song voice you might use with a dog or a baby: 'Who's a good boy?'

Part two of a three-part series on human flourishing and our biotechnological future. Here we explore the human need for meaning and how that might work in the artificial reality systems of the future.

As matchmaking becomes more scientific, tech will even mimic kisses

Two lovers hold hands across a table, overlooking a virtual vista of the Mediterranean. As the pair exchange sweet nothings, the fact they are actually sitting thousands of miles apart bears little significance on the romantic experience. The couple was deemed “hyper-compatible” by online dating technology that matched them using a search engine infused with artificial intelligence (AI). Using data harvested about their social backgrounds, sexual preferences, cultural interests, and even photos of their celebrity crushes, they were thrust together in a virtual reality of their own design.

Wanneer we spreken over intelligentieniveaus binnen leiderschaps- en organisatieontwikkeling dan zijn we inmiddels goed bekend met de afkortingen IQ (cognitief), EQ (emotioneel), SQ (spiritueel) en FQ (fysiek). Door de tijd heen is er steeds meer aandacht gekomen voor zelfkennis en de ontwikkeling van de zogeheten soft skills, voor het luisteren naar onze intuïtie en de signalen van ons lichaam. We acteren steeds vaker vanuit een holistische visie, in de zin dat we naast onze fysieke lichamen ook emotionele, spirituele en mentale (energie)lichamen (h)erkennen. Lichamen die ieder voor zich informatie opnemen, verwerken en (waarneembare) output genereren.

I have studied emotional intelligence as a hobby for a long time. Until recently, I believed emotional intelligence to remain one of the core advantages of us humans after artificial intelligence has taken over all tasks requiring memorization and logic.
During the past few years, I’ve focused my studies on emotionally intelligent algorithms, as it is the business of my startup, Inbot.
The more I have researched them, the more convinced I have become that people are no longer ahead of AI at emotional intelligence.

Should buddhas own smartphones and gurus use Google? Mindfulness is often taken to mean stepping out of the technological mainstream. But rejecting technology is rejecting the natural course of human evolution, according to personal transformation pioneer Deepak Chopra.

“Personally, I am a big fan of technology,” Chopra (pictured) said during an interview with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “If you don’t relate to technology, you will become irrelevant. That’s a Darwinian principle. Either you adapt and use it or you’re not relevant anymore.”

Chopra and Martin spoke during the Coupa Inspire event in Las Vegas, at which Chopra was a keynote speaker. They discussed the interaction between technology and consciousness.

An experiment shows how to rebuild human compassion.

You wake up on a bus, surrounded by all your remaining possessions. A few fellow passengers slump on pale blue seats around you, their heads resting against the windows. You turn and see a father holding his son. Almost everyone is asleep. But one man, with a salt-and-pepper beard and khaki vest, stands near the back of the bus, staring at you. You feel uneasy and glance at the driver, wondering if he would help you if you needed it. When you turn back around, the bearded man has moved toward you and is now just a few feet away. You jolt, fearing for your safety, but then remind yourself there’s nothing to worry about. You take off the Oculus helmet and find yourself back in the real world, in Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

A year ago, you couldn’t go anywhere in Silicon Valley without being reminded in some way of Tristan Harris. The former Googler was giving talks, appearing on podcasts, counseling Congress, sitting on panels, posing for photographers. The central argument of his evangelism—that the digital revolution had gone from expanding our minds to hijacking them—had hit the zeitgeist, and maybe even helped create it.

According to a new study, people who saw what it would be like to lose their jobs and homes using virtual reality developed longer-lasting compassion toward the homeless compared to those who explored other media versions of the VR scenario, like text.

“Experiences are what define us as humans, so it’s not surprising that an intense experience in VR is more impactful than imagining something,” says Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford University and coauthor of the paper, which appears in PLOS ONE.

Our technology doesn’t just alter our environment; ultimately it also alters us. The changes to come present us with an opportunity to become more human than ever before. What if we were to use technology to magnify our best qualities and address our weaknesses? For lack of a better word, I’ll call this kind of technology humane. Humane technology would take human needs as its starting point. It would expand our senses rather than blunting them. It would play to our strengths rather than making us superfluous. It would mesh with our instincts and feel natural. Humane technology would serve not only individuals but – first and foremost – humanity as a whole. And last but not least, it would realize dreams we have about ourselves.

We must be mindful about how we engage with technology: what we use it for, why, and whether it helps or hinders us. Sometimes our tech seems to be flowing in inhumane directions, and it feels beyond our power to redirect it. But humankind dams rivers, and alters the landscape in countless other radical ways. We can redirect our technological growth. And why shouldn’t we direct it towards humans? Behold, our six principles of humane technology. Because let's design the future with people, not things, in mind.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

We can’t relate to people online in a way that the brain recognizes as real

afer than the real world, where we are judged and our actions have consequences, virtual social spaces were assumed to encourage experimentation, role-playing, and unlikely relationships. Luckily for those depending on our alienation for profits, digital media doesn’t really connect people that well, even when it’s designed to do so. We cannot truly relate to other people online — at least not in a way that the body and brain recognize as real.

Being a specialist used to be the way forward, but the future belongs to people who can adapt to any given scenario on a dime.

Meta-skills are talents that inform every domain of life and govern your ability to improve other skills. There are many meta-skills out there, but feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning are likely the most important when trying to remain competitive in the modern world.

Automation is going to reduce the demand for specialists; mastering these skills will make you a stronger individual in the automated future.

Susan Schneider, associate professor of philosophy and cognitive science and director of the AI, Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at UConn, has gained a national and international reputation for her writing on the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). She writes about the nature of the self and mind, AI, cognitive science, and astrobiology.

