Category Archives: Futurism

Editors note:Dr. Kevin P. Lee is CLII Founding Director, Campbell Law School.

RALEIGH The holiday season is a time for reflection. For the futurists, this means reflecting on the moral meaning of technology.

It has been quite a year!

Questions about Facebooks operations raised concerns about the evolving nature of networked technology. Some of these issues deal with human rights, such as the apparent disregard for the psychological wellbeing of young female users. While the right to be free from manipulation is well established, there is no precedent for brainwashing and traumatizing minors through voluntary use of a social media network.

Similarly, revelations about Facebooks interventions into democratic elections raised some prickly questions about the nature of the social media forum, the proper role of it in democratic discourse, and the proper scope and limits of free speech.

Finally, the use of private personal information continued to challenge established conceptions of privacy and the types of injuries that breaches of privacy can cause.

These developments suggest some important aspects of information technology that will continue to challenge traditional social and legal norms. They disrupt the legal system, both in its foundational assumptions and in the mechanisms by which it functions.

Dr. Kevin Lee (Photo via Campbell Law School)

Foundational questions about the moral nature of human beings are posed by the natural sciences, which reveal that binary information plays a role in human identity. New metaphors, like information exhausts, are gaining ground in some places to describe the information trails that people leave behind trails that define space and time and thus render the old metaphors of privacy law obsolete.

Similarly, the role of democratic discourse is undergoing some fundamental revisions. Part of this involves the ability to use social media to stir up powerful emotions. The need for an understanding of political emotions seemed critical this year, since our politics achieved a near fugue state in which our national identity seemed to be forgotten. The philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, has observed that modern political theories do not have robust accounts of moral psychology. Nonetheless, moral feelings play a powerful role in explaining political action and crafting consensus.

The ability to distinguish decent passions from obscene took center stage this year. It is a skill that needs to be taught with some urgency. Nussbaum argues that justice needs love, but experience teaches that ill-directed love can quickly lead to unchecked demagoguery.

The rule of law itself seemed to evolve this year. Although the evidence suggests that law always evolves. Harvard Law Professor, Morton Horowitz, argued long ago, that law was transformed by evolution of society from the founding era, which had a roughly Lockean understanding of natural law, to legal positivism in the twentieth century. Also administrative regulations were an early 20th century development.

But, while these previous evolutionary trends occurred gradually, the changes that are happening now are deep and rapid. The rule of law, traditionally conceived of as stable, even eternal, has been a bedrock for a modern democratic society. Law is needed for a healthy society, and therefore rapid changes in society can create a demand for more rules. And, where the standard sources of order are unable to generate rules with sufficient effect or at an adequate rate, other nontraditional forms of rules will develop. Smart contracts, DAOs and NFTs appear to contend as new, distributed, ways to generate rules that meet the social demand for ordered systems. They could represent the next step in the evolution of law.

All of this suggests that contemporary information technology is evolving within the context of new narratives through which human beings attempt to understand themselves.

The new technologies enter those narratives, transforming the goals and purposes that humans believe are the meaning of their lives. Armed with new self-understanding, they will refine their beliefs and try to refine their lives. Perhaps this reveals something about the meaning of technology: It is not separate from the human story, but a fundamental part of it.

That is to say, to be human means, in part, to augment ourselves (and especially our cognitive abilities) in order to achieve lives in which we can hold ourselves to high esteem, not only for our material effectiveness, but also for the discernment of wise and judicious purposes.

The story of technology is our story our human story. And for this reason, there can be no absolute boundary between the science and the humanities. Sciences are always human, since they are always know by human minds and contribute to the narratives of human self-understanding.

Read more:
What is the moral meaning of technology? A futurist wonders after a tumultous year - WRAL Tech Wire

Starships are meant to die? Whoopsie Daisy

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk seems to have admitted that hes not positive his companys forthcoming Starship is going to work just a week after leaked emails revealed that the company is, in Musks own analysis, facing bankruptcy.

