Now it turns out that for half a decade, the Myanmar military has used Facebook to fuel this fire against the Rohingya. On Monday, The New York Timespublished a grisly investigation that reveals how information warfare on a social network can fuel actual genocide.
Power to the Platform
Facebook is so prevalent in Myanmar that many of the nation’s 18 million internet think it is the internet — they don’t use any other sites. That gives Facebook a ton of power.
Now we know how state actors used that power to incite violence. According to five sources who spoke to the NYT under the condition of anonymity, hundreds of military personnel contributed to Myanmar’s online propaganda campaign against the Rohyingya over the past several years.
After creating fake Facebook accounts and pages dedicated to news and celebrities, these military members published comments and posts designed to incite hatred and violence against Rohingya. They also criticized any anti-military Facebook posts they found on the site.
Facebook confirmed to the NYT that it had already removed a series of accounts designed to appear focused on entertainment but that were actually tied to the Myanmar military. In total, those accounts had 1.3 million followers, so it’s not hard to imagine how effective Facebook was as a propaganda-spreading tool.
Online Warfare
While Facebook is taking steps to prevent the Myanmar military from using its platform as a propaganda machine, the issue of weaponizing social media extends far beyond just that nation’s borders.
As we watch in horror as the Myanmar situation continues to unfold, Facebook and its ilk need to ask themselves if they’re truly doing everything they can to prevent such nefarious use of their platforms now and in the future. If they aren’t, what’s stopping them?
Don’t be surprised if sales of blackout curtains start to skyrocket in Chengdu.
On Tuesday, media platform CIF News reported that the Chinese city plans to launch an illumination satellite into the sky in 2020. This “artificial moon” will be eight times as bright as the Earth’s natural one, according to the report — bright enough to replace all the streetlights currently illuminating the city at night.
Reflection
The artificial moon isn’t some giant lightbulb in the sky — a coating on the satellite‘s adjustable wings will simply reflect sunlight onto the city.
Technical details on the satellite are scarce, but if it works as expected, the device will cut Chengdu’s energy consumption enough to save the city an estimated 20 billion yuan (approximately $2.8 billion dollars) within five years of its launch, according to the CIF News report.
Wu Chunfeng, chairman of the Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute, the private space contractor behind the project, said during an innovation and entrepreneurship event held in Chengdu last week that testing began on the artificial moon years ago.
The institute predicts the artificial moon will be able to illuminate an area between 10 and 80 kilometers (approximately 6 and 50 miles) in diameter and will be ready for launch within two years.
Bright Future
Those concerned that this atmospheric night light will disturb wildlife in Chengdu needn’t be — researcher Kang Weimin told People’s Daily Online the satellite will produce a dusk-like glow that’s dim enough to not affect the city’s animal population.
As for people who can’t sleep in anything but a completely dark room, though, there’s always those blackout curtains.
When Apple added a heart rate monitor to its Apple Watch, it never expected the gadget would reveal to users that they had irregular heartbeats or other serious medical conditions.
But according to a new CNBC feature, stories about users learning about their heart health from the device were a wake up call to the company. Its executives realized that they had a sensor on the pulse — literally — of millions of people worldwide.
Suddenly, Apple was a healthcare company.
Heart Throb
Nowadays, CNBC reports, major tech companies from Apple to Amazon are so interested in developing products to support users’ heart health that they’re competing to hire the world’s best cardiologists in the same way they’ve long jockeyed for the best programmers.
The CEO of Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences property, is a heart doctor. The latest Apple Watch contains the world’s first over-the-counter EKG, and the company’s chief operating officer told CNBC last year that Apple’s focus is on “empowering individuals to play a more active role in their health.”
Health Wealth
Big tech’s long-term goal seems to be hacking heart disease and high blood pressure by collecting and analyzing data from lots of people and finding subtle patterns in it — the same approach it used to tackle everything from online advertising to web commerce.
That approach made those companies extraordinarily successful. But Amazon built that dominance by treating workers poorly, and Alphabet’s child company Google recently shut down its Google Plus social network after accidentally exposing personal data about hundreds of thousands of its users.