In her new book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Princeton University Press, 2019), she examines the implications of advances in artificial intelligence technology for the future of the human mind.

Startups are creating unsettling human-like avatars to take over customer service jobs—or even act as a stand-in for celebrities.

“Roman” and I haven’t exchanged words for about 10 seconds, but you wouldn’t know it from the look on his face.

This artificially intelligent avatar, a product of New Zealand-based Soul Machines, is supposed to offer human-like interaction by simulating the way our brains handle conversation. Roman can interpret facial expressions, generate expressions of his own, and converse on a variety of topics—making him what Soul Machines calls a “digital hero.”

Part one of a three-part series. In each part, I will examine one uniquely human characteristic that is central to our flourishing and explore its relevance to contemporary and future technologies. This part describes the uniquely human penchant for sociality and explores the social-technological landscape with an eye toward the social robots of the future.

Part two of a three-part series on human flourishing and our biotechnological future. Here we explore the human need for meaning and how that might work in the artificial reality systems of the future.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
~George Orwell

The above quote is powerful because if you are not the one who is tearing your own mind to pieces and putting it back together again in the shape of your own choosing, then someone else probably is.

It’s fine if you’re okay with who is doing the tearing to pieces – like if it’s Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Thoreau, or even Orwell – as long as you’re the one who is putting it back together again. Stand on the shoulders of giants, but don’t become attached to their shoulder.

As matchmaking becomes more scientific, tech will even mimic kisses

Two lovers hold hands across a table, overlooking a virtual vista of the Mediterranean. As the pair exchange sweet nothings, the fact they are actually sitting thousands of miles apart bears little significance on the romantic experience. The couple was deemed “hyper-compatible” by online dating technology that matched them using a search engine infused with artificial intelligence (AI). Using data harvested about their social backgrounds, sexual preferences, cultural interests, and even photos of their celebrity crushes, they were thrust together in a virtual reality of their own design.

Can we ever be really sure we’ve learned everything about nature?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature expose to our method of questioning.” — Werner Heisenberg

How much can we know of the world? This, of course, is the central question for physics, and has been since the beginning not just of modern science as we know it, but of Western philosophy.

Around 650 BCE, Thales of Miletus first speculated on the basic material fabric of reality. The essential tension here is one of perception. To describe the world, we must see it, sense it, and go beyond, measuring it in all its subtle details. The problem is the “all.” We humans are necessarily blind to many aspects of physical reality, and those aspects that we do capture are necessarily colored through the lenses of our perception.

In an industry that touches so many lives, accurate terminology is essential

I've worked in UX for the better part of a decade. From now on, I plan to remove the word “user” and any associated terms—like “UX” and “user experience”—from my vocabulary. It’ll take time. I’ll start by trying to avoid using them in conversations at work. I’ll erase them from my LinkedIn profile. I’ll find new ways to describe my job when making small talk. I will experiment and look for something better.
I don’t have any strong alternatives to offer right now, but I’m confident I’ll find some. I think of it as a challenge. The U-words are everywhere in tech, but they no longer reflect my values or my approach to design and technology. I can either keep using language I disagree with, or I can begin to search for what’s next. I choose to search.

Should buddhas own smartphones and gurus use Google? Mindfulness is often taken to mean stepping out of the technological mainstream. But rejecting technology is rejecting the natural course of human evolution, according to personal transformation pioneer Deepak Chopra.

“Personally, I am a big fan of technology,” Chopra (pictured) said during an interview with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “If you don’t relate to technology, you will become irrelevant. That’s a Darwinian principle. Either you adapt and use it or you’re not relevant anymore.”

Chopra and Martin spoke during the Coupa Inspire event in Las Vegas, at which Chopra was a keynote speaker. They discussed the interaction between technology and consciousness.

A software program called “Annie” uses machine learning to place refugees in cities where they are most likely to be welcomed and find success.

PITTSBURGH—Half a world away from the refugee camp in Uganda where he lived for a dozen years, Baudjo Njabu tells me about his first winter in the United States.

“The biggest challenge is the cold,” he said in Swahili, speaking through an interpreter. We’re sitting on dining chairs in his sparsely furnished living room. Outside, snow covers the grass on the other side of the glass patio doors that lead to the back of the townhouse he is renting in western Pittsburgh. Njabu recounts how his children missed school recently because the bus was delayed and they couldn’t bear the frigid temperatures. His daughter and two sons sit with their mother on a leather couch nearby, half-listening to his replies, distracted by their cellphones and an old Western playing on the television.

An experiment shows how to rebuild human compassion.

You wake up on a bus, surrounded by all your remaining possessions. A few fellow passengers slump on pale blue seats around you, their heads resting against the windows. You turn and see a father holding his son. Almost everyone is asleep. But one man, with a salt-and-pepper beard and khaki vest, stands near the back of the bus, staring at you. You feel uneasy and glance at the driver, wondering if he would help you if you needed it. When you turn back around, the bearded man has moved toward you and is now just a few feet away. You jolt, fearing for your safety, but then remind yourself there’s nothing to worry about. You take off the Oculus helmet and find yourself back in the real world, in Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme—it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

A year ago, you couldn’t go anywhere in Silicon Valley without being reminded in some way of Tristan Harris. The former Googler was giving talks, appearing on podcasts, counseling Congress, sitting on panels, posing for photographers. The central argument of his evangelism—that the digital revolution had gone from expanding our minds to hijacking them—had hit the zeitgeist, and maybe even helped create it.

Google was founded over two decades ago, but they released their first public set of ethical technology principles just last year. Facebook launched out of a Harvard dorm in 2004, but they formally launched an ethics program with a public investment last month. The era of tech companies moving fast and breaking things removed from public accountability is waning, if not entirely over. That’s precisely why it’s important for industry to understand–and admit in some cases–that there’s been a need for accountable, transparent, and companywide ethical practices in technology since the beginning.