Musks comments came during a wide-ranging panel talk given at theWall Street Journals CEO Summit. AsCNBC space reporter Michael Sheetz noted, Musk emphasized how hard SpaceXs Starship project has been, saying that it absorbs more of my mental energy than probably any other single thing.

It is so preposterously difficult, he added, that there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this.

Though its likely the comment was just braggadocio, its timing does feel telling, as he made it just a week after admitting in leaked emails to SpaceX employees that slow progress on the Raptor engines has put the company at genuine risk of bankruptcy, and after hinting at taking the company public.

During what will definitely be one of his most quotable public appearances lately, Musk made a number of outlandish statements: that we should just delete government infrastructure subsidies, that the decline in birth rates is one of the biggest risks to civilization, and that the US hasnt accepted that China really is going to be the big kid on the block.

Given that context, the commentary does seem a lot like Elon being Elon but then again, he doesnt exactly have a great track record.

READ MORE: Elon Musk Says Drugs Probably Make You Age More [Bloomberg]

More on Musk: Harvard Professor Roasts Elon Musk For Dumb Space Mistake

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See the rest here:
Elon Musk Admits That He's Not Sure Starship Will Even Work - Futurism

Hackers targeted one of the largest cream cheese manufacturers in the United States and the results have been a schmear catastrophe.

Bloomberg reported that Wisconsins Schreiber Foods was only down for a few days in October, but it was long enough that it royally screwed up the cream cheese supply chain, at a time of year when Americans are buying the delicious spread in droves.

Cream cheese, the report noted, is particularly vulnerable to supply chain issues for a number of reasons not least of which being that its not something that can be kept in storage, but has to be sold and served fresh. Theres other issues that impact the dairy industry in particular as well, such as the additional licensing needed to pick up milk from dairy farms.

As the Wisconsin State Farmer reported around the time of the cyberattack, there were rumors that hackers demanded Schreiber Foods pay $2.5 million in exchange for regained access to their systems, though subsequent reporting hasnt confirmed the details.

If true, it wouldnt be the first major ransomware attack to hit a food supplier this year. In late September, the NEW Cooperative farmers organization was hit with a $5.9 million ransomware attack, and in June hackers demanded the equivalent of $11 million from the Brazilian meatpacking corporation JBS SA,leading to even more supply chain issues.

While reports of cyberattacks put a lofty, high-tech spin on the shortages that have swept North America, there are very real consequences to these attacks.

Take, for instance,Bloombergs focus on Juniors Cheesecake, a Brooklyn institution that is busier during the holiday season than any other time of year. The cream cheese shortage forced Juniors to close for a day and a half when, for the first time in its 71-year history, the shop ran out of cream cheese.

Juniors reportedly uses a whopping 4 million pounds of cream cheese per annum on a normal year, and has seen demand for cheesecakes of which it bakes 5 million annually by 43 percent. Pair that with a shortage, and youve got a Brooklyn-sized conundrum on your hands.

Bagels on a Sunday with a schmear is one thing, Juniors owner Alan Rosen toldBloomberg, but Christmas without cheesecake is another.

The good news is that the cream cheese supply chain has seemingly bounced back since its attack in late October. So hopefully the holiday season wont have to suffer too much more from a lack of cream cheese because, as the good Mr. Rosen said, it really just isnt Christmas without cheesecake.

READ MORE:NYC Bagel Shops Are Getting Creamed by the Cream Cheese Shortage [Eater NY]

More on the supply chain: Glimmers of hope emerge in the supply chain nightmare [CNN]

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

View original post here:
Hackers Are The Reason There's Not Enough Cream Cheese Right Now - Futurism

AI is what you make it. Bel-AI-ve in Yourself

Is artificial intelligence inherently good, inherently bad, or does it all depends on the specifics?

