Transhuman r/Transhuman – reddit

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I'm doing an art project that involves thinking about the shape humans will take in the future, what would that bring to an individual and how it might impact society if the individuals didn't share the overall what-we-now-think-of-as human shape.

Individuals in the animal kingdom look similar if we look at their average shape. For example, an average healthy human has two legs, two arms, a head, a torso and walks upright.

But in the wake of advancements in biotechnology, cybernetics (and other numerous fields) I wonder how our more or less similar silhuete will change if we gain the power to transform our bodies beyond current capabilities of cosmetic surgery.

For example, why have two arms when you could have three? Or "eyes"on the back of your head?I'm interested in more examples that might drastically affect the shape of what we today percieve as human body.

I want to know how would you augment your body, and weather it would alter your current physical apperance?How do you think that change would affect your daily life, positives and perhaps any negatives?

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Transhuman r/Transhuman - reddit

National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)

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FDA recognizes NHGRI's ClinGen, dataset that ties genetic variants to disease

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has formally recognized a public dataset of genetic variants and their relationship to disease to help accelerate the development of reliable genetic tests. Genetic test makers, including those using next-gen sequencing, can use genetic variant information in the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) to support clinical validity in premarket submissions to FDA. ClinGen is administered by the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, and is available via ClinVar.

Andy Baxevanis, Ph.D., a senior scientist leading the Computational Genomics Unit at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Baxevanis was recognized for his distinguished contributions to the field of comparative genomics, particularly for using computational approaches to study the molecular innovations driving diversity in early animal evolution.

In the November issue of The Genomics Landscape, NHGRI Director Dr. Eric Green highlights the 25th anniversary of NHGRI's Intramural Research Program. Other topics include: ClinGen and ClinVar featured in a special issue of Human Mutation, NIH enacting a policy change for summary results from genomics studies, a request for information (RFA) on the proposed NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy, the NIH All of Us Program funding awards for genome sequencing centers, and more.

North Asians, including Mongolians and other Siberian ethnic groups, may be more closely related to Eastern and Northern Europeans - including the people of Finland - than previously thought, according to a new genomics study in Nature Genetics. The international team of researchers, including those from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), made the connection by comparing the whole-genome sequences of 175 ethnic Mongolians to existing genetic variation data.

The National Institutes of Health has updated its Genomic Data Sharing Policy to again allow unrestricted access to genomic summary results for most of the studies it supports. These summary results come from analyzing pooled genomic data from multiple individuals together to generate a statistical result for the entire dataset. Such information can be a powerful tool for helping researchers determine which genomic variants potentially contribute to a disease or disorder. Read the blogpost co-authored by NHGRI Director Eric Green

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National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)

Ron Paul: Foreign interventionism isnt the America First …

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Donald Trump campaigned with a promise to put America first and to stay out of foreign conflicts. As president, Trump has followed the same interventionist policies that failed his predecessors, says former Congressman Ron Paul.

Rather than back out of the meeting, Paul wrote on Monday, Trump should have used the opportunity to declare that the US is not the policeman of the world, and that what flag flies over Crimea is none of our business.

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Instead of being the president who ships lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime, instead of being the president who insists that Crimea remain in Ukraine, instead of being the president who continues policies the American people clearly rejected at the ballot box, Trump could have blamed the Ukraine/Russia mess on the failed Obama foreign policy and charted a very different course, Paul wrote.

Crimeas majority-Russian residents voted to rejoin Russia in 2014, rather than side with the US-supported pro-Western regime in Kiev. Trumps messaging on Crimea has been inconsistent since. Before incurring the wrath of the media in June by reportedly telling world leaders that Crimea is Russian because everyone who lives there speaks Russian, Trump agreed to sell Javelin anti-tank missiles to Poroshenkos anti-Russian government.

READ MORE:Are we the baddies? Al Qaeda team plays on the same side as the US in Yemen (VIDEO)

In a press conference after last months midterm elections, Trump castigated his predecessor Barack Obama for allowing a very large part of Ukraine to be taken on his watch, not blaming Russia but not contradicting State Secretary Mike Pompeos referral to Crimea in June as under Russian occupation.

Torn between the demands of the American electorate and the influence of foreign policy experts in Washington, Trump seems to have been listening to the latter in recent months, Paul wrote.

READ MORE:Life in fear: Report says 1 in 3 US drone-strike deaths in Yemen are civilians, including children

On the campaign trail, Trump had slammed President George W. Bushs $1.9 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and promised to stay out of Syria. Since taking office, however, he signed off on multiple cruise missile strikes against Syria, continues to arm anti-government rebels there many of whom have links to Al-Qaedaand continues to hit all three countries with airstrikes, some of them deadly to civilians.

Trump responded to the tragic news of three US soldiers losing their lives to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan last week with a pledge to continue fighting the longest war in US history, because, Paul said, he listened to neoconservative experts.

Virtually every expert that I have and speak to say if we dont go there, theyre going to be fighting over here, Trump said after the fatal attack. And Ive heard it over and over again.

READ MORE:Atlantic Council fellow says US should send ships to Azov Sea (illegally) after Kerch standoff

That is the same bunkum the neocons sold us as they lied us into Iraq! countered Paul, before offering some advice to the president.

Listen to the people who elected you, who are tired of the US as the worlds police force. Let Ukraine and Russia work out their own problems. Give all your experts a pink slip and start over with a real pro-American foreign policy: non-interventionism, the former congressman from Texas wrote.

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TNR Exclusive: A Collection of Ron Pauls Most Incendiary …

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The July 1992Ron Paul Political Reportdeclares, Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems, and defends David Duke. The author of the newsletterpresumably Paulwrites, My youngest son is starting his fourth year in medical school. He tells me there would be no way to persuade his fellow students of the case for economic liberty.

A March 1993Survival Reportdescribes Bill Clintons supposedly illegitimate children, black and white: woods colts in backwoods slang.

Gays

The December 1989Ron Paul Political Reportcontains entries on a new form of racial terrorism, cites former Congressman Bill Dannemeyers claim that the average homosexual has 1,000 or more partners in a lifetime, and quotes Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in the third person.

In January 1990, theRon Paul Political Reportcites a well-known libertarian editor who told me: The ACT-UP slogan on stickers plastered all over Manhattan is Silence=Death. But shouldnt it beSodomy= Death?