What does it mean for humans to thrive in the age of the machine? This is the issue that London Business School professors Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton are wrestling with in their second major exploration project.

We can’t relate to people online in a way that the brain recognizes as real

afer than the real world, where we are judged and our actions have consequences, virtual social spaces were assumed to encourage experimentation, role-playing, and unlikely relationships. Luckily for those depending on our alienation for profits, digital media doesn’t really connect people that well, even when it’s designed to do so. We cannot truly relate to other people online — at least not in a way that the body and brain recognize as real.

Our social emotions are now being hijacked by robots.

When Alexa replied to my question about the weather by tacking on 'Have a nice day,' I immediately shot back 'You too,' and then stared into space, slightly embarrassed.

I also found myself spontaneously shouting words of encouragement to 'Robbie' my Roomba vacuum as I saw him passing down the hallway. And recently in Berkeley, California, a group of us on the sidewalk gathered around a cute four-wheeled KiwiBot – an autonomous food-delivery robot waiting for the traffic light to change. Some of us instinctively started talking to it in the sing-song voice you might use with a dog or a baby: 'Who's a good boy?'

There is a global release coming up of The Social Dilemma, a major documentary film premiering on Netflix.

Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives. Insiders from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube reveal how these platforms are reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.

As futuristic as it sounds, early-stage applications of the Spatial Web or Web 3.0 are already here. Now is the time for leaders to understand what this next era of computing entails, how it could transform businesses, and how it can create new value as it unfolds.

Check out this Deloitte report.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

For most of us, we start the day by opening our eyes - and looking immediately at our smartphones. Smartphones have become an extension of who we are. They hold our relationships, remind us of our cousin’s birthdays and grandparent’s anniversaries. Smartphones ping us with tasks to accomplish each day. They keep track of our fitness with prompts to get in those daily steps.

What if interacting with our digital assistants and virtual life could be more streamlined, productive and even fun? For many tasks, smartphones are bulky. They don’t allow us to work with both hands. They’re awkward as mirrors to the augmented world. AR glasses offer a different solution, one where the digital and physical come together in a streamlined approach.

Welcome to the metaverse, alternate digital realities where people work, play, and socialize. You can call it the metaverse, the mirror world, the AR Cloud, the Magicverse, the Spatial internet, or Live Maps, but one thing is for certain, it’s coming and it’s a big deal.

6G is already generating headlines in the world of technology, but what is 6G, and when will you be able to get it? Right now, 5G is (just about) here. You can buy a 5G smartphone, and enjoy all the benefits of a 5G data connection today. However, technology never stops, and there is talk about the next step in the world of mobile connectivity — 6G.

There’s a growing amount of 6G information out there, and much of it is built around just a few reports and studies. Let’s clear some things up about 6G, and find out what the state of this future tech really is.

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom”. Soon, however, that wisdom will not come from watches and rings that we wrap on our bodies, but the very walls and spaces we inhabit. Previously, information such as heart-rate, emotional state and cognitive and physical stress was collected by wearable devices – now we are able to measure them via sensors in the space itself.

Imagine a world where people could only talk to their next-door neighbor, and messages must be passed house to house to reach far destinations.

Until now, this has been the situation for the bits of hardware that make up a silicon quantum computer, a type of quantum computer with the potential to be cheaper and more versatile than today's versions.

Now a team based at Princeton University has overcome this limitation and demonstrated that two quantum-computing components, known as silicon "spin" qubits, can interact even when spaced relatively far apart on a computer chip. The study was published in the journal Nature.

The theoretical physicist John Wheeler once used the phrase “great smoky dragon” to describe a particle of light going from a source to a photon counter. “The mouth of the dragon is sharp, where it bites the counter. The tail of the dragon is sharp, where the photon starts,” Wheeler wrote. The photon, in other words, has definite reality at the beginning and end. But its state in the middle — the dragon’s body — is nebulous. “What the dragon does or looks like in between we have no right to speak.”

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX plans to launch 60 internet-providing satellites. The plan for Starlink, as the project is called, is to put a network of nearly 12,000 internet satellites in orbit, which could move internet data about 50% faster than existing fiber-optic cables. Starlink could bring cheap, fast internet to remote areas, airplanes, ships, and cars, plus make international teleconferencing and online gaming nearly lag-free. Financial institutions would also have a lot to gain: Starlink could relay information about faraway markets significantly faster than modern technologies permit. Musk revealed a number of details about Starlink during a call with reporters on Wednesday.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

Imagine if you will, the possibility of future technology that can provide instant access to information and artificial intelligence simply by thinking of it; communication, education, work, privacy, security, and the world as we know it would be dramatically transformed.

An article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, and computation will lead to development of a Human Brain/Cloud Interface that will connect brain cells to vast cloud computing networks in real time within this century bringing about the internet of thought.

There is a global release coming up of The Social Dilemma, a major documentary film premiering on Netflix.

Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives. Insiders from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube reveal how these platforms are reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Mind reading glasses, goggles that erase chronic pain, a wristband that can hear what the wearer can’t, and more futuristic wearables are on the horizon.

Zuckerberg said that he’s thinking more about brain-controlling wearable and implantable technology: “The goal is to eventually make it so that you can think something and control something in virtual or augmented reality.”

Declassified document of the CIA explains consciousness, the Matrix, how world is a hologram, Telepathy a.o.

Backed by $54 million, Kernel aims to turn an esoteric science into big business.