As big tech moves into healthcare, maybe we should ask ourselves whether we’re OK putting our hearts into its so-often-careless hands.
The next evolution: programmable smart pills that tailor medical treatments in response to signals from individual cells.
The preprint server arXiv recently published a paper describing work that could lead to the creation of such pills — and they have to potential to forever change what it means to be human.
Molecular Computation
On Wednesday, MIT Tech Review ran a compelling overview of the research. According to that report, researchers from the University of Chicago figured out a way to trick strands of DNA into behaving like switches — a development in a field known as molecular computation.
The hope is that we can combine these switches into logic gates — the same basic computational building blocks that power the electronics in your computer or smartphone.
Eventually, the Chicago researchers imagine, we could incorporate those DNA-powered computers into pills, programming them to keep watch on our bodies and release medications in response to signs of distress from individual cells.
Body Load
This research is interesting on a number of levels.
Not only could it lead to incredible medical treatments, it also conjures up visions of a future in which tiny computers reside alongside the natural cells and microflora in the human body — a development that could call into question what exactly it means to be human.
Back in December, Facebook admitted something you might have already suspected: too much social media probably isn’t very good for you.
A month prior, Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook VP, put it more bluntly: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth,” he said during an interview at Stanford.
That might be a little harsh, but it’s in line with a growing body of research. Excessive social media use has been linked to higher rates of anxiety, depression, increased peer pressure, and negative social comparison. More and more neuroscientists believe it may even be changing the underlying chemistry of our brains.
How will this be treated in the future? Day 180, the sixth episode of Glimpse, a new original sci-fi series from Futurism Studios (a division of Futurism LLC) and DUST explores the effects of these types of addictions. Watch the episode below.
“In a face to face interaction, everything is qualitative,” Lauren Sherman, the author of a 2016 study on the effects of social media on adolescents, toldCNN. “You use someone’s gestures or facial expressions, that sort of thing, to see how effective your message is. If you go online, one of the ways you gauge the effectiveness of your message is in the number of likes, favorites or retweets.” In other words, we gauge the success of an online interaction quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Experts now liken this “social quantitative reasoning” to the methods used to make gambling addictive. “The rewards are what psychologists refer to as variable reinforcement schedules and is the key to social media users repeatedly checking their screens,” explained Mark Griffiths, a professor of behavioral addition at Nottingham Trent University, in an interview with The Guardian.
While we don’t yet know if social media can be addictive, it’s clear that sometimes a little break would do us some good. Even some of the companies behind some of these at-times-detrimental tools are making it easier for people to unplug; in May, Google announced its first-ever “Digital Wellbeing” initiative, aimed at developing tools to help users do exactly that.
Clearly, there are things we can do better. But for a lot of people, swearing off social media altogether isn’t exactly an option. A digital presence is increasingly part of the workplace, whether you’re marketing your small business or simply connecting with colleagues in the same field.
Plus, moderate use of digital technologically doesn’t seem to be inherently harmful. Last year, a landmark study of 120,000 adolescentsindicated there was a ‘Goldilocks Zone’ for digital screen use. So instead of creating tools to keep us off social media, a better challenge for Silicon Valley, and ideally society as a whole, might be: “How can we reengineer social media to serve people better?”
By definition, virtual reality is designed to simulate the real world, immersing us in a digital duplication of it. That, inherently, might protect people from some of the “dopamine-driven feedback loops” they might fall into with social media as we use it now.
And now, the technology is ready to be a part of our everyday lives. The cord-free, phone-free Oculus Go, which Mashable recently called “the iPhone of VR headsets,” may herald in a mass market inflection point.
The Oculus Go’s release is also pushing VR developers toward shared social experiences, instead of individualized play. This is Facebook we’re talking about, after all. Take Oculus Rooms, an app created by Facebook Reality Labs (formerly Oculus Research). Billing itself as your “personalized home base in VR,” Oculus Rooms evokes the customizable chat rooms in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One toenable close-quarter, face-to-face interaction with a small group of friends joining in from anywhere on Earth.