The September 1994 issue of theRon Paul Survival Reportstates that those who dont commit sodomy, who dont get blood a transfusion, and who dont swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay.

The June 1990 issue of thePolitical Reportsays: I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.

A January 1994 edition of theSurvival Reportstates that "gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense," adding: "[T]hese men don't really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners." Also, "they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

Survivalism and Militias

The January 1995 issue of theSurvival Reportreleased just three months before the Oklahoma City bombingcites an anti-government militias advice to other militias, including, Dont fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.

The October 1992 issue of thePoliticalReportparaphrases an ex-cop who offers this strategy for protecting against urban youth:If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).

Conspiracies

This 1978 newslettersays the Trilateral Commission is no longer known only by those who are knowledgeable about international conspiracies, but is routinely mentioned in the daily news.

Middle East

A 1989 newslettercompares Salman Rushdie to Ernst Zundel, a Canadian Holocaust-denier.

Anti-Government Paranoia/Conspiracy Theories/Survivalism

A fundraising letter from Pauls 1984 Senate campaign in which Paul complains about the minions of Kissinger and Rockefeller and the big New York banks, and their pals in Texas who want me silenced.

The January 1988Ron Paul Political Reportapprovingly cites Dr. William C. Douglass, who believes that AIDS is a deliberately engineered hybrid developed at a World Health Organization experiment conducted at Ft. Detrick. Douglass has long been a fringe medical guru, and today claims that smoking can help you live longer!!!

The November 1989Ron Paul Political Reportreports on the Bohemian Grove and Ronald Reagans old Trilateralist agenda item of four-year terms for Congressmen.

This 1993Ron Paul Strategy Guideentitled, How to Protect Yourself from Urban Violence, is a special supplement to theRon Paul Survival Report.In the April 1993Ron Paul Survival Report, the authorwriting in the first personstates, Whether [the 1993 World Trade Center bombing] was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little. The newsletters also warns readers to do your very best to keep your family away from inner cities. If you cant, have a haven remote from the metropolitan areas.

The May 1995 issue of theRon Paul Survival Reportwarns of The Trilateralist Alan Greenspan and its author writes, Now that my five children are grown and educated, Ive listened to the many supporters whove urged me to return to office. I can now give up my medical practice, and dedicate every fiber of my being to saving our country. The newsletter also contains an advertisement for the Ron Paul congressional exploratory committee.

The September 1995 issue of theRon Paul Survival Reportasks about Black Helicopters?

The June 1996 issue of theRon Paul Survival Reportrefers to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officers as Jackbooted Thugs.

Jews

The November 1992Ron Paul Survival Reportdefends chess champion and Holocaust-denier Bobby Fischer, saying that the brilliant Fischer, who has all the makings of an American hero, isverypolitically incorrect on Jewish questions, for which he will never be forgiven, even though he is a Jew. Thus we are not supposed to herald him as the worlds greatest chess player.

Pat Buchanan

In January 1992, Paul writes about his consideration of a presidential bid which he dashed after Pat Buchanan expressed his intention to run. Paul wrote of the essential compatibility between [Buchanans] ideas and mine and agreed to serve as the chairman of his economic advisory committee.

A 1992 issue of theRothbard-Rockwell-Reporttells of Pauls decision to defer to Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican presidential primary.

Newsletter Authorship

The masthead ofMarch 1987Ron Paul Investment Letterlists the Hon. Ron Paul as Editor and Publisher and Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. as one of several contributing editors.

An undated personalsolicitation lettersigned by Paulasking the recipient to subscribe to his newsletter in anticipation of (presumably) the 1988 Libertarian Party Presidential nominating convention.

The April 1988Ron Paul Investment Letterlists Paul as Editor.

The May 1988Ron Paul Investment Letterlists Lew Rockwell as Editor. It also advertises books by the far-right conspiracy theorist Gary Allen, who was a contributing editor to theRon Paul Investment Letter.

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TNR Exclusive: A Collection of Ron Pauls Most Incendiary ...

Ron Paul Tweets Racist, Anti-Semitic Cartoon

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Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty)

Are you one of the people who forgot that Ron Paul ever existed? Well, he popped up on Monday to remind the world that he is both still around and still quite racist.

Lets go ahead and zoom in on that, shall we?

Enhance...

Hmmmmmmmmm?

More than two hours after sharing his thoughts on cultural marxism Paul pulled down the extraordinarily offensive tweet, and swapped it out for something a little more benign.

Got that folks? No political correctness here!!!! If you want less racism and anti-Semitism in your life, KEEP MOVING.

I have reached out to both the Ron Paul Institute, and Pauls son, Senator Rand Paul, for their insight into this tweet, and will update this story with their responses.

Update, 3:43 p.m.: Paul has followed up on his tweet, explaining that hes not an anti-Semitic racistsomeone on his staff is.

See the article here:

Ron Paul Tweets Racist, Anti-Semitic Cartoon

SOLO Offshore Racing Club – SOLO Offshore Racing Club

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We are a virtual yacht club without anypremises. Our office is the Sea. What do have is an enthusiastic group of offshore & inshore yacht racers who love "going solo", and enjoy a lively gathering afterwards. We sail a range of "Class" boats and IRC cruiser/racers. Anybody is welcome to join our events so long as you and your boat meet oursafety & competence criteria. Budding Vendee aspirants, Figarists, or just wanting to enjoy the personal challenge, all are welcome!

Our "in house" training events, both ashore and on the water, are aimed at encouraging all levels but with a leaning towards solo newbies, whilst our more formal North U Training events cater for the more experienced pushing to the next level.

The solo racesarea mixture of "round the cans" Inshore Series day events, with corners. which our French solo cousins call Technical" racing, and then longer Offshore Series events whichare typically cross-Channel passage races with some overnight sailing. We havean annual Channel Week which may take in the Channel Islands, Britanny, Ireland or further afield. Occassional one off events are staged. In 2016 we held the inaugural SORC Round the Rock Race (Fastnet Rock that is!) which was hugely successful.

So whatever your solo aspirations, you are in good company, ranging from Adventurers to adrenalin fuelled competitive racers - but we all share a common bond and respect for eachother!