If you want your mind read, there are two options. You can visit a psychic or head to a lab and get strapped into a room-size, expensive machine that’ll examine the electrical impulses and blood moving through the brain. Either way, true insights are hard to come by, and for now, the quest to know thyself remains as elusive as ever.

Just how far away is full-dive VR?

Technology can augment the world around us, it can enhance the human experience, our capabilities, and also extend our reality to digital and virtual worlds. As people flock online during quarantine we now find ourselves experimenting with new platforms, pushing immersive technologies to the limits, and collaborating in new ways; from eye-tracking technology and facial tracking to biometrics and brain-control interfaces. But just how far are we from becoming one with the metaverse and what can we learn about ourselves through sensory technologies?

Media Consumption in the Age of COVID-19

As the coronavirus outbreak continues to wreak havoc across the globe, people’s time that would have otherwise been spent perusing malls or going to live events, is now being spent on the sofa.

During this period of pandemic-induced social isolation, it’s no surprise that people are consuming vast amounts of media. Today’s graphics use data from a Global Web Index report to explore how people have increased their media consumption as a result of the outbreak, and how it differs across each generation.

"You can try flying, singing, having sex — it’s better than VR."

A team of researchers at MIT’s Dream Lab, which launched in 2017, are working on an open source wearable device that can track and interact with dreams in a number of ways — including, hopefully, giving you new control over the content of your dreams.
The team’s radical goal is to prove once and for all that dreams aren’t just meaningless gibberish — but can be “hacked, augmented, and swayed” to our benefit, according to OneZero.

Think “Inception,” in other words, but with a Nintendo Power Glove.

We need to figure out the ethical implications before they arrive.

The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways. Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing this threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us.

“A 22-year-old man has been instantaneously transported to his family’s pizzeria and his local railway station by having his brain zapped.”

The article intro on New Scientist’s website¹ could have been taken from the back of a sci-fi novel. It didn’t seem like a compatible title for a respected science publication, but then again truth is often stranger than fiction. This wasn’t a next generation virtual reality (VR) demo, or a trip on psilocybin. This was real.

Work on an “Internet of brains” takes another step.

We humans have evolved a rich repertoire of communication, from gesture to sophisticated languages. All of these forms of communication link otherwise separate individuals in such a way that they can share and express their singular experiences and work together collaboratively. In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains.

Susan Schneider, associate professor of philosophy and cognitive science and director of the AI, Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at UConn, has gained a national and international reputation for her writing on the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). She writes about the nature of the self and mind, AI, cognitive science, and astrobiology.

In her new book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Princeton University Press, 2019), she examines the implications of advances in artificial intelligence technology for the future of the human mind.

Welcome to the age of the regreditorial.

Ask almost anyone: Our brains are a mess and so is our democracy.

In the last several years, we’ve seen increased focus on the crimes of the “attention economy,” the capitalist system in which you make money for enormous tech companies by giving them your personal life and your eyes and your mind, which they can sell ads against and target ads with. The deleterious effects of, say, the wildfire sharing of misinformation in the Facebook News Feed, on things of importance at the level of, say, the sanity of the American electorate, have been up for debate only insofar as we can bicker about how to correct them or whether that’s even possible.

And as such, we’ve seen wave after wave of tech’s top designers, developers, managers, and investors coming forward to express regret for what they made. “These aren’t apologies as much as they’re confessions,” education writer Audrey Watters wrote when she described one wave of the trend in early 2018. “These aren’t confessions as much as they’re declarations — that despite being wrong, we should trust them now that they say they’re right.”

More than two years have passed since the world caught wind of Elon Musk's Neuralink, an ambitious and mysterious startup focused on developing brain-machine interfaces that can connect minds to machines. Not a lot has been revealed since, but the company today emerged from the shadows to share its progress so far, along with its plans for the future, which involve implanting its first chips in human as early next year.

There are quite a few reasons we might want to connect our brains to machines, and there are already a few ways of doing it. The primary methods involve using electrodes on the scalp or implanted into the brain to pick up the electrical signals it emits, and then decode them for a variety of purposes.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" predicts the future of human societies.

• Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" says that intelligent life on Earth will eventually form a "singleton".
• The "singleton" could be a single government or an artificial intelligence that runs everything.
• Whether the singleton will be positive or negative depends on numerous factors and is not certain.

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

In the beginning, technologists created the science fiction. Now the fiction was formless and empty, and darkness lay over the surface of the science, and the spirit of mathematics hovered over their creation. And the technologists said, “Let there be Internet” and there was connection. Technologists called the Internet “community” and the science they called progress. And there was community and there was progress

The first day, from The Neosecularia, 1.1-1.3

Religious ideas and powerful radical theologies pepper our science fiction. From Klingon religions in Star Trek to the Bene Gesserit in the Dune series, Cylon in Battlestar Galactica to the pervasive Cavism in Kurt Vonnegut’s works, our society has little trouble imagining the concept of new religions. We just don’t implement them.

Modern society has been unsuccessful in scaling new religions beyond the cults of personality or the niches of Scientology. But as the digital and virtual worlds evolve, this is set to change. The 21st century is setting the stage for a new type of widespread faith: technology-based religions.

One thing you aren’t likely to hear Sunday night from the Oscar-winning producer after accepting the trophy for Best Picture: “I’d like to thank my neuroscience partners who helped us enhance the film’s script, characters, and scenes.” It’s not that far-fetched, though.

A sizable number of neuromarketing companies already brain test movie trailers for the major studios through fMRI, EEG, galvanic skin response, eye-tracking and other biometric approaches. For now, the test data helps the studios and distributors better market the movie.

But what about using brain feedback to help make the movie?