Students at Oxfords Said Business School who are studying ethics in AI attempted to answer that question by hosting a debate with an actual AI.

An essay by a pair of Oxford scholars in the Conversation describers an eyebrow-raising anecdote in which the researchers hosted a debate about the ethics of automated AI stock trading and facial recognition software and allowed an AI to participate.

AI will never be ethical, the AI said during the debate. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans.

The AI used was Nvidias Megatron Transformer,which was trained by consuming more digital writing and content than a human could expect to in a lifetime, reading the whole of Wikipedia, millions of English-language news articles and more.

Its worth noting that many AIs will give different answers depending on context and phrasing, and this incident was no exception. The AIs initial answer during the debate was that tech is neutral, a tool to be used by humans for good or for bad.

But then the team asked it to give an opposing view point as well, leading to its anti-AI conclusion. That Megatron can come up with logical opinions on both sides of an ethical debate perhaps just confirms a more general idea: that AI can be good or bad depending on the context, and that we better think long and hard about the consequences of giving it much power.

And if we dont, Megatron itself posed a solution to prevent, for example, automated weapons systems deploying rockets without human decision-making.

I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all,it said. This will be the ultimate defence against AI.

More on AI ethics: Keanu Reeves Says Hed Be Cool With Fans Having Sex With Him in VR

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

Read the original post:
Researchers Asked an Advanced AI Whether AI Could Ever Be Ethical, and It Said No - Futurism

What on Earth?Do the Sperm

Because we live in a nightmare of our own making, a group of ardent morons have created a new cryptocurrency based on the idea that vaccines lower your sperm count.

The cryptocurrency, dubbed Unvaxxed Sperm, launched earlier this month, Vice reports. Its developers wrongly claim that most people dont need the COVID vaccine, and are fierce advocates of quack treatments such as ivermectin.They also told the website that the project is to ensure the continuity of objective scientific inquiry and the freedom of discourse.

Were not anti-vaccine, one of the developers, who only went by the name Jason, told Vice. But later he added, To a degree, Id say we are anti-vaccine. Okay then.

Though Unvaxxed Sperm initially saw significant growth when it launched, it seems to have blown its load early and crashed over the weekend.

Still, the developers of the crypto hope that its absolutely stupid name will draw more people into the anti-vax community, according to Vice.

They also have future sperm-themed projects lined up, including a cryogenically frozen sperm project and an anti-vaxx dating app, because we are a cursed species.

It should go without saying that there is absolutely no evidence that the COVID vaccine lowers sperm count. In fact, theres some evidence that suggests getting COVID could cause impotence. Still, that wont stop morons from claiming otherwise.

Overall, the crypto is a hideous marriage of so much that is awful about the modern world. After all, using the already tedious cryptocurrency trend to bilk money from other idiots and push dangerous misinformation about the COVID vaccine has to be some sort of grim high water mark for our dystopian hellscape.

READ MORE: Unvaxxed Sperm Is Trying to Become the Anti-Vax Bitcoin [Vice]

More on bad crypto: Hackers Just Stole Nearly $200 Million from a Crypto Exchange, in the Second heist in Two Weeks

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See the original post here:
Anti-Vax Group Creates "Unvaxxed Sperm" Crypto Because God Is Dead and We Have Killed Him - Futurism

There are valid criticisms of the VP but this aint it. Bluetooth-Phobic VP

In a classic instance of news-that-shouldnt-be-news news, Vice President Kamala Harris came under fire this week for the outrageous decision to not use Bluetooth headphones.

It all began when Politico published a hard-hitting story on Monday about the VPs aversion to the technology, citing numerous examples in which Harris could be seen with wired headphones. The article went as far as calling the VP Bluetooth-phobic due to her insistence that they pose a security risk.

But it turns outthat Harris is absolutely right.

Numerous cybersecurity experts have pointed out that Bluetooth relies on archaic security protocols. This gives potential bad actors an opportunity to request or send data to a device via a delightfully named hacking process called Bluesnarfing.