2016 ROUND THE ROCKRace video ROUND THE ROCK RACE website

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SOLO Offshore Racing Club - SOLO Offshore Racing Club

What is Seasteading? DIS Magazine

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disaster issue Alessandro Bava, architect and Renaissance man Martti Kalliala, and artist Daniel Keller discuss #seasteading and Tech-Secessionism.

The Seasteading argument:

1. We need a better legal system in order to increase freedom and efficiency.

2. The best way to find a better system is through diverse experimentation and competition.

3. One needs a location to make an experimental society.

4. All land is claimed by governments who wont give up their land, yet 70% of the earth is covered by oceans.

6. In order to make experimental societies we must build competing floating city-states on the ocean.

Daniel Keller: Seasteading is a portmanteau of Sea and homesteading. It is the concept of building semi-permanent cities at sea, usually in international waters and armed with novel socioeconomic and legal systems. Its sold as the optimal libertarian solution to the lack of innovation in government. Yet its essentially a fantasy escape plan for a permanent minority to circumvent a representative democracy, which is inherently unsympathetic to their devotion to tax evasion and secession.

Libertarians argue that the Federal government should consider itself a public option provider of citizen experience in the governance industry, and open the market to competing options. Obviously no national government is going to let this happen within their borders, so the idea is that they might, for some reason, just go ahead and tolerate it as long as it takes place in international waters. So a seastead is seen as the only way to lower the barriers of entry to the governance industry which are insurmountably high in any sovereign (land-based) nation. These platforms would ideally be built modularly so that citizens or groups could merge and split off to form new seasteads in the constant search for their optimum-blend society. (Islands having sex with other islands, then divorcing them).

ExitCon, Martti Kalliala

Alessandro Bava: Since the 15th century, understanding the legal and political status of the sea has been a struggle. Political philosophers like Hugo Grotius and Carl Schmitt have produced, in very different times, theories to define the immense and fluctuating body of water in terms of power relations. The renewed interest in seasteading seems to reignite that struggle by trying to inhabit the voids left by contemporary regulations on the sea, in times of global political instability. Do you think the seasteading option is a form of new colonialism, and in a way interprets current frustration with traditional governance models?

Martti Kalliala: I dont think the colonial lens necessarily sets a meaningful frame in which to understand seasteading even though you could say its rooted in a narrative sequence beginning with Manifest Destiny (then hitting the Pacific Wall, and reopening the idea of the frontier via a literal application of Blue Ocean Strategy).

But yes, frustration and anxiety for sure re: broken governance systems that have been experienced across the political spectrum. Theres a whole lot to be said about the current, and to a certain degree generational, disposition towards exit over voice. The tendency to favor opting-out over staying in, to create new structures rather than improve what already exists, to build a startup instead of a tracked career in existing organizations or to start a new country. Exitcore might then be the aesthetic limit of utopia.

DK: I agree that the narrative basis of seasteading could be seen as a literal extension of Manifest Destiny off of the California coast and into the Pacific and beyond. But as opposed to classic forms of colonialism there arent any people out there being directly displaced or subjugatedseasteading has all the excitement and potential of a frontier without the humanitarian guilt. When I asked Peter Thiel about his interest in seasteading at the DLD conference a few years ago he framed it exclusively as fulfilling an emotional need for new exploitable frontiers as a catalyst for innovation and economic growthfirst the oceans and then space.

AB: Will the next war be fought at sea?

DK: A lot has already been written about the emerging scramble for the North. The Nordic countries, Canada, Russia and the USA are all jockeying for resources and access trade routes in the soon-to-be ice-free Arctic Ocean. In fact a lot of potential geopolitical hotspots involve access to the sea, most notably Russias annexation of Crimea which was primarily about maintaining control of its only southern naval base and access to the Black Sea or the dispute over the resources around the Spratly Islands in the S. China Sea which threaten to escalate into a regional war.

Moreover, its a common belief that wars over access to freshwater will be the 21st century equivalent of wars over oil. So one way or another wars this century will be fought on or for water.

Simon Denny, TEDxVADUZ REDUX at T293 gallery / Courtesy T293, Rome

AB: Is it untimely that such interest in the sea is territorial even in times when the biggest industries are non-territorial (i.e finance)?

MK: But the body is still territorial. And the banality and awkwardness of needing to deposit ones physical body somewhere to be free is really fascinating: one would choose this total unfreedom and hardship that comes with living on an isolated platform in a corrosive, at times hostile ocean environment in exchange for a set of abstract, mainly negative freedoms. Culturally its a bizarre combination of settler machismo battling the challenges of the life aquatic and an almost autistic disregard for ones physical environment like whatever as long as there is soylent, hi-speed internet and a lax tax code.

DK: I think its a misconception that weve moved beyond the territorial. I think its similar to fantasies of the internet as immaterial when in fact it is an enormous, lumbering stack of physical infrastructure. This is also why I think people were so shocked by Russias territorial expansion into Ukraine fighting for territory felt so retro. But even finance is super-territorial (not non-territorial). Enormous profits are derived from exploiting the differing energy states between jurisdictions, through tax avoidance schemes like the double irish or the dutch sandwich, sort of comparable to a steam engine generating energy from thermal gradients. If the world was really post-territorial, this would no longer be possible. A uniform and post-territorial world would be akin to a state of maximum entropy.

AB: Martti how do you think seasteading is relevant in architecture, or rather how is architecture relevant to seasteading?!

MK: Its pretty obvious how existing and historical architectural typologies of living and working could be applied in more intelligent and interesting ways compared to these naval engineer / archi-hobbyist designs that now circulate online.

More interesting is the fact that designing a seastead would mean collapsing spatial concepts such as country, city, neighborhood, territory, site and building into basically one architectural gesture. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, in a design where secession is possible down to the scale of an individual building or cell a seastead as a kind of plankton raft of floating mini-steads these concepts become almost meaningless.

AB: Daniel how has your interest in seasteading translated into your art practice. In general whats the relationship between your research and your art-making?

DK: Its always a bit difficult for me to translate my interest in something into an exhibition format intended for art world audiences (without veering into didactic illustration on the one hand or obscurant poetics on the other). But of course on an allegoric and visual level seasteading is so incredibly rich with potential that I think it is worth trying. In my exhibition Lazy Ocean Drift last year at New Galerie in Paris (which was my first solo show post aids-3d) I tried to introduce a constellation of ideas around seasteading, offshore finance, labor automation, and ecological disaster in the form of sculpture, sound, installation and video.