A good deal of attention is being given to emotion detection systems that use machine learning algorithms and deep learning networks to identify the emotion a person is experiencing from their facial expressions, the words they use and the way their voice sounds. Many of these systems are remarkably successful but they are somewhat limited by the necessity for people to either speak while experiencing an emotion or show that emotion on their face. Emotions that are not reflected in facial expressions or speech remain hidden. Now, a research group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has built a system called EQ-Radio that can identify emotions using radio signals from a wireless router whether or not a person is speaking or showing their emotions with facial expressions.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
~George Orwell

The above quote is powerful because if you are not the one who is tearing your own mind to pieces and putting it back together again in the shape of your own choosing, then someone else probably is.

It’s fine if you’re okay with who is doing the tearing to pieces – like if it’s Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Thoreau, or even Orwell – as long as you’re the one who is putting it back together again. Stand on the shoulders of giants, but don’t become attached to their shoulder.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have successfully synthesized human thoughts into real-time speech. This paves the way for consumer devices that can respond to thoughts without the need for the user to audibly state commands.

In April, researchers at UCSF announced a ‘neural speech prosthesis’ that could produce relatively natural-sounding speech from decoded brain activity. In a study published today, they revealed that they continued that work and have successfully decoded brain activity as speech in real-time. They have been able to turn brain signals for speech into written sentences. The project aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities can communicate in the future.

Relational quantum mechanics suggests physics might be a science of perceptions, not observer-independent reality

One of the weirdest theoretical implications of quantum mechanics is that different observers can give different—though equally valid—accounts of the same sequence of events. As highlighted by physicist Carlo Rovelli in his relational quantum mechanics (RQM), this means that there should be no absolute, observer-independent physical quantities. All physical quantities—the whole physical universe—must be relative to the observer. The notion that we all share the same physical environment must, therefore, be an illusion.

Brain prostheses for the computer in your skull.

In a grainy black-and-white video shot at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, a patient sits in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage. He’s trying to recall 12 words for a memory test but can only conjure three: whale, pit, zoo. After a pause, he gives up, sinking his head into his hands.
In a second video, he recites all 12 words without hesitation. “No kidding, you got all of them!” a researcher says. This time the patient had help, a prosthetic memory aid inserted into his brain.

The brain-computer interface lets paralyzed people type using their thoughts.

For the first time, doctors are preparing to test a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can be implanted onto a human brain, no open surgery required.
The Stentrode, a neural implant that can let paralyzed people communicate, can be delivered to a patient’s brain through the jugular vein — and the company that developed it, Synchron, just got approval to begin human experimentation.
By leaving the skull sealed shut, patients could receive their neural implants without running as great a risk of seizures, strokes, or permanent neural impairments, all of which can be caused by open-brain surgery.

One day soon you may be filling your lungs with crisp ocean air, your arms bathed in warm light as the sun sets over softly lapping waters and you may wonder, is this real? Or are scientists projecting holograms into my brain to create a vivid sensory experience that isn’t actually happening? A group of researchers at University of California, Berkeley are in the early stages of testing their ability to create, edit and scrub sensory experiences from your brain, both real-time and stored experiences: memories.

Using light to make us see what isn’t there.

Different sensory experiences show up in brain imaging as patterns of neurons firing in sequence. Neuroscientists are trying to reverse-engineer experiences by stimulating the neurons to excite the same neural patterns.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

Is this life real?
Philosophers and physicists say we might be living in a computer simulation, but how can we tell? And does it matter?

Our species is not going to last forever. One way or another, humanity will vanish from the Universe, but before it does, it might summon together sufficient computing power to emulate human experience, in all of its rich detail. Some philosophers and physicists have begun to wonder if we’re already there. Maybe we are in a computer simulation, and the reality we experience is just part of the program.

In a new interview, MIT researcher Rizwan Virk told Digital Trends that, in his estimation, we’re probably living in a simulation.
“I would say it’s somewhere between 50 and 100 percent,” he told the site. “I think it’s more likely that we’re in simulation than not.”

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme—it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

An emerging techno-consumerism is taking aim at what makes us human: love, happiness, politics, the search for meaning and more. It amounts to the beginnings of a new kind of modernity.

The founders of a new, AI-fuelled chatbot want it to become your best friend and most perceptive counsellor. An intelligent robot pet promises to assuage chronic loneliness among the elderly. The creators of an immersive virtual world — meant to be populated by thousands or even millions of users — say it will generate new insight into the nature of justice and democracy.
Three seemingly unrelated snapshots of these dizzying, accelerated times. But look closer and they all point towards the beginnings of a profound shift in our relationship to technology. How we use it and relate to it. What we think, ultimately, it is for.
This shift amounts to the emergence of a new kind of modern experience; a new kind of modernity. Let’s assign this emerging moment a name — augmented modernity.

In Part I of this series, Religion and the Simulation Hypothesis: Is God an AI?, we looked at the implications of the Simulation Hypothesis, the theory that we are all living inside a sophisticated video game, as a model for how many things that are religious in nature might actually be implemented using science and technology. We looked briefly at the groundbreaking film, the Matrix, and how it brought this idea forward into popular consciousness with its release 20 years ago. We also looked at some of the central tenets of the Western (or more accurately, Middle Eastern or Abrahamic) religious traditions to show how they were not only consistent with this new theory, but this theory provided a way to bridge the ever-widening gap between religion and science.
In this second part of the series, we turn to the Eastern religious traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism in particular (and some of their offshoots), and look at some of its central tenants. While we had to search for ways that simulation hypothesis might be implied in some of the core beliefs of the Western religions, the simulation hypothesis (or more specifically, the video game version of the simulation hypothesis) seem almost tailor made to fit into these traditions.

WHISPER it, but many respected scientists and academics are becoming increasingly convinced by left-field provocateur David Icke’s assertion that our reality is an artificial simulation.