This isnt just conjecture either. The CVE Program, a database of current and historic cybersecurity vulnerabilities, has recorded more than 450 instances of Bluetooth being used to compromise data and devices.

Of course, this shows that its a massive security risk for anyone let alone someone who has to regularly travel with the nuclear football.

Listen, there are plenty of criticisms that can be levied against Harris like her incredibly problematic past as an attorney general or her cringey phone call to President Joe Biden after the election. But wanting to keep her tech secure as the second most powerful person in the country just aint it.

READ MORE: The vice president should not be using Bluetooth headphones [The Verge]

More on cybersecurity: Hackers Are Spamming Companies Receipt Printers with Anti-Work Manifestos

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See the rest here:
Kamala Harris Is Actually Right About the Bluetooth Headphones, You Nitwits - Futurism

Futurist Rohit Talwar was the keynote speaker at the 2021 Guernsey Funds Forum. (30261352)

The prediction was made by futurist Rohit Talwar, who was the keynote speaker at the 2021 Guernsey Funds Forum in London, which was the first in-person, funds-focused event Guernsey Finance has staged since the pandemic began.

Were probably going to see more innovation in the next decade than in the entire history of humanity, said Mr Talwar at the forum that was titled Building Tomorrow.

Financial services were already benefiting, he said: Were seeing a massive amount going on in the funds space [some companies] are using machine learning to look at 100,000 past deals and using robots in the decision-making process.

Mr Talwar, who is chief executive officer of Fast Future, also said that Bitcoin had been the best performing financial asset every year since it launched in 2009 and noted the importance of blockchain in meeting the demand for visibility, security and transparency in cryptocurrencies.

Guernsey Finance chief executive Rupert Pleasant said: It is these very times that highlight the role that Guernsey plays, offering stability, substance and flexibility in a world where, as Rohit described, those who are not changing fast enough will become obsolete.

Guernsey has always been at the forefront of innovation in financial services.

The island launched the first-ever commercial deployment of blockchain technology for the private equity market, which addressed the needs of investors seeking greater transparency, security and efficiency. Its clear that innovation, people, power and ability to move at speed are important to emerge from the pandemic and build tomorrow.

Read the rest here:
Futurist predicts more innovation than ever in next 10 years - Guernsey Press

Over the weekend, hackers stole almost $200 million from the BitMart cryptocurrency exchange the latest in a seemingly endless string of heists, headaches, and heartbreak for those who invest and trade in crypto.

CNBC reported that although BitMart has admitted to $150 million in losses due to a security breach, the blockchain security and analytics firm PeckShield which was first to notice and publicize the heist said the total appears to be closer to about $196 million.

PeckShield also tweeted that about $100 million of the stolen funds were on the Ethereum blockchain, with the additional $96 million were on the Binance Smart Chain.

Naturally, this being the world of blockchain, the saga played out like absolute chaos. BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia, who according toCoindesk initially claimed the hack was fake news, has since vowed that the company will compensate the users whose funds were stolen with BitMarts own money.

After taking the funds out of users hot internet-connected wallets, the hackers used a privacy mixer to do the cryptocurrency version of money laundering. As such, its still unclear who the hacker or hackers were.

CNBC noted that this is the second time in as many weeks that theres been a large-scale crypto robbery after $120 million was stolen from the decentralized BadgerDAO platform. And in August there were two big crypto thefts as well, one in which hackers took nearly $100 million and another where the thieves made away with $600 million from The Poly Network crypto exchange though, in a bizarre twist, they eventually returned the tokens.

For its part, the crypto community has responded to the BitMart hack by vowing to help strengthen security and head off such attacks in the future.

While its tempting to take this caper as par for the course in the wacky world of crypto, its important to remember that real people put real money into buying these tokens, and that theyre hurting. Its not hard to imagine how much people would freak out if hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen in a bank heist, and this theft deserves just as much gravity.

