Let's explore innovations in tech and longevity that prompt interesting questions.
1. Animation
Some scientists recently created a real life version of the animated Pixar lamp, and in doing so, have had to explore the some interesting questions around feelings. Can emotion be programmed? What does it mean to feel something? How do we know if a robot can "feel?" Does it matter if it is actually feeing an emotion or just convincing us that it is? How might this apply to caretaking industries?
2. Turing Test
Chat GPT has passed a version of the Turing test, which is intended to see if an observe can distinguish between a human's response or a machines. What do we mean when we say machines can think?
3. Not a Human
As AI becomes more ubiquitous, there is also a need to distinguish if content is AI generated or authentic. This will be especially true for insurers to avoid claim submissions that may include artificially generated images of damages. In an interesting test, an AI detector looked at various texts including Harry Potter and The Bible and concluded that they were not generated by humans! Now, this may be a limit on the technology, but it raises an entertaining question about where inspiration comes from.
4. Privately owned nuclear power
One of the consequences of the AI revolution is the thirst for water and power. The movie the Matrix postulated using humans as batteries. In today's world companies like NVIDIA and Oracle are devoting resources to their own dedicated power sources. This brings up interesting ethical questions about who should get resource priority - humans or machines?
5. AI Driven Combat Decisions
It's not too much of a stretch to start to imagine Terminator-esque scenarios when looking through the website of company like Palantir and their target identification and strategic assistant GOTHAM -
6 - 3D Printed Body Parts
Shifting into the longevity world, one of the impediments of aging is that our body parts start deteriorating. But what if we could get replacement parts? How might that change what we are able to do and act? What are the limits of renewal?
7 - Synthetic Embryos
A critical element of understanding medicine is being able to do it in an ethical way. Experimenting on people tends to evoke unsettling sentiment. Adding to the thorniness of the ethical dilemas, a lot of promising research is coming out of the study of stem cells, especially ones derived from embryonic cells. At a high level, when we are forming in the womb, we are in a building and regeneration phase, but aging is a constant deterioration and renewed growth slows. Stem cells give us a reason to regrow/renew. In an effort to bypass the thorniness of harvesting materials from embryos scientist are developing synthetic clumps of tissue that behave like embryos.
"The boundary between a tissue culture and a human organism is yet to be defined clearly" - Methuselah Foundation
8 - Digital Worker Workforce
The Industrial Revolution was a game changer for society. Factories and mass production rapidly expanded the possibilities of manufacturing, labor, and prosperity. The internet was a similar cataclysmic change. Now AI will be the next disruption, and reframe the world. Already this can be seen as drug companies are making use of super computer processing to enable a digital workforce able to accomplish over 100 years of research.
Will this help us cure cancer? Address genetic disorders?
9 - Nano Brain Control
Will it be possible to influence your brain from your phone? While Elon Musk and others work through hardwired brain interfaces, others are looking to use tech like nanoparticles to record and transmit signals in the brain. Will this be the path toward thought control?
10 - Longevity City
In today's digital metaverse people from all over the world can connect and share ideas with very little friction. Enter Zuzalu, a place unconfined by borders, existing outside of regulatory regimes, and non accountable to a singular source of funding for research. This decentralized organization may be the ticket to unlocking new levels of research that may had been choked out by the bottlenecks of grant approvals or government bureaucracies.
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