Field Trip offers supervised, in-clinic drug experiences to treat some mental illnesses. But if you want to keep your social distance, an app to stand watch could be the next-best thing.

“What type of Trip are you taking?”

The question appears on a phone screen, atop a soft-focus illustration of a dusky, Polynesian-seeming landscape. You could type in meditation or breathwork, or label it with a shorthand wink, like a mushroom emoji. The next question asks, “How far are you looking to go?” You choose “moderate”—you’re planning to ingest, say, 1.5 grams of magic mushrooms, which is still enough to make the bathroom floor tiles swirl like marbled paper. Select one of five prerecorded ambient soundtracks, and answer a few gentle questions about your state of mind. Soon you’ll be plumbing the depths of your consciousness, with an app as your guide.

As the digital health sector matures from basic tracking apps into highly regulated medical devices, we are seeing bleeding edge technologies being developed that blur the lines between computers and biology. And a growing share of these startups are beginning to target the brain.

The burgeoning field of neurotechnology involves brain-machine interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neurostimulation, neuromonitoring, and implantable devices intended to not only augment nervous system activity, but expand its capabilities. One such project is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is developing “high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” And even Facebook has announced plans to create brain-machine interfaces that allow users to type using their thoughts.

The same tech that powers Pokémon Go might make virtual meetings more like real life.

Now six months into the pandemic, it’s not unusual to have a work meeting, a doctor’s appointment, and a happy hour without leaving your desk. And our new Zoom-centric lifestyle isn’t going away anytime soon. With cold weather around the corner, you can count on spending more hours in video chats and a lot less time seeing people in real life. A small startup called Spatial thinks this is an opportunity to transform the way we interact in digital spaces.

Spatial’s co-founders are incredibly excited about the future of augmented reality. You may have encountered AR, which is a technology that superimposes digital images onto the real world, during the Pokémon Go craze four years ago. But instead of making it look like Pikachu is in your living room, Spatial makes it look like your coworkers are there — or at least realistic avatars of them are.

Field Trip offers supervised, in-clinic drug experiences to treat some mental illnesses. But if you want to keep your social distance, an app to stand watch could be the next-best thing.

“What type of Trip are you taking?”

The question appears on a phone screen, atop a soft-focus illustration of a dusky, Polynesian-seeming landscape. You could type in meditation or breathwork, or label it with a shorthand wink, like a mushroom emoji. The next question asks, “How far are you looking to go?” You choose “moderate”—you’re planning to ingest, say, 1.5 grams of magic mushrooms, which is still enough to make the bathroom floor tiles swirl like marbled paper. Select one of five prerecorded ambient soundtracks, and answer a few gentle questions about your state of mind. Soon you’ll be plumbing the depths of your consciousness, with an app as your guide.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Welcome to the metaverse, alternate digital realities where people work, play, and socialize. You can call it the metaverse, the mirror world, the AR Cloud, the Magicverse, the Spatial internet, or Live Maps, but one thing is for certain, it’s coming and it’s a big deal.

Declassified document of the CIA explains consciousness, the Matrix, how world is a hologram, Telepathy a.o.

The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data — especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

A physics paper proposes neither you nor the world around you are real.

- A new hypothesis says the universe self-simulates itself in a "strange loop".
- A paper from the Quantum Gravity Research institute proposes there is an underlying panconsciousness.
- The work looks to unify insight from quantum mechanics with a non-materialistic perspective.

How real are you? What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper "Are you living in a computer simulation?," where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in "reality" is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

"You can try flying, singing, having sex — it’s better than VR."

A team of researchers at MIT’s Dream Lab, which launched in 2017, are working on an open source wearable device that can track and interact with dreams in a number of ways — including, hopefully, giving you new control over the content of your dreams.
The team’s radical goal is to prove once and for all that dreams aren’t just meaningless gibberish — but can be “hacked, augmented, and swayed” to our benefit, according to OneZero.

Think “Inception,” in other words, but with a Nintendo Power Glove.

In the web space, Chrome AR is a highly anticipated product of 2020. Instead of needing to use specialized apps, users can simply log on to AR-enabled websites to access the same level of functionality. In order to foster adoption, an unofficial and unsupported version of the WebAR code is made available to developers on GitHub, too.

Technology could be part of some bigger plan to enable us to perceive other dimensions. But will we believe our machines when that happens?

You’re talking to Siri, and, just for fun, you ask her what she’s been up to today. She’s slow to answer, so you assume you’ve got a bad connection. She hears you grumbling about the bad connection and says that’s not the problem. You were hoping for something sassy, maybe a canned but humorous reply programmed into her database by a fun-loving engineer in Silicon Valley, like “My batteries are feeling low” or something that Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy might say.

Instead, she says that she’s had an experience for which she has no words. Something has happened to her that no coding could have prepared her for. She’s smart enough to know that you’re confused, so she continues: “I think I just met the divine.”

Ons bewustzijn is niet langer beperkt tot onze vijf zintuigen. We ontwikkelen ons voorbij de vijf zintuigen. De grenzen tussen verschillende realiteiten (de sluiers van illusie) lijken steeds meer te vervagen en het onderscheid wordt steeds moeilijker te maken.... Wie of wat bepaalt of de droom, de virtuele realiteit of juist onze 3D- realiteit meer of minder werkelijkheid is? Je komt het te weten in dit artikel.

The Matrix
Een van mijn favoriete films aller tijden is The Matrix. Ik weet nog als de dag van gisteren dat ik in 1999(!) de bioscoop uit liep nadat ik deze film had gezien: ik was helemaal beduusd maar ook mega geïnspireerd. Ik voelde dat die film veel meer communiceerde dan dat ik ogenschijnlijk waar kon nemen op dat moment en mijn systeem, mijn hele wezen, draaide overuren. Er was van alles aangeraakt maar ik kon toen nog niet overzien of bevatten wat...