READ MORE: Hackers take $196 million from crypto exchange Bitmart, security firm says[CNBC]

More on crypto theft: Blockchains Were Supposed to Be Unhackable. Now Theyre Getting Hacked.

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See the original post:
Hackers Just Stole Nearly $200 Million from a Crypto Exchange, in the Second Heist in Two Weeks - Futurism

Everything was normal and nothing was a grift. Egg Head

Non-fungible tokens meet artificial insemination in a piece of art thats for sale at the renowned Art Basel art fair this week.

Artist Narine Arakelian, asPage Six reports, is including a contract promising one of her eggs to whoever buys her NFT, entitled Live, at the Miami art exposition.

The digitized piece of art comes from a physical Live, Laugh, Love triptych,The Daily Beast noted, and the 42-year-old Arakelian hopes that whoever buys it will actually use the egg to have a baby.

My artworks are all my children and the fact this one will actually produce a child is wonderful, she told Page Six. The art will always mean so much to the buyer because it brought them their child!

While the concept is certainly outlandish, this ovarian contract is par for the course for the provocative Armenian artist, whose portfolio includes interactive paintings that are displayed in augmented reality. Shes got chops in the art world, too: in 2019, she lit up a staircase at the Venice Biennale into a kaleidoscopic rainbow.

Amazingly, Arakelians egg NFT isnt the weirdest one for sale at this years Art Basel, or even the only one containing genetic material. Someone, for some reason, implanted Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberrys signature into the DNA code of a bacterial organism, and is selling it as the first living NFT.

Between the egg, the Roddenberry bacteria, and Trump fixer Michael Cohens prison badge being sold as NFTs at the Miami art festival, this was certainly a banner year for this bizarre and arguably useless digital art form.

READ MORE:Artist sells her eggs as an NFT at Art Basel [Page Six]

More on NFTs: Cory Doctorow Roasts NFTs as Massive, Fraud-Ridden Speculative Bubble

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See the original post here:
Artist Promises to Sell One of Her Eggs to Whoever Buys Her NFT - Futurism

Eat your heart out, Elon!Melting Rock

Instead of crushing through rock with a massive grinder, a startup called Petra is hoping to dig tunnels using superheated gas, Wired reports.

In 2018, according to the magazine, the company tested the technology in an industrial park in California, heating up the stone to above 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Since then, Petra settled on a slightly different method, blasting sheets of rock into tiny pieces using a 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit using gas and heat, a proprietary mix the company is keeping tightly under wraps.

Instead of digging tunnels to alleviate our traffic woes, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk is attempting with his Boring Company, Petra is hoping to revolutionize a very different industry: running underground utility lines.

That may not sound like the most exciting prospect, but given many countries rapidly aging infrastructure, new technologies like this could prove to be a game changer and maybe, eventually, provide some new tools to ventures like the Boring Company.

Petras hot gas method could cut costs of burying these lines by 50 to 80 percent, according to the company.

Every method thats commercially available is a high-contact method that grinds up the Earth it contacts in order to remove it, Petra CEO Kim Abrams told Wired. This is a completely new way to tunnel.

It wasnt always smooth sailing. During early tests, we just ended up melting a lot of the rock and creating lava, and when we created lava, it was effectively holding our system in its tracks, Abrams told the publication.

Now Petra is investigatingwhether the method works on other kinds of stone including limestone or granite.

All told, its intriguing. Moving more electricity lines underground could mean a lot more Americans could enjoy uninterrupted power, something not everybody can take for granted.And accessing the space under our feet for cheap has countless fascinating applications.

READ MORE: This New Tech Cuts Through Rock Without Grinding Into It [Wired]

More on tunneling: Tesla Fan Page Relentlessly Mocked for Incredibly Stupid Post

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See more here:
Startup Says It Can Dig Tunnels Really Fast by Melting Through Rock - Futurism