The emphasis here is on small groups—Oculus Rooms only allows four people to be together at any given time, promoting more meaningful and intimate interactions. The newly expanded Oculus TV offers a similar experience, allowing friends to get together to stream movies and TV together.
Apps that allow small groups of friends to congregate are likely the future of social networking. “What VR does is it takes all the gadgets away, it takes all of the multitasking away and you actually feel like you’re with someone,” Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, explained in an interview with Public Radio International. “We call this social presence — you see their emotions, you see their gestures and it feels just like you’re in the room with them. It takes what is typically seen as something that’s unemotional and distant and makes it feel like somebody is right there with you.”
Bailenson is onto something. Studies have shown that virtual reality is effective in eliciting specific emotions like awe and fear in ways that a smartphone never could. Whether this will ultimately be good or bad for human anthropology remains to be seen, but we’ll find out soon enough.
Ironically — inevitably — it looks like Facebook will be leading the way.
Once is unique. Twice is a trend. Three or more times starts to feel awfully gimmicky.
That’s where we stand with the ever-so-edgy novelists using artificial intelligence to spit out lazy new books. AI isn’t as impressive as you think — at least not yet — so the results of writing with AI are invariably underwhelming.
Get over yourselves, authors!
24-Hour Bot Show
One recent offender: Robin Sloan, author of the acclaimed “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.”
A new story in TheNew York Times describes Sloan’s work on his follow-up book. Huddled in his “cluttered man-cave of an office,” he punches in a sentence: “The bison are gathered around the canyon.” Then he hits “tab,” spurring software he trained — with classics by John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, and others — to spit out this page-turner: “The bison are gathered around the canyon by the bare sky.”
“That’s kind of fantastic,” Sloan muses to the Times, which seems like a bit much. “Would I have written ‘bare sky’ by myself? Maybe, maybe not.”
And now we’ll never know.
On The Algorithm
Sloan’s new novel will probably be great compared to this word salad, generated by programmer Ross Goodwin. Goodwin hooked up a bunch of neural networks to a GPS, a camera, and other sensors, then took a road trip from Brooklyn to New Orleans.
The result is a bunch of meaningless sentences like this, strung together into an entire book:
The table is black to be seen, the bus crossed in a corner. A military apple breaks in. Part of a white line of stairs and a street light was standing in the street, and it was a deep parking lot.
Of course, road trip novels are insufferable even when humans write them. To paraphrase Truman Capote’s famous diss of Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing; that’s just machine learning.”
Fanfic Panic
If you’re tired of actual full-length books, Botnik Studios used a predictive keyboard-style algorithm to churn out a new chapter of “Harry Potter”:
The Castle grounds snarled with a wave of magically magnified wind. The sky outside was a great black ceiling, which was full of blood. The only sounds drifting from Hagrid’s hut were the disdainful shrieks of his own furniture. Magic: it was something that Harry Potter thought was very good.
Heck, it might not be J.K. Rowling, but we have to admit this attempt at writing with AI at least has a certain charm.
Think kids move slowly when asked to clean their rooms? They probably look like Usain Bolt next to these robots.
On Monday, Tokyo-based robotics company Preferred Networks showed off a pair of fully autonomous room-tidying robots at CEATEC 2018, a Japanese tech exhibition. And while they are a huge technical step up from the dust-guzzling Roomba, they sure take their time.
Rosy’s Replacements
In a video of the demonstration, the robots navigate a room in which various objects — shoes, toys, plasticware — litter the floor. The robots pick up the objects one by one and put them where they’re supposed to go, expertly dropping a piece of plastic into a bin and placing a shoe neatly on the floor next to its match.
According to a site describing the robots, this is all possible thanks to a combination of cameras and deep learning software, which allow the tidying robots to identify objects and decide their fate. Presumably, users would need to train the bots in some way so they’d know in advance where to place each object.
Slow and Slower
Occasionally, one of the bots drops an object outside a bin, or knocks askew a box of folders while placing an object on a shelf. But in general, the robots seem to know what they’re doing, and they do it with relative skill.