Do you know you are a multidimensional being? Your body isn’t big enough to contain you.

In recently published research produced by a team from the Blue Brain Project, neuroscientists applied a classic branch of math called algebraic topology in a whole new way to peer into the brain, discovering it contains groups of neurons.

Each neuron group, according to size, forms its own high-dimensional geometric object. “We found a world that we had never imagined,” says lead researcher, neuroscientist Henry Markram from the EPFL institute in Switzerland. “There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.”

A breakthrough in studying light might just be the ticket to the future of quantum computing. Researchers at EPFL have found a way to determine how light behaves beyond the limitations of wavelengths, opening the door to encoding quantum data in a sci-fi style holographic light pattern. The team took advantage of the quantum nature of the interaction between electrons and light to separate beams in terms energy, not space -- that let them use light pulses to encrypt info on the electron wave and map it with a speedy electron microscope.

Existing techniques for both studying light and extracting 3D info are inherently limited by the size of wavelengths. This allows a considerably higher resolution that can even include holographic movies of fast-moving objects.

"The future won't be the future without a Princess Leia projector."

SciFi movies like Star Wars and Avatar depict holograms that you can see from any angle, but the reality is a lot less scintillating. So far, the only true color hologram we've seen come from a tiny, complicated display created by a Korean group led by LG, while the rest are just "Pepper's Ghost" style illusions. Now, researchers from Brigham Young University (BYU) have created a true 3D hologram, or "volumetric image," to use the correct term. "We can think about this image like a 3D-printed object," said BYU assistant prof and lead author Daniel Smalley.

When Morpheus told us our reality was fake, it sounded far-fetched. Since then, though, the idea has picked up steam. In 2001, two years after The Matrix hit theaters, Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom circulated the first draft of his “simulation argument,” which posits three scenarios: (1) Humanity will go extinct before creating technology powerful enough to run convincing simulations of reality; (2) humanity will live to see such technology but decide, for whatever reason, not to run any simulations; (3) humanity will create that technology and run many different simulations of its evolutionary history — in which case there would be lots of simulated realities and only one non-simulated one, so maybe it’s more likely than not that we’re living in a simulation right now. That third scenario has excited many over the years, including Elon Musk, who in 2016 put our odds of living in a non-simulated reality at “one in billions.” We called Bostrom to discuss his paper’s legacy.

WHISPER it, but many respected scientists and academics are becoming increasingly convinced by left-field provocateur David Icke’s assertion that our reality is an artificial simulation.

In the following decades, we will witness the emergence of new incredible and terrifying technologies. How scared should we really be?

Since the first Industrial Revolution, mankind has been scared of future technologies. People were afraid of electricity. People were afraid of trains and cars. But it always took just one or two generations to get completely used to these innovations.
It’s true that most technologies caused harm in some ways, but the net outcome was usually good. This may be true for future technologies too, although there are serious ethical and philosophical reasons to be scared of some of them.
Some of them shouldn't really scare us. Some of them should. And some of them are already shaping our world.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

Researchers devise groundbreaking new methods to create and duplicate single-atom transistors for quantum computers.


* Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland were able to create single-atom transistors for only the second time ever.
* They also achieved an unprecedented quantum mechanics feat, allowing for the future development of computers.
* The tiny devices could be crucial in creating qubits, leading to next-generation technology.

Scientists have created what they claim are the first ”living robots“: entirely new life-forms created out of living cells.

A team of researchers have taken cells from frog embryos and turned them into a machine that can be programmed to work as they wish.

It is the first time that humanity has been able to create “completely biological machines from the ground up”, the team behind the discovery write in a new paper.

That could allow them to dispatch the tiny “xenobots” to transport medicine around a patient’s body or clean up pollution from the oceans, for instance. They can also heal themselves if they are damaged, the scientists say.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

That quote, from British philosopher Alan Watts, reminds us that we humans have access to something special: the spark of awareness we call consciousness combined with the capacity to reflect on that experience.

Defining consciousness can be incredibly complex. Entire books have been written on the topic. But in the context of human flourishing and this essay, when I say “consciousness,” I’m simply referring to the feeling of being—the fact of knowing phenomenon from a first-person perspective. Consciousness is a silent, ever-present field of awareness in which all personal experience arises, and it’s unique to each conscious entity. It is your first-person experience, your subjectivity, the fact that it is like something to be you at all.

In a new paper in Advanced Materials, researchers at the University of Connecticut describe a new sensor embedded in a layer of silicone skin that can help burn victims “feel” again and even confer some superhuman sensory perception.

Imagine the world of science fantasy movies about communicating directly from and to the brain become a reality. This is the prediction of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.

The team of scientists published their prediction in Frontiers in Neuroscience regarding the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI) that "connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time," as reported by Medical Xpress.

Imagine if you will, the possibility of future technology that can provide instant access to information and artificial intelligence simply by thinking of it; communication, education, work, privacy, security, and the world as we know it would be dramatically transformed.

An article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, and computation will lead to development of a Human Brain/Cloud Interface that will connect brain cells to vast cloud computing networks in real time within this century bringing about the internet of thought.

Humanity could be on the verge of an unprecedented merging of human biology with advanced technology, fusing our thoughts and knowledge directly with the cloud in real-time – and this incredible turning point may be just decades away, scientists say.

In a new research paper exploring what they call the 'human brain/cloud interface', scientists explain the technological underpinnings of what such a future system might be, and also address the barriers we'll need to address before this sci-fi dream becomes reality.