I am working on a proposal for a follow-up exhibition in an institution in Germany where I will transform the space into a sort of site-specific immersive seastead simulator. The centerpiece of the proposal is a 7 channel video projection onto the windows of the space, which will display a real-time rendered seascape generated in a video game engine.

AB: Theres something beautiful about imagining the sea horizon as the only view from your future windowis that just romantic? Or is it a generational phenomenon that arises from the implication of false ideas of limitlessness in technology, and the actual physical and phenomenological limitation we experience everyday?

MK: If its romantic, the ocean-as-image is also culturally (and apparently also biologically) imprinted with a host of associations that have been successfully appropriated by financial capitalism. Just think of concepts such as liquidity, offshore, Blue Ocean Strategy etc. and the imagery they are typically associated with. This is of course something that Daniel has been looking at a lot in his practice.

DK: Yes, I think the appeal of this imagery really boils down to an almost lizardbrain attraction to blue and green landscapes. By employing that sort of imagery to illustrate entirely artificial concepts like liquidity, it lends them a sense of naturalistic inevitability. I imagine liquidity looks more like cubes on a conveyer belt than a splash of refreshing aquamarine mouthwash.

AB: For me ultimately the idea of seasteading conflicts with the idea of world order, meaning: imagining the coexistence of many tiny floating utopias where you can choose your preferred form of life seems totally nuts. Thats what happened in colonial americaand then the USA happened

MK: Or you could consider seasteading as being a completely predictable glitch of that very world order inhabiting its voids as you said earlier. If nature abhors a vacuum then human nature abhors any vacuum of governance. So pretty much every opportunity for jailbreak from so-called Westphalian state space, which is the foundation of our current world order, has been ruthlessly exploited in the form of thousands of extra-state, extra-legal real and virtual spaces covering our globe from special economic zones to offshore finance to Guantanamo. Seasteading is just a tiny sub-narrative of this rearranging and relayering of sovereign space. In itself I doubt it could pose an existential threat to this so-called world order, but it doesnt claim to be one.

AD: How do you imagine your island?

MK: I think the neo-Victorian New Atlantis from Neal Stephensons Diamond Age mixed with Leon Kriers Atlantis would offer an attractive USP.

DK: I imagine a real seastead to be an incredibly depressing unabomber style man cave. A barnacle-pocked corroding metal platform, littered with semen-encrusted socks, stockpiled food in filthy barrels and broken algae bioreactors; the water surrounded by floating plastic garbage.

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

AB: In 2012 I did a project for a seasteding island off the shore of Naples, Italy. The idea was to create a free trade zone in the sea, operated by the Italian government, which would benefit from a new neighborhood. The project was published online on the most read left wing newspaper, La Repubblica, and generated tons of negative responses Why do you think seasteading has so many enemies?

MK: Id presume its as unattractive as most libertarian ideas in general to the vast majority of people. Thats also part of the libertarian argument for it: people with a natural disposition for libertarian ideas will always remain a minority, hence a libertarian government can never get into power through the democratic process, hence seasteading.

In any case, funny that you mention the hostility towards your project as I just last week had the opposite experience. In 2008 I produced a rather well researched but completely preposterous project to construct an artificial island a kind of SEZ-meets-TAZ social laboratory in the Baltic Sea between Helsinki and Tallinn by using the excavated rock material of a potential railway tunnel dug between the two cities. I just got mail from the mayors office in Helsinki requesting the drawings as they would like to bring the idea back into discussion. Now Im not sure if this is a good idea

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

DK: Yeah there is a huge disconnect between the idea of seasteading as a platform for experimenting with various forms of governance and the reality that the vast majority of people interested in pursuing it are orthodox libertarians who see some kind of anarcho capitalist libertarianism as the inevitable winner in a fair fight between political systems. I really think that a belief in libertarianism is linked to a distinctive and relatively rare neurological type, and therefore will never convince the vast majority of people who tend towards a more altruistic and collectivized morality.

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

AB: Martti recently you have rewritten Rem Koolhaas text City of the Captive Globe, readapting it for seasteading, could you explain that connection?

MK: So the original text was an early hypothesis of the theory of Manhattan written before Koolhaass seminal book Delirious New York. In it he abstracts Manhattan into its essential parts: a gridded archipelago in which each science and mania has its own plot. On each plot you have a base (platform) on top of which each philosophy can construct its own edifice, suspend unwelcome laws, facilitate speculative activity, etc. Here 1920s Manhattan works as an ideological laboratory and an incubator of the world itself (the actual office and condo-filled Manhattan obviously failed to deliver on this hypothesis). Today of course the incubator is a startup incubator and the grid is the smooth unobstructed space of the ocean. So suddenly the text becomes the subconscious theory of seasteading

While I understand the relative pragmatism of the Seasteading Institute looking into solving the fundamental hard problems of settling in an ocean environment which Im sure is necessary for them to gain any mainstream acceptance, the potential of the seasteading imaginary is to a degree wasted on trying too hard to make sense of it. It will probably never make sense, and it shouldnt. For it to be truly attractive I believe it ought to be explicitly charged with libido, excess, and insanity essentially the unfulfilled promise of Manhattanism as a kind of boiling aquaculture. So instead of the lock-in of the grid, a liquid substrate on which islands can copulate and produce mutant offspring, collapse, burn and rise again. And, why not resurrect seapunk as some kind of aesthetic practice of every day life?

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

On December 11, Martti Kalliala is organizing a symposium in NYC about Seasteading, including new work by Daniel Keller:

ExitCon a Symposium on the Formal Imaginary of Tech-Secessionism

Van Alen Institute30 W. 22nd StNew York, NY

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What is Seasteading? DIS Magazine

Will Seasteading Create First Truly Non-Violent Nations …

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Why do the nations rage?

I don't know. Maybe because they're out of ammo culturally. As Joe Quirk, president ofThe Seasteading Institute calls them, the 193 monopolies on government that control 7.6 billion people right now" could benefit from some peace-loving competition. More importantly, the existence of his planned seasteads, floating platform-based ocean communities, could benefit the ostensible customers of monopoly governments by modeling nonviolent, voluntary community making.

