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Solving the Deficit Crisis with Life Extension

The United States government is over $17 trillion in debt. That is over $56,641 of debt for every man, woman, and child in the country.

In the past four years alone, debt has skyrocketed from 75% to more than 105% of GDP:

It’s not just the size of the debt itself, but the pace at which it is increasing. In fiscal 2013, interest payments on the debt totaled $222.75 billion, or 6% of all government spending. Some money funds have stopped buying securities due to fears of a US default, demonstrating to us that the process of issuing securities for debt cannot continue forever. The more debt our government builds up, the harder it is to keep borrowing.

The source of much of this growing debt is spending on Social Security and Medicare. If we are going to pay for these programs in the long run, we need a new strategy. According to New York Times blogger Nate Silver:

It’s one of the most fundamental …

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brainimplant

Nano-Harpoons for Silk Brain Interfaces

Silk brain implants, developed by Brian Litt at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, are in the news again, this time as part of an NIH-funded study where they’re being used to stop epilepsy in rats.

What are silk brain implants? They’re silk membranes just 2.5 microns thick which support a network of flexible electrodes for neural interfacing. The membranes are designed to dissolve, leaving the electrodes behind.

A couple of technologies have been developed since 2010 which could be used with the silk membranes to make them more useful. The first are flexible microchips, just 30 microns thick, developed in Belgium and announced in October 2012. The second are nano-scale carbon nanotube neural harpoons, a millimeter long and nanometers wide, developed at Duke University and announced in July 2013.

The neural harpoons could hook up to neurons up to a millimeter in the brain, while the flexible microchips do localized processing. This approach would provide much clearer signals than electrodes which just sit on the surface of the brain. The harpoons, crafted through ion beam …

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The Colloidal Silver Crowd ‘Debunks’ Transhumanism

A new criticism of transhumanism recently made the rounds. It’s not particularly insightful, but many transhumanists shared it on the social networks.

It turns out that the article is more of a criticism of mind uploading in particular rather than transhumanism in general, though it does attack Ray Kurzweil near the beginning.

The context: NaturalNews.com, where the article was published, is ground zero for health crankery on the Internet. Their Facebook page has 378K likes. Colloidal silver, fluoride paranoia, ‘cancer cures’, you name it. Visit the website to see what I mean.

Writers at NaturalNews see Kurzweil’s vision as directly threatening to their worldview and business. Kurzweil argues we will all become nearly-immortal cyborgs by the late 2040s, through the progress of medicine and bionics. NaturalNews, on the other hand, advocates for taking natural substances to extend life and cure ills. The approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, though NaturalNews seems to think they are.

Both sides are mistaken. We will not become immortal cyborgs by the 2040s.  Sometime this century it will be possible to …

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What are Your Political Views?

I thought it would be fun to write up some poll questions and see the answers. These answers reflect what I hear all the time. They aren’t strawmen because I’ve heard people who sincerely espouse them all.

There are no points or score of anything like that, because this is too complex to fit on a linear scale. Just write down your answers, list them in the comments, and waste a bunch of time arguing about them.

Here we go.

1) The military is…

A) Necessary to defend our country, but much larger than it needs to be. Its funding should be cut by 10-30% to help fund health care, infrastructure, and programs for the needy.

B)  Essential. The world is a dangerous place, and we need a large military to assert our interests globally. Funding should be kept roughly where it is, though it would be nice if there were less waste and more efficiency. Maybe the military should even be a little larger than it is now.

C) An overblown military-industrial complex perpetuated by bloodthirsty hawks, killer of …

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MetaMed — Personalized Medical Research
Backed by Peter Thiel and Jaan Tallinn

Doctors, like other experts, have limited domain knowledge. The average primary care visit is only 11 minutes, a figure which hasn’t changed since the 1930s, with four minutes of that being the patient talking. Doctors often lack the time to evaluate up-to-date research relevant to specific patients or diseases. In a widely cited and approved study, one researcher, John P. A. Ioannidis, even argued that up to 80% of medical research findings doctors rely on are flawed.