What they don’t seems to know how to do, however, is anything fast — the video is sped up to 20 times actual speed, and the tidying robots still don’t exactly zip around the screen.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Preferred Networks hopes to sell its room-cleaning robots, but it doesn’t say when. Until it can teach them to pick up the pace, we’re probably better off just tackling our tidying tasks on our own. Sorry, kids.
*Two billion years ago. But still: the star CI Tau is small and young, comparatively speaking. It’s about 80 percent the size of our own Sun and less than half its age. But the planets orbiting the star? Another matter entirely. New research shows that they’re absolute units, dwarfing the largest planets in our own system by an enormous margin. And their sheer magnitude, some believe, could change scientists’ understanding of how planets form.
Large Adult Planets
We already knew about one planet orbiting CI Tau: CI Tau b. That planet’s 10 times the size of Jupiter, but whips around its star every nine Earth days. Jupiter, by comparison, makes it around our Sun only once every 12 years.
Now, a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters describes CI Tau b’s three colossal brothers.
A ring of dust and gas known as a “protoplanetary disk” surrounds CI Tau. The researchers aimed a network of Chilean radio telescopes at this disk and spotted telltale gaps that almost certainly mean that the little star has three more massive planets. One is three times the size of Jupiter, while the two others are only as big as Saturn. Only.
Large Astronomy Shakeup.
Astronomers previously thought that mega gas planets formed slowly, over periods longer than CI Tau has been around. One of the researchers who discovered CI Tau’s planets, Farzana Meru, told NBC that the huge gas balls upend that understanding.
Under the right circumstances, it appears, these planets can form far more quickly than we thought possible.
We’ll probably never make it out to CI Tau, which is 500 million light-years away. But for now, we’ll keep an eye peeled for more news about its brood of giant planets and anything they can tell us about the formation of the cosmos.
Typing on a game console is a pain in the butt. Simply entering an Xbox password can take forever as you scroll up, down, and side to side to select each letter. And then the next one, and the next one.
This is an even worse problem in virtual reality (VR), where selecting letters is still a laborious process. Now, Microsoft has now conjured up what might be a better way to input text in VR.
Quitting QWERTY
Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization granted Microsoft a patent for the new typing system.
It does away with the traditional QWERTY layout in favor of a dial format. Based on images included in the patent application, it appears the user would spin through the letters using either the joystick on their controller or by gazing in one direction. Once they select a letter, either by pressing a button or making a hand gesture, the system then suggests letters likely to come next in the word.
The idea seems to be that the system will save users time because they won’t have to worry about moving all around the virtual keyboard. Whether that’s accurate is anyone’s guess.
Patent Pending
Of course, no reporting about a patent would be complete without mentioning that a patent approval does not a product make. There’s a solid chance this one will never make the transition from the page into our VR goggles.
If that’s the case, we might just have to resign ourselves to putting the fantasy of VR aside long enough to type the way we currently do.
When there’s an accident, the first police officer or emergency responder to arrive on the scene might ask the driver to turn off the vehicle or pull over to the side of the road. But what if the car doesn’t have a driver?
That’s the question autonomous vehicle (AV) developer Waymo attempts to answer in a newly published guide. The document details everything officials need to know about dealing with AVs on the road — and it could shape the future of AV safety.
Follow the Leader
Waymo started out in 2009 as a Google side project, but since then the company has evolved into one of the biggest names in AV development. Its vehicles have driven more than 10 million miles, and along the way the company has learned a lot about what could go wrong for an AV on the road.
Waymo knows law enforcement officials and first responders are going to cross paths with one of its AVs, the fully self-driving Chrysler Pacifica, from time to time. To ensure those folks know what to do when that happens, the company submitted AV safety guidelines to the California DMV back in May.
On Wednesday, Waymo published a finalized version of what it’s now calling its “Emergency Response Guide and Law Enforcement Interaction Protocol,” and the document details everything from how to tow one of the AVs to how to remove passengers from crashed vehicles.
Share the Road
Of course, the hope is that AVs will eventuallymake our roads safer, not crash into stuff. Still, the transition to AV-dominated transportation will take time. The vehicles are going to share the road with human-driven vehicles for a while (perhaps forever), and while that’s happening, there are going to be accidents.