Iinterviewed Quirk because I am interested in the cause of liberty and nonviolence from an anthropological perspective. I am curious about why humans group together and assent to monopolies of violence called states. I want to know how humans came to morally condone and even consecrate the violence such entities employ against nonviolent people for disagreeing with majoritarian might-makes-right rules.

Watch the interview here:

In the news today we are hearing reports that an elderly pundit Dr. Jerome Corsi is likely facing prison time for getting tripped up in a perjury trap during psychologically abusing grillings by grand inquisitor Robert Mueller. Corsi's actions, whatever the specifics, did not produce a victim. (Robert Mueller did when he helped mislead the nation into the Iraq War, as tens of thousands of wounded or killed soldiers prove.)

Regardless of what you think of his politics, Corsi is facing the prospect of being locked in a cage merely for the impotently cathartic game of DC blood sport. Seemingly near half the country seems to be foaming at the mouth at the sight of a political writer being caged in his last years just because he favored their rivals' presidential pick. Who wants to live in a society where its law and liberty is decided by these violent bouts of scapegoat ping pong?

Centralized monopolies that demand the right to initiate violence against any nonviolent misfit are devolving into anarchic schisms of mad groupthink. Where do we get off this ride?

To exit the vehicle safely, we must know how we got in it and why it is breaking down and making us sick on its way out of commission.

The enigmatic Jewish prophet Habakkuk once wrote, Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by injustice!

He wrote it at a time in which evidence suggests the world was filled with societies founded and mediated by controlled acts of bloodshed. Today, we call it ritual human sacrifice and tribal war campaigns for glory. As sophisticated moderns, we are embarrassed to address the seeming fluke of sacrifice so ubiquitous to human history so we awkwardly shuffle it off to the corners of our museums. At best, the fashionable answer is that sacrifice was a quirk of religion or agriculture or proto-patriarchy or some other such cultural institution that soiled our primal nobility.

In reality, sacrifice was a safety valve ancient communities used to channel pent up resentment, fear, and conflict into misfit human vessels of destruction. These scapegoats were marked out from the masses by some arbitrary difference that made them unbearably peculiar to suspicious crowds looking to avert famine, disease, or other harbingers of social in-fighting and disorder. Eventually, the governing authorities streamlined the process of sacrifice to include foreign-captured slaves who first received orgies and feasts to make them tainted enough with the local spirit of the community in tension.

We think we educated ourselves out of human sacrifice but this is a convenient myth we tell ourselves to justify its continual residue in our daily lives. Every culture that sends state agents to lock up a woman sellingunlicensed tamales or a politicaldissident or an addict or an Amishherbal salve seller is still very much enthralled by the one-for-all logic underlying our generative sacrificial origins.

Today, we hide our consent for coercion against misfits by telling ourselves it is for the protection of victims and children. As if, for example, another Amish farmer thrown into a violent prison cage would cause the nation to perish if he was left alone to sellhis raw milk.

Beyond domestic sacrificial violence in the name of victims, it is difficult to find a single country in existence today that did not have its founding determined by self-justifying war. As another remnant of sacred ritual, war has been a socially binding agent for societies: a means of uniting restless neighbors in righteous self-sacrifice of life and wealth for the defeat of a less-than-human foreign foe. Yet recent years have shown that as the public is more frequently exposed to the images of constant intervention in countries like Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, whatever unifying high war has long held is rapidly dissipating.

Our increasing sensitivity to the plight of the other, be it the drug war-ravaged family or drone strike victims abroad, make the governance models built on the initiation of physical violence against nonviolent people increasingly ineffective. No wonder criminal justice reform and ending wars are now the few areas of overwhelming political unity. Yet political systems, always in a lag from cultural trajectories because of structural incentives to maintain the status quo, are dramatically slow to decisively satisfy such popular demands.

A command-and-control economy where medical innovation and scientific reform are bugs to be blocked by bureaucracies simply has too much inertia built on the foundation of sacrificial wars and regulations to change its ways any time soon.

That's why Joe Quirk and the Seasteading project are such a fascinating case to consider. As sacrificial forms of governance continue to leave their citizens in disunity and internal resentment over who gets what spoils in a supposedly zero-sum economy, we have a real chance to see the first sovereign societies develop free from bloodshed.

An ocean-platform community voluntarily funded and organized, if successful, is a monumental event in human anthropology.

Just having a place where problem solvers and innovators can develop potential breakthroughs in science, medicine, and innovation, free from deeply captured regulatory apparatuses could be a tremendous leap forward for mankind. And if these societies can maintain a thriving, non-monopoly state-managed existence, the rest of the world's governments will be on notice to wean off of sacrificial violence or perish through increased social unrest and decline.

Competition may be a sin to John D. Rockefeller. But when it comes to bloated bureaucracies buoyed by outdated ways of treating human beings, it looks like a big beautiful blue ocean to me.

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Will Seasteading Create First Truly Non-Violent Nations ...

Patri Friedman – Wikipedia

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Patri Friedman (born July 29, 1976) is an American libertarian activist and theorist of political economy.[1] He founded the nonprofit Seasteading Institute, which explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies.[2][3][4]

Friedman grew up in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of Upper Merion Area High School, class of 1994, where he went by the name Patri Forwalter-Friedman. He was named after Patri J. Pugliese, a close friend of his parents.[5] He graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1998, and went on to Stanford University to obtain his master's degree in computer science. He also holds an MBA from New York Institute of Technology Ellis College.[6] He worked as a software engineer at Google.[7][8] As a poker player, he cashed in the World Series of Poker four times.[9]

Friedman was executive director of the Seasteading Institute, founded on April 15, 2008, with a half-million-dollar donation by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[10] The Institute's mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems".[11][12] This was initially a part-time project one day a week while working as a Google engineer the rest of the time[7] but Friedman left Google on July 29, 2008 to spend more time on seasteading.[13] He and partner Wayne Gramlich hoped to float the first prototype seastead in the San Francisco Bay by 2010.[14][15] At the October 2010 Seasteading social, it was announced that current plans were to launch a seastead by 2014.[16]

Since attending the Burning Man festival in 2000, Friedman imagined creating a water festival called Ephemerisle as a Seasteading experiment and Temporary Autonomous Zone. Through the Seasteading Institute, Friedman was able to start the Ephemerisle festival in 2009, aided by TSI's James Hogan as event organizer and Chicken John Rinaldi as chief builder. The first Ephemerisle is chronicled in a documentary by Jason Sussberg.[17] Since 2010, the event has been annual and community-run.