Many doctors and medical professionals lack a basic understanding of statistics. For instance, in one study, sixteen out of twenty HIV counselors said that there was no such thing as a false positive HIV test (Gigerenzer et al 1998). Another study found that British general practitioners rarely change their prescribing patterns, and when they do, it’s not in response to evidence (Armstrong et al 1996). Gigerenzer and others have shown that statistical illiteracy is ubiquitous among patients and doctors. Many confuse sensitivity and specificity, and most physicians do not understand how to compute the …

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Think Twice: A Response to Kevin Kelly on ‘Thinkism’

In late 2008, tech luminary Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, published a critique of what he calls “thinkism” — the idea of smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligences with accelerated thinking and acting speeds developing science, technology, civilization, and physical constructs at faster-than-human rates. The argument over “thinkism” is important to answering the question of whether Artificial Intelligence could quickly transform the world once it passes a certain threshold of intelligence, called the “intelligence explosion” scenario.

Kelly begins his blog post by stating that “thinkism doesn’t work”, specifically meaning that he doesn’t believe that a smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligence could rapidly develop infrastructure to transform the world.  After using the Wikipedia definition of the Singularity, Kelly writes that Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil and others view the Singularity as deriving from smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligences (superintelligences) developing the skills to make themselves smarter, doing so at a rapid rate. Then, “technical problems are quickly solved, so that society’s overall progress makes it impossible for us to imagine what lies beyond the Singularity’s birth”, Kelly says. Specifically, …

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Comprehensive Copying Not Required for Uploading

Recently, there was some confusion by biologist P.Z. Myers regarding the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap report of Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute.

The confusion arose when Prof. Myers made incorrect assumptions about the 130-page roadmap from reading a 2-page blog post by Chris Hallquist. Hallquist wrote:

The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.

If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation

Prof. Myers objected vociferously, writing, “It won’t. It can’t.”, subsequently launching into a reasonable attack against the notion of scanning a living human brain at nanoscale resolution with current fixation technology. The confusion is that Prof. Myers is criticizing a highly specific idea, the notion of exhaustively simulating every axon and dendrite in a live brain, as if that were the only proposal or even the central proposal forwarded by Sandberg and Bostrom. In fact, on page 13 …

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A Future Worth Working Towards

There isn’t enough in the world.

Not enough wealth to go around, not enough space in cities, not enough medicine, not enough intelligence or wisdom. Not enough genuine fun or excitement. Not enough knowledge. Not enough solutions to global problems.

What we need is more. And we need it soon. The world population is doubling every 34 years. Instead of turning back the clock, we must move towards the future.

There is a bare minimum that we should demand out of the future. Without this bare minimum, we’re just running in place. Here is what I think that minimum is:

1) More space 2) More health 3) More water 4) More time 5) More intelligence

First off, we need more space. There are seven billion people on this planet.

There is actually a lot of space on this earth. About 90 million square kilometers of land isn’t covered in snow or mountains. That’s about 5,000 times larger than the New York City metro area. Less than 1% of this land has any …

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Molecular Machine Breakthrough: Solid State Synthetic Molecular Machine

In a major breakthrough for the field of molecular machines, Canadian chemists have created a self-assembling metallo-organic molecular wheel and axle. This is the first time scientists have proved that interlocked molecules can function inside solid materials. The lead author, a graduate student, said:

“Until now, this has only ever been done in solution,” explained Chemistry & Biochemistry PhD student Nick Vukotic, lead author on a front page article recently published in the June issue of the journal Nature Chemistry [abstract]. “We’re the first ones to put this into a solid state material.”

A molecular wheel and axle in a solid state material is proof of concept for simple solid state molecular machines. A wheel can in principle be developed into more sophisticated solid state molecular machines, such as power-transfer rods and other kinetic frameworks or elements in a solid state molecular computer. The predictability of the solid state environment relative to the environment of a solution is crucial for developing predictable molecular machine systems, and makes it easier to apply certain general principles of macroscale engineering to …

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