Officials need to know what do to when these accidents happen, and while the Waymo document focuses on one specific type of AV, it could serve as a blueprint for other manufacturers to follow, helping ensure a relatively seamless transition between the cars we drive and the cars that drive themselves.
According to a new Reuters report, plant biotechnologist Keerti Rathore had a specific goalin mind when he first arrived at Texas A&M University in 1995: transform cotton into a crop we could eat.
And he succeeded — with a little genetic wizardry, he produced a modify plant with edible cottonseeds.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service lifted its regulations on Rathore’s genetically modified cotton, meaning anyone can now grow it. It could even eventually pave the way to overpriced edible cotton seeds lining the shelves at Whole Foods.
You’re Toxic
Cotton is one of the most widely grown crops in the world. In addition to producing fiber we use for fabrics, it also generates a ton of peanut-sized seeds — for every pound of cotton fiber, we get 1.6 pounds of seeds.
These seeds contain a ton of protein. Unfortunately, they also contain a ton of gossypol, a chemical compound that protects the plant from pests and diseases.
Gossypol is toxic to humans, but Rathore figured out how to genetically modify the cotton plant to silence the gene that produces gossypol in its seeds. The chemical still turns up elsewhere in the plant, though, so it retains its natural protection from harm.
Cotton Candy
Rathore told Reuters that if we replaced all the world’s cottonseeds with his consumption-safe version, which he says taste like chickpeas, we could ensure about 575 million people meet their daily protein requirements. He envisions a future in which we roast the edible cottonseeds to snack on, or grind them into a flour we could use to make breads and other baked goods.
Of course, having permission to grow these genetically modified cotton plants isn’t the same as having permission to feed their seeds to people. Before that can happen, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will need to approve the seeds.
No word yet on when that might happen. So for now, the only cotton that will find its way onto your dinner table will be in the form of a nice cloth napkin.
There are very few things in this world surrounded by more hype and confusion than quantum computers. Depending on who you ask, quantum computers will either solve every problem in the known world or never prove useful at all.
The problem is that the computers we already have and understand are pretty darn good at their jobs. But scientists finally found specific ways that quantum computers outperform them — and that could be a big deal in computer science.
Slow and Steady
In research published today in the journal Science, researchers from IBM and the Technical University of Munich detailed the type of problems for which quantum computers may be best suited.
Specifically, quantum computers will be able to solve complex linear algebra problems — that’s a type of math computer scientists use for the optimization problems at which AI excels — without engineers needing to ramp up the complexity of the computer’s circuitry. With old-school classical computers, more complex problems require more complex processors, but a quantum computer’s limited circuitry will be able to solve this type of problem even as it becomes more difficult, according to the paper.
But Really, This Matters
In an accompanying blog post, IBM clarified why there was still so much confusion surrounding this new development. The short answer is that they haven’t really identified any specific problems that a quantum computer would be able to handle better than a classical one. But, IBM says that wasn’t the point.
Rather, they proved that such a problem exists. Claiming “hey, quantum computers will actually be good for something” may sound elementary but until this point, scientists weren’t actually sure that was the case.
Even so, the IBM blog post — which suggests that quantum tech could boost artificial intelligence capabilities — sometimes sounds like a combination of dense engineering speak and hedging bets.
On a clear night, you might be able to point out a few constellations — maybe the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and your Zodiac sign. But to see the Hulk and Albert Einstein, you’re going to need help from a powerful space telescope.
On June 11, 2008, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Every three hours, it produces a map of all the sources of gamma rays in the entire sky. And now, these gamma ray sources have their own set of constellations.
Patterns in the Noise
Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light, but we can’t see them with our own eyes. That means the gamma-ray sky depicted in Fermi’s maps looks a lot different from the sky we see when we look upward.
To date, Fermi has located about 3,000 sources of gamma rays, which include everything from rotating neutron stars to supermassive black holes. To celebrate the device’s 10 years of hard work, the Fermi team decided to create a set of 21 constellations from among these 3,000 sources.