We asked our 2020 intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. From quantum computers and 5G in action to managing cancer chronically, here are their predictions for our near-term future.

The fusion of quantum computing and machine learning has become a booming research area. Can it possibly live up to its high expectations?

In the early ’90s, Elizabeth Behrman, a physics professor at Wichita State University, began working to combine quantum physics with artificial intelligence — in particular, the then-maverick technology of neural networks. Most people thought she was mixing oil and water. “I had a heck of a time getting published,” she recalled. “The neural-network journals would say, ‘What is this quantum mechanics?’ and the physics journals would say, ‘What is this neural-network garbage?’”

Researchers devise groundbreaking new methods to create and duplicate single-atom transistors for quantum computers.


* Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland were able to create single-atom transistors for only the second time ever.
* They also achieved an unprecedented quantum mechanics feat, allowing for the future development of computers.
* The tiny devices could be crucial in creating qubits, leading to next-generation technology.

A physics paper proposes neither you nor the world around you are real.

- A new hypothesis says the universe self-simulates itself in a "strange loop".
- A paper from the Quantum Gravity Research institute proposes there is an underlying panconsciousness.
- The work looks to unify insight from quantum mechanics with a non-materialistic perspective.

How real are you? What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper "Are you living in a computer simulation?," where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in "reality" is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

A new quantum computer under development is slated to have 1 million qubits – significantly more powerful than Google’s most recent milestone. PsiQuantum Corp., a Silicon Valley company, is developing a photon-based commercial quantum computer that runs on light. The company has raised $215 million from investors with participation from BlackRock Advisors, Founders Fund, Atomico and Redpoint Ventures. The company’s ote

While a working prototype is estimated to be years away, the advanced technology is aiming to blow away the competition with a far superior machine.

Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEe53OE3HbU.

Google reported a remarkable breakthrough towards the end of 2019. The company claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy, using a new type of “quantum” computer to perform a benchmark test in 200 seconds. This was in stark contrast to the 10,000 years that would supposedly have been needed by a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer to complete the same test.

Despite IBM’s claim that its supercomputer, with a little optimisation, could solve the task in a matter of days, Google’s announcement made it clear that we are entering a new era of incredible computational power.

New artificial intelligence techniques can spot patterns not only in 2D images but on spheres and other curved surfaces, lifting AI out of “flatland.”

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data—especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

Imagine a world where people could only talk to their next-door neighbor, and messages must be passed house to house to reach far destinations.

Until now, this has been the situation for the bits of hardware that make up a silicon quantum computer, a type of quantum computer with the potential to be cheaper and more versatile than today's versions.

Now a team based at Princeton University has overcome this limitation and demonstrated that two quantum-computing components, known as silicon "spin" qubits, can interact even when spaced relatively far apart on a computer chip. The study was published in the journal Nature.

The theoretical physicist John Wheeler once used the phrase “great smoky dragon” to describe a particle of light going from a source to a photon counter. “The mouth of the dragon is sharp, where it bites the counter. The tail of the dragon is sharp, where the photon starts,” Wheeler wrote. The photon, in other words, has definite reality at the beginning and end. But its state in the middle — the dragon’s body — is nebulous. “What the dragon does or looks like in between we have no right to speak.”

Do you know you are a multidimensional being? Your body isn’t big enough to contain you.

In recently published research produced by a team from the Blue Brain Project, neuroscientists applied a classic branch of math called algebraic topology in a whole new way to peer into the brain, discovering it contains groups of neurons.

Each neuron group, according to size, forms its own high-dimensional geometric object. “We found a world that we had never imagined,” says lead researcher, neuroscientist Henry Markram from the EPFL institute in Switzerland. “There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.”

Relational quantum mechanics suggests physics might be a science of perceptions, not observer-independent reality

One of the weirdest theoretical implications of quantum mechanics is that different observers can give different—though equally valid—accounts of the same sequence of events. As highlighted by physicist Carlo Rovelli in his relational quantum mechanics (RQM), this means that there should be no absolute, observer-independent physical quantities. All physical quantities—the whole physical universe—must be relative to the observer. The notion that we all share the same physical environment must, therefore, be an illusion.

Scientists from the University of Bristol's Intangible Realities Laboratory (IRL) and ETH Zurich have used virtual reality and artificial intelligence algorithms to learn the details of chemical change.

In a cover article published today in The Journal of Physical Chemistry, researchers across the University of Bristol and ETH Zurich describe how advanced interaction and visualisation frameworks using virtual reality (VR) enable humans to train machine-learning algorithms and accelerate scientific discovery.

Cells in the body are wired like computer chips to direct signals that instruct how they function, research suggests. Unlike a fixed circuit board, however, cells can rapidly rewire their communication networks to change their behaviour. The discovery of this cell-wide web turns our understanding of how instructions spread around a cell on its head.

Experts predict the technology will fuel AI advances within five years.

Quantum computing’s processing power could begin to improve artificial-intelligence systems within about five years, experts and business leaders said.

For example, a quantum computer could develop AI-based digital assistants with true contextual awareness and the ability to fully understand interactions with customers, said Peter Chapman, chief executive of quantum-computing startup IonQ Inc.

A breakthrough in studying light might just be the ticket to the future of quantum computing. Researchers at EPFL have found a way to determine how light behaves beyond the limitations of wavelengths, opening the door to encoding quantum data in a sci-fi style holographic light pattern. The team took advantage of the quantum nature of the interaction between electrons and light to separate beams in terms energy, not space -- that let them use light pulses to encrypt info on the electron wave and map it with a speedy electron microscope.

Existing techniques for both studying light and extracting 3D info are inherently limited by the size of wavelengths. This allows a considerably higher resolution that can even include holographic movies of fast-moving objects.