Lifeboat Foundation

Lifeboat Editorial

Lydia Begag is a high school junior at Advanced Math and Science Academy in Massachusetts. She got our attention when she published an editorial critical of the school’s uniform policy. With eloquence and articulation, she laid out a brilliant and persuasive argument that the policy was anything but uniform. It was ambiguous, arbitrary and discriminatory.

I’m with Her
Ideas Regarding Sex Equality
—Forget the Rest

Political and social turmoil are everywhere we turn, especially in the early months of 2017. Lunch conversations, small talk at work, and, of course, the media we consume have all become related to a singular topic: the United States government and its workings. Emotionally, I want to curl up in a ball and block out the political nonsense being spewed left and right until the day I die (pun very much intended)—but I feel intellectually obliged to confront the controversy.

Continue reading “Sex Equality: I’m With Her” »

A type of food that has been around for centuries, but is primed to be increasingly relevant to the future: Plant-Based “Meat.”

In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.

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Happy Easter…and a reality check: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/where-were-going-we-dont-need-popes #transhumanism #reason

Modern values, transhumanist technology, and the embrace of reason are making many Catholic rules and rituals absurd.

Everywhere I look, Pope Francis, the 266th pope of the Catholic Church, seems to be in the news—and he is being positively portrayed as a genuinely progressive leader. Frankly, this baffles me. Few major religions have as backwards a philosophical and moral platform as Catholicism. Therefore, no leader of it could actually be genuinely progressive. Yet, no one seems to pay attention to this—no one seems to be discussing that Catholicism remains highly oppressive.

Continue reading “The Transhumanist Future Has No Pope” »

Some weird religious stories w/ transhumanism Expect the conflict between religion and transhumanism to get worse, as closed-minded conservative viewpoints get challenged by radical science and a future with no need for an afterlife: http://barbwire.com/2017/04/06/cybernetic-messiah-transhuman…elligence/ & http://www.livebytheword.blog/google-directors-push-for-comp…s-explain/ & http://ctktexas.com/pastoral-backstory-march-30th-2017/

By J. Davila Ashcroft

The recent film Ghost in the Shell is a science fiction tale about a young girl (known as Major) used as an experiment in a Transhumanist/Artificial Intelligence experiment, turning her into a weapon. At first, she complies, thinking the company behind the experiment saved her life after her family died. The truth is, however, that the company took her forcefully while she was a runaway. Major finds out that this company has done the same to others as well, and this knowledge causes her to turn on the company. Throughout the story the viewer is confronted with the existential questions behind such an experiment as Major struggles with the trauma of not feeling things like the warmth of human skin, and the sensations of touch and taste, and feels less than human, though she is told many times she is better than human. While this is obviously a science fiction story, what might comes as a surprise to some is that the subject matter of the film is not just fiction. Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence on the level of the things explored in this film are all too real, and seem to be only a few years around the corner.

Continue reading “The Cybernetic Messiah: Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence” »

The fast-advancing fields of neuroscience and computer science are on a collision course. David Cox, Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Computer Science at Harvard, explains how his lab is working with others to reverse engineer how brains learn, starting with rats. By shedding light on what our machine learning algorithms are currently missing, this work promises to improve the capabilities of robots – with implications for jobs, laws and ethics.

http://www.weforum.org/

So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously — even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time.”

― David Pearce

The Hedonistic Imperative Documentary

Continue reading “‘… both natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions” »

Philosopher Daniel Dennett believes AI should never become conscious — and no, it’s not because of the robopocalypse.

Algorithms with learning abilities collect personal data that are then used without users’ consent and even without their knowledge; autonomous weapons are under discussion in the United Nations; robots stimulating emotions are deployed with vulnerable people; research projects are funded to develop humanoid robots; and artificial intelligence-based systems are used to evaluate people. One can consider these examples of AI and autonomous systems (AS) as great achievements or claim that they are endangering human freedom and dignity.

We need to make sure that these technologies are aligned to humans in terms of our moral values and ethical principles to fully benefit from the potential of them. AI and AS have to behave in a way that is beneficial to people beyond reaching functional goals and addressing technical problems. This will allow for an elevated level of trust for technology that is needed for a fruitful pervasive use of AI/AS in our daily lives.

The first of my major #Libertarian policy articles for my California gubernatorial run, which broadens the foundational “non-aggression principle” to so-called negative natural phenomena. “In my opinion, and to most #transhumanist libertarians, death and aging are enemies of the people and of liberty (perhaps the greatest ones), similar to foreign invaders running up our shores.” A coordinated defense agianst them is philosophically warranted.

Many societies and social movements operate under a foundational philosophy that often can be summed up in a few words. Most famously, in much of the Western world, is the Golden Rule: Do onto others as you want them to do to you. In libertarianism, the backbone of the political philosophy is the non-aggression principle (NAP). It argues it’s immoral for anyone to use force against another person or their property except in cases of self-defense.

A challenge has recently been posed to the non-aggression principle. The thorny question libertarian transhumanists are increasingly asking in the 21st century is: Are so-called natural acts or occurrences immoral if they cause people to suffer? After all, taken to a logical philosophical extreme, cancer, aging, and giant asteroids arbitrarily crashing into the planet are all aggressive, forceful acts that harm the lives of humans.

Continue reading “Why Aging Is a Disease” »