On 31 July 2011, Friedman stepped down from the position as Executive Director of Seasteading Institute, but remained chairman of the board.[18] Later, he co-founded the Future Cities Development Corporation, a project to establish a self-governing charter city within the borders of Honduras.[19][20]

In 2012 it was announced the initiative would be halted due to the changing political climate of Honduras.[21]

During his poker career, Patri Freidman was predicted to become a world champion by Card Player Magazine.[22] He claims to have created AI bots for online poker.[23]

Patri is the grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman[24] and economist Rose Friedman and son of economist and physicist David D. Friedman.[24][25] He has two children by his first wife. As of Feb 10 2018, he is married to Brit Benjamin.[26]

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Patri Friedman - Wikipedia

Buy Automation – The Car Company Tycoon Game

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We held back on launching Automation into Early Access until the game had a solid, fleshed-out core which the main tycoon part of the game will be based on. We also wanted to make sure we can offer enough content and polish to warrant presenting and selling the game to a larger audience.

Previously we offered an early access version of the game via our website, but this sales platform and distribution channel has been outgrown by the steadily increasing interest in the game, becoming complicated to manage for a small team like ours.

Finally launching the game on Steam Early Access makes possible to speed up development with any additional income, allowing for quicker content addition (car bodies, engines, etc.) than otherwise possible. It also allows us to get additional manpower to the team to tackle the huge job of game balancing and AI programming.

Last but not least, with the major milestones of completing the car designer and engine designer under our belt, the implementation of multiplayer features means using the Steam API for network communications, saving us a lot of double work associated with developing our own networking code first.

We're not known for being good with estimates, but always deliver and are good at avoiding feature creep. Our development process focuses on milestone builds that introduce new features every ~3-4 months and are both beta-tested and reasonably polished-up. Any major problems with these milestones are addressed quickly in hotfixes before we move on to the next milestone.

Quick Facts About Development:

Since Mid 2015, a portion of our team has been focused on porting Automation over to Unreal Engine 4, and the current version of everything besides the Lite Campaign is on Unreal, giving huge improvements in graphical quality, performance, UI design and general playablity, as well as giving us the developers the tools to develop Automation better, faster, and maintain it far into the future.

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Russian Space Agency Roscosmos Blames SpaceX For Its Woes

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In its most recent annual report, Roscosmos blames SpaceX — which promises to shuttle astronauts to the ISS — for its declining fortunes.

Space Race

For years, the Russian space agency Roscosmos has served as an international space courier service, contracting with NASA to shuttle astronauts and equipment into orbit aboard its reliable Soyuz rockets.

But in the wake of a high-profile Soyuz booster failure last month, and in the face of new competitors in the private spacetech industry, Bloomberg reports that Roscosmos is now reevaluating its future. In particular, the business magazine found, the agency’s ire is aimed at Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Obviously Concerned

In its most recent annual report, Roscosmos blamed SpaceX — which plans to send four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station this April aboard its Dragon 2 reusable spacecraft — for its declining fortunes. It also blamed sanctions and weak currency, Bloomberg reported.

Roscosmos is “obviously concerned,” NASA associate administrator William Gerstenmaier told Bloomberg in Moscow. “They share some of the same problems we do — there’s a finite amount in the budget in our countries and space flight is part of the discretionary budget.”

Corruption Problems

Roscosmos is dealing with more than international competition from the private sector, though. The head of a Russian auditing group said in November that the equivalent of billions of dollars had been “basically stolen” from the agency’s coffers.

But Gerstenmaier, the NASA administrator, expressed hope that collaboration between the two countries — which dates back to the 1970s Soviet Union — will continue in the future, regardless of the changing industry.

“We see tremendous advantages in us working together and cooperating,” he told Bloomberg. And if there’s “even a little competition in some areas,” he said, “that’s healthy too.”

An earlier version of this story reported that SpaceX planned to send four astronauts to the ISS aboard a Dragon 2 spacecraft, rather than two. The story has been updated.

READ MORE: Russian Space Agency Sees Musk on Horizon as Monopoly Set to End [Bloomberg]

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Will Be Ready To Transport Humans In April 2019, NASA Estimates

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Russian Space Agency Roscosmos Blames SpaceX For Its Woes

Researchers Just Overcame a Key Barrier to Fusion Power

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U.K. researchers say they've finally found a way to vent super-heated plasma, which can be as hot as the Sun, out of a tokamak fusion power reactor.

Fusion Cuisine

One promising approach to nuclear power is a type of reactor called a tokamak, which uses powerful magnetic fields to trap super-heated plasma in a bagel-shaped torus.

An obstacle to making tokamak reactors viable is that the plasma gets extremely hot, reaching temperatures of up to 100 million degrees Celsius — as hot as the Sun. But according to Reuters, U.K. researchers say they’ve finally found a way to vent that heat safely.

Sacrificial Wall

The new exhaust system, which was developed by scientists at the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, directs the plasma to travel in a longer path through the tokamak in order to cool down.

Then the cooler plasma will come into contact with a “sacrificial wall” — it wasn’t clear from the Reuters report what it’s made out of — designed to be replaced every few years as the plasma breaks it down.

2025 Vision

The researchers hope the new exhaust system will be used at an experimental reactor in France called ITER. The international team working on ITER, which is scheduled to go live in 2025, hope that it will be the first reactor in history to produce net energy — which would be a meaningful step toward practical fusion power plants.

“We’re here to commercialize fusion power,” Atomic Energy Authority executive director Ian Chapman told Reuters. “I mean, fusion offers this enormous potential. There’s no long-lived radioactive waste, there’s effectively inexhaustible fuel, there’s no carbon emission. It sounds perfect, but it’s really hard to do.”

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Researchers Just Overcame a Key Barrier to Fusion Power

It Took Seven Minutes to Pull Over a Drunk and “Unresponsive” Tesla Driver

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Local news report that a Los Altos comissionner was found to be unresponsive and drunk behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S.