“Developing these unofficial constellations was a fun way to highlight a decade of Fermi’s accomplishments,” said Fermi project scientist Julie McEnery in a NASA news release. “One way or another, all of the gamma-ray constellations have a tie-in to Fermi science.”
Science Meets Art
The team had some fun with the project. They drew inspiration from everything from pop culture (the TARDIS from “Doctor Who, Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise) to science (Schrödinger’s Cat, Albert Einstein) while conjuring up this new set of constellations.
You can view these newly identified constellations via an interactive website featuring artwork by illustrator Aurore Simonnet. Click on a constellation, and you’ll find a link to a page with information about the gamma ray sources within it, giving you a chance to bone up on your science while indulging in a little culture.
The flagship electric car company’s answer to that question has been confusing — which has ended in disaster on a number of occasions.
But now we have clarity. The order page for the new Tesla Model 3 doesn’t feature the much-hyped “Full Self-Driving Capability” that promised customers “all you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go.” CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the feature caused “too much confusion.”
Feature Creep
Removing the feature will certainly sting for potential Tesla buyers. Especially in light of the $7,500 tax credit that Tesla no longer guarantees after October 15.
So when will Teslas really be able to drive themselves? That’s very hard to predict. For instance, Tesla’s newly introduced “Mad Max mode” can even irritate other human drivers just as effectively as any aggressive driver in an Audi.
Enhanced Driving
For now, customers will have to settle for “Enhanced Autopilot,” which includes lane assist and changing, intelligent blind spot monitoring, self-parking, and even navigating complex highway intersections.
People’s lives are at stake here. It’s a good thing Elon Musk decided to take things slow, and no longer offer the feature — fully autonomous driving isn’t going to happen over night.
It’s the future. You’re running low on dish detergent, so the container starts bugging you to buy more. Maybe it even cuts you out of the process by ordering more soap online on its own.
That’s the idea behind Water.io, a hardware company that’s working on a range of “smart caps” that keep track of how much stuff is left in a container.
Track Race
Water.io envisions a cap for water bottles, another for pill bottles, and another for detergents. The caps will tell you if you’re hydrating enough, track whether you’re taking all your pills — and, yes, put in orders when you’re running low on soap.
It’s a neat idea. But in the end, it’s just one more way for retailers to collect data about your shopping and consumption habits. Just remember that, like online ads, these smart caps could eventually become annoying — or even invasive.
Brand More
Water.io CEO Kobi Bentkovski spelled out the vision in a new interview with Fast Company.
“We are enabling the brands of consumer packaged goods to get data from their products,” he said. “The moment they know who their customers are, how customers are using a product, and when the product is going to run out is the moment they can compete with Amazon and the private brands of the retailers.”
That sounds great for brands. But here at The Byte, we’ll just keeping buying detergent when we see that we’re running low.
You’ve Heard of Fake Meat. How About Fake Fish? A new Wall Street Journal story looks at the rise of imitation tuna, shrimp, and even smoked salmon. The surprise conclusion: It’s pretty convincing.
Bias in AI is a truly worrisome issue. We’ve seen algorithms that are racist, sexist, and every other negative -ist you can think of. Even more troubling: if we eliminate all the human bias in our training data, an AI might still learn to be bigoted all on its own.
That’s a concern researchers across the world are grappling with as we move toward a future in which AI is everywhere. One bright spot: Google, a leader in AI tech, just added an AI fairness module to its crash course on machine learning.
Dirty Data
Machine learning is a branch of AI in which we train algorithms using data sets. Since that data is often influenced by humans in some way — for example, a data set on arrests might include a racial bias based on the arresting officers’ beliefs — machine learning is particularly susceptible to issues of unfairness.
Several years ago, Google created a Machine Learning Crash Course (MLCC) as part of an internal two-day boot camp to expose more of its engineers to machine learning. It released the MLCC online in February so that anyone could take advantage of the exercises, case studies, and lessons contained within it.
And on Thursday, the company added a new training module to the course, this time focused on fairness when building AI.
Good Guy Google
According to a Google blog post, upon completing the 60-minute-long fairness module, students will know the types of human biases that can crop up in machine learning models, what to look for in data when determining if it might contain human bias, and how to evaluate a machine learning model’s predictions to see if they contain bias.