DUI on Autopilot

At approximately 3:37 am, an officer pulled up to a stationary Tesla Model S with sirens blaring on Highway 101 in Palo Alto, California. After chasing the car for seven long minutes at 70 mph (the Tesla was driving just over the speed limit) the officer finally managed to get a peek at the driver.

But the driver was completely “unresponsive,” according to the Los Altos Town Crier.

Highway Hazard

The officer was clever enough to figure out the Tesla was most likely set to Autopilot —although that’s not officially confirmed yet — and called two additional officers to help him slow down Samek’s Model S safely.

The driver turned out to be the head of the Los Altos Planning Commission Alexander Samek. The officers gave him a ride to a local Shell gas station, and promptly arrested him after he failed a sobriety test.

Safety Off

It’s unusual given the fact that Tesla’s Autopilot feature will aggressively blink, and beep at the driver if they are unresponsive or don’t have both hands on the steering wheel. That is, if Autopilot was actually turned on. The feature will also automatically slow the car down on the side of the road if the driver doesn’t react.

Samek was booked on two misdemeanors, the Los Altos Town Crier reports. Unsurprisingly, Samek posted bail to get out of custody by the next day.

Futurism has reached out to Tesla for comment. Tesla has yet to release a statement with regards to the incident.

READ MORE: Highway patrol struggles to pull over allegedly drunk, sleeping Tesla driver [Mashable]

More on Tesla’s Autopilot: Tesla Crash Shows Drivers Are Confused By “Autonomous” vs. “Autopilot”

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It Took Seven Minutes to Pull Over a Drunk and “Unresponsive” Tesla Driver

NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Landed in a “Large Sandbox” at a Slight Angle

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The InSight team at JPL have discovered that the spacecraft landed at a four degree angle in a large, sand-filled impact crater.

Awkward Landing

NASA’s Insight Lander survived the harrowing journey through outer space, and has settled nicely on the Martian surface. And while it’s charging its batteries, new details are emerging about where exactly InSight landed.

The InSight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California determined the spacecraft is actually sitting at a slightly tilted angle — roughly four degrees.

While that may sound like it could be an issue down the road, scientists at NASA have thought ahead: InSight could actually operate normally with an inclination of up to 15 degrees, according to an update on NASA’s website.

Land at the wrong angle, and collecting solar energy could prove more difficult. It could’ve also jeopardized InSight’s mission to probe the Martian surface to read the planet’s temperature, and detecting ground motion using its seismometer.

“A Large Sandbox”

There’s a lot of shallow dust and sand surrounding InSight’s impact crater — and that might actually turn out to be an advantage. “There are no landing pads or runways on Mars, so coming down in an area that is basically a large sandbox without any large rocks should make instrument deployment easier and provide a great place for our mole to start burrowing,” Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL, tells NASA.

Postcards From Mars

In a couple of days, InSight will (hopefully) be sending us some high-definition pictures of its surroundings. And those will give the team back on Earth a much better idea as to where to place InSight’s instruments for some scientific experiments within the next couple of months.

Otherwise, InSight is doing just fine. In fact, it just broke the “off-world record” for generating the most electrical power than any other previous lander on Mars — almost twice as much as Curiosity.

And that means all systems go. “The 4,588 watt-hours we produced during sol 1 means we currently have more than enough juice to perform these tasks and move forward with our science mission,” says Hoffman.

READ MORE: Mars New Home ‘a Large Sandbox’ [NASA]

More on InSight: NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Fires up Solar Cells and Sends Selfie

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NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Landed in a “Large Sandbox” at a Slight Angle

You Can Sketch on This E Ink Blackboard With Almost No Lag

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The company that produces Amazon Kindle screens just showed off new tech that allows you to sketch on a large black E Ink display.

Digital Etch A Sketch

You might be familiar with the technology from reading a book on a Kindle.

But so far, the technology behind the screen called E Ink or p-paper has proven useful mostly for displaying information.

Startup E Ink — the company that produces those Kindle displays — wants to change that. In a new video, the company showed off new tech it’s calling JustWrite that allows you to sketch on a large E Ink display with virtually no lag.

E Doodle

Interestingly enough, most of the hardware that drives the technology is in the stylus itself. That means the screen portion only requires minimal amounts of power to refresh or erase, as The Verge reports.

The details are sparse but the technology behind it seems far more basic than what’s inside Apple’s new Pencil and iPad screens. But sometimes less is more, and considering the current pricing of Amazon Kindle e-readers, this should be a lot more affordable to the consumer than the Apple Pencil and iPad— and have a much better battery life.

Colorful Future

For now, you’ll have to settle for black and white, though.

For conventional E Ink displays with no writing functionality that might change as soon as next year. The company has announced it will be shipping colored E Ink screens in the second quarter of 2019.

E Ink has yet to reveal any shipping dates for any JustWrite-enabled displays. But having what essentially amounts to a large digital Etch A Sketch could prove to be extremely useful to students, and visual artists.

READ MORE: E Ink display lets you write on it as if it were paper [Engadget]

More on e ink displays: Road Signs In Australia Use the Same Kind of Screen as a Kindle

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Elysium and SpaceX to Launch Cremated Remains of 100 People Into Orbit

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100 capsules of cremated remains are about to be packed into a CubeSat and launched into orbit, fulfilling the last wishes of many who wanted to see space.

Rocket Man

A San Francisco-based company called Elysium Space plans to launch the cremated remains of 100 people into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

For $2,500, the company will launch your ashes — along with those of 99 of other deceased people — in a four-inch satellite called a CubeSat, which will be released into orbit along with other companies hitching a ride on the Falcon 9, CNN reports. It’s expected to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in about four years.

Where Some Have Gone Before

The launch was originally slated for November 19, but the company pushed it back and no date is currently set. The off-world memorial does have precedent, though: in 2012, a different startup called Celestis sent the remains of 320 people, including “Star Trek” actor James Doohan, into orbit.

It’s a nice image to know that your loved ones, some of whom may have once dreamed of being astronauts, are floating serenely through the night sky — even if each CubeSat is shared with 99 other people’s ashes.