We must leave no stone unturned in the hunt for solutions to our AI bias problem, and by including a fairness module in its MLCC, Google is making a major contribution to the effort.
Going home for the holidays or a family reunion is no big deal for many Americans.
But for millions of undocumented immigrants, returning to the place they grew up simply isn’t an option — if they leave the U.S., their immigration status could prevent them from coming back.
One workaround: a nonprofit is using VR to give immigrants an alternate way to “visit” the places and people they left behind.
Fakin’ It
Alvaro Morales and Frisly Soberanis created the Family Reunions Project to help Latinos reconnect with their roots. Using funds from grants and donations, the project has facilitated more than a dozen “reunions” in VR.
Immigrants apply to be a part of the project via its website. It’s not clear how Morales and Soveranis choose participants for their project, but once they do, the pair visits the immigrant’s hometown and records their family and loved ones using 360-degree video technology. Then they convert the footage into a format you can watch with a VR headset.
The Family Reunion Project has already helped more than a dozen families reconnect, according to a report by NBC.
Look for America
Morales and Soberanis, who hail from Peru and Guatemala respectively, have personal reasons for developing this project.
“Both of us being undocumented, we knew the pain, we knew the separation, and we knew how much our parents would really enjoy looking at home,” Soberanis told NBC.
They’re hopeful that their project could have a positive impact on the future of America by helping “humanize” the polarizing issue of immigration in the U.S., while also bringing joy to the lives of immigrants themselves. Truly a win/win.
EVERYONE DIES. ‘Just a fact. The knowledge and subsequent fear of our impending doom drives the way we go about this world: Either as methodically and cautiously as we can, playing the odds of hanging onto this mortal coil as long as we can, or, going full-YOLO: smoking, caloric indulgences, skydiving, public restrooms, chainsaw juggling, Tinder dates — whatever it is.
But a handful of uber-successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have been trying for years to reconfigure death against its given as an immutable truth — and now, they’re pushing harder than ever before.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and (but of course) Elon Musk are approaching their supposed respective demises with the same gusto the average person might a home remodeling. The members of this informal club are set on stretching the limits of the human lifespan, from about 120 to 1,000 (or more). To them, admitting that they’ll die (or die on a typical timeline) is akin to accepting defeat.
“There are all these people who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth,” Paypal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel told Business Insider in 2012. To him, “death is a problem that can be solved.”
These billionaires probably won’t succeed. But even more: If they do stumble upon a technique that actually extends life, it won’t really benefit them — or anyone else.
Since the earliest days of human myth-making, there have been stories of those who work to find ways to avoid or delay death. There’s Gilgamesh, the titular king in an epic that dates back to 2,000 BCE, sought a longevity-granting plant; the Greek legend of Tithonus (who asked Zeus for eternal life but forgot eternal youth), Ponce de Leon (who ventured to new lands in search of the fountain of youth), Dorian Gray (who sold his soul for eternal youth). And so on. These are all men (real or fictional) who sought eternal life, all of whom failed.
It’s not hard to read these legends as cautionary tales. Whether they were struck down in battle, cursed to live forever with the decrepitude of old age, or simply met a swift demise, none of these quests bore the fruits of their labor. Even those hungriest for longer lives can’t deny the physical and cognitive degradation of aging. As we age and certain physiological processes don’t work as well as they once did, our bones break more easily, organs begin to fail, minds dull, locomotion is limited. Is there even a point in trying to extend the human lifespan if it means your existence is reduced to a miserable shadow of its former self?
Of course: None of these concerns will slow down the aforementioned Ponce de Leon-would-bes. Not satisfied with solving problems like how we get around and how we talk to each other, longevity research is Silicon Valley’s new pet project. In 2013, Google founded Calico, a biology company with the stated goal of “solv[ing] death” (a glimpse at the company’s web site shows that since its inception Calico researchers have been mired in what longevity scientists have been doing for decades: testing certain types of molecules on non-human species to see if they extend the organisms’ lives).