READ MORE: The cremated remains of 100 people are going to be launched into space on a SpaceX rocket [CNN]

More on the funerals of the future: Pop Band “The KLF” to Build a Pyramid out of 35,000 Cremated Fans

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NASA’s First-Ever Asteroid Return Mission Just Reached Its Target

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NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at Bennu on Monday, a huge milestone in the agency's effort to return asteroid samples to Earth.

Hello Bennu

A spacecraft that could help us understand the history of the solar system just reached its destination.

Around noon on Monday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at Bennu, a 1,600-foot-wide asteroid located about 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the Sun. OSIRIS-REx is the first NASA spacecraft designed to collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back to Earth — and those samples could contain valuable insights about our solar system’s earliest years.

Lay of the Land

It took OSIRIS-REx two years to arrive at Bennu, but it’s not going straight in for a landing. Right now, the craft is roughly 12 miles above the asteroid’s surface, and in January, it’ll move in to a distance of just about a mile above Bennu’s surface.

It’ll spend about a year and a half using a series of five instruments to analyze and map the asteroid from that distance. From that data, NASA’s researchers will determine the ideal spot for a sample retrieval, which will involve OSIRIS-REx “bouncing” off Bennu in 2020.

Clues to the Past

Asteroids are a remnant of the early solar system, and because they remain largely unchanged from the time of their formation, they can provide valuable insights into what the solar system was like during its infancy.

NASA expects OSIRIS-REx to deliver its samples in 2023, so we could be just half a decade from having our hands on clues that help us unravel a mystery billions of years old.

READ MORE: NASA Spacecraft Meets With Asteroid [CNN]

More on Bennu: To Bennu and Back: NASA Just Launched the First-Ever Asteroid Return Mission

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NASA’s First-Ever Asteroid Return Mission Just Reached Its Target

Amazon Is Testing Its Cashierless Tech in Big Box Stores

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DIY Checkout

The future of shopping is already here: at Amazon’s seven recently-opened Go stores spread across the U.S. you can simply walk in, grab a sandwich, and walk back out — without the risk of getting accused of shoplifting.

So far, Amazon’s cashierless technology is limited to those seven convenience stores. But according to the Wall Street Journal, the company is testing similar technology in a much larger space in Seattle — a clue that the online shopping giant might next aim to disrupt the big box model of Walmart or Target.

The Future of Retail

The system behind Amazon’s cashierless Go stores detects when a shopper picks up a particular item using a sophisticated array of cameras and sensors powered by artificial intelligence algorithms.

Amazon already has the real estate to make use of the technology: it acquired the grocery chain Whole Foods back in 2017, including all its storefronts. It’s not clear whether Amazon intends to roll out Go-style tech at Whole Foods.

Amazon isn’t the only company trying to make use of cashierless technology inside retail stores. Walmart’s Sam’s Club brand is also opening a cashierless store in Texas — although customers will still have to use a proprietary app to scan merchandise as they shop.

Big Brother Shopping Experience

We will likely see more cashierless stores in the near future.

But that also means tech giants like Amazon will be collecting even more data about us — our highly detailed shopping habits, and even what we wear in the store. Whether that data will eventually be used for good is a much bigger question.

READ MORE: Amazon Tests Its Cashierless Technology for Bigger Stores [The Wall Street Journal]

More on cashierless stores: Amazon’s Cashier-Free Stores Are Going National. And It Might Just Change the Future of Retail.

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New AI Dreams Up Trippy Video Games Based on Real Life Video

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NVIDIA's latest AI technology can recreate an entire 3D scene by learning from a real-life video.

Creating a Virtual World

Video game designers routinely pour thousands of hours of labor into painstakingly creating complex 3D objects and environments. But that could soon become much less labor intensive, thanks to a new technique that dreams up trippy video games inspired by real life video.

NVIDIA showed off new tech, which can produce compelling but glitchy gameplay based on real-life video footage, at the NeurIPS AI conference in Montreal.

Artificial Reality

The algorithm isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds. The virtual environment was still rendered using a traditional game engine, but the graphics were produced by the AI.

The result: a playable video game demo that allows you to drive a car down a series of city blocks. It doesn’t sound like much, but it does suggest a future in which deep learning could be used to create studio-quality gaming content — making video games a lot easier to produce.

Rendering the Future

It’s an impressive use of machine learning technology, but the results aren’t quite photorealistic — at least yet. And to be fair, the demo was created by only one engineer at NVIDIA.

“It’s proof-of-concept rather than a game that’s fun to play,” Bryan Catanzaro, NVIDIA’s vice president of applied deep learning, told The Verge.

But it could take a while for this to actually be used by video game designers. Catanzaro tells The Verge it could take decades until this kind of technology could actually be used in consumer video games.

READ MORE: Nvidia has created the first video game demo using AI-generated graphics [The Verge]

More on AI rendering: Artificial Intelligence Is Automating Hollywood. Now, Art Can Thrive.

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MIT Researchers Built a Cyborg Houseplant

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Researchers from MIT built a cyborg houseplant that can sense light and move toward its source via a pair of attached wheels.

Robo-Plant

Wish your houseplants were a bit more mobile? Check out this cyborg plant that rolls itself around on two wheels.

On Thursday, researchers from the MIT Media Lab unveiled Elowan, a hybrid between a plant and a robot. Thanks to a system of electrodes and a robotic base with wheels, Elowan can detect light sources — and then drive itself toward them, using the plant’s own electrochemical signals.

I Feel You

Plants are sensitive to their environments. They can sense changes in light, gravity, temperature, and more. These changes prompt the organisms to send electrochemical signals between their tissues and organs.

When Elowan senses light, it produces some of these signals. Electrodes connected to the plant’s stems and leaves detect the signals, and that triggers Elowan’s robotic base to drive in the direction of the light.

Plants and Animals

We spend a lot of time thinking about how we might use tech to augment our human bodies, but according to Elowan’s creator, Sareen Harpreet, humans needn’t be the only cyborgs populating future society.

“As humans, we rely on technological augmentations to tune our fitness to the environment,” Harpreet writes on his website. “However, the acceleration of evolution through technology needs to move from a human centric to a holistic nature-centric view. I created Elowan as an attempt to provoke thought as to what augmented plants would mean.”

READ MORE: Elowan: A Plant-Robot Hybrid [MIT Media Lab]

More on cyborgs: Humanity’s Next Stage of Evolution Could Be the Cyborg

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