Others concern themselves with treating chronic diseases to help humans live longer, better lives. Human Longevity, Inc. uses algorithms to predict an individuals risk of cancers or a genetic condition based on a genetic test. Verily, another Google subsidiary, creates devices which improve quality of life for people with chronic illnesses such as diabetes and Parkinson’s.
But don’t confuse modern medicine’s efforts to extend life with the kind of long-term health many might dream of, warns Linda Waite, professor of urban psychology at the University of Chicago. If we had a choice in the matter, most of us would like to go quick, painless, or else in our sleep.
But heart disease and cancer rates are on the rise, and according to Waite, “the choices that people make often get them the kind of death they all say they don’t want.”
THE WILD THING IS that there are, in fact, a few treatments scientists are exploring which could, in fact, help people live longer, and be affordable for the masses, too. Among them:
Metformin, a medication doctors currently prescribe to patients with diabetes, may reduce DNA damage and help keep cells working normally.
Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant, has shown promise in keeping cell growth and reproduction regular in aging cells.
And in studies, tanespimycin, a drug used in cancer treatments, has helped clear the body of cells which no longer divide properly. It’s not yet clear which of these compounds (if any) will help humans live longer, but the results of early studies are promising.
But these Silicon Valley companies seem more interested in out-of-the-box approaches to longevity.
Most of the interventions they’re looking at aren’t approaching any “anti-aging treatment” that would actually help the average person, nor are they intended to — many of the investors pouring money into these efforts are doing so mostly to help themselves.
The lack of a scientifically proven intervention for extending life isn’t stopping the tech leaders from trying out a few themselves. Peter Thiel is definitely notbut maybe kind of receiving injections of blood drawn from healthy young folks, a technique that hasn’t been shown to work in humans and is based on some very scary studies in mice.
At 32, Serge Faguet, founder of video platform TokBox and Russian booking web site Ostrovok, claims he’s spent $200,000 on “biohacking,” including hearing aids to augment his already-perfect and microdoses of MDMA, all in an effort to live his best life (what happens when he actually does get old, well, we’ll have to see).
Image Credit: Emily Cho
They do this with the knowledge that, if somehow they do find an intervention to extend the human lifespan, it will almost certainly be too expensive for the average person to afford, which would create two entirely different classes of humans — one group with money that can see 150, and another that just has to take whatever small insights trickle down from the top.
“The disparity of wealth in the United States will create a “class of immortal overlords,” former Facebook President Sean Parker said at a cancer innovation event last November. “Because I’m a billionaire, I’m going to have access to better healthcare so… I’m going to be, like, 160 and I’m going to be part of this class of immortal overlords.”
To think that money and a bit of self-experimentation can solve an issue that plagued humanity and has been unsolved since humans evolved, to create two biologically separate classes of human beings — and be fine with it?
There might be something going on there, you know, psychologically, to explain a bit of that. Are these entrepreneurs just in denial about their own deaths? Because they already changed the world so much by creating the thing that brought them to prominence, are they just bored now?
There’s some hubris in there for sure, says Waite, the psychology professor. “Aren’t they masters of the universe? They think they can have everything just because they’re rich, but it’s so not true.” Sounds a lot like the same kind of pride and arrogance shared by Gilgamesh and Tithonus and Dorian Gray.
Faith — where it’s allocated, and where it’s not — could also be playing a role. “Traditional religion in the Bay Area is being replaced with another sort of faith, a belief in the power of technology and science to save humanity,” according to an article about Christianity in Silicon Valley published by Quartz. Combine this new governing philosophy (what others have called a “religion of technology“) with leaders who are too young to find peace in the concept of death and who haven’t experienced the kinds of traumas that might inoculate them against some of that fear? You get a perfect storm of longevity obsession.
So far, there are no drugs or infusions or special herbs you can eat to live a longer, healthier life. No, the only thing proven to help you live longer is exercise and a healthy diet rich in whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. No shortcuts.
If Silicon Valley entrepreneurs really wanted to “disrupt” death, they would do more of that, and blow less money on the kind of outside-the-box schemes that might soothe their egos, but won’t really help anyone along the way.
