Afrofuturism, anyone?

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“Assefa is a computer scientist, a futurist, and a utopian — but a pragmatic one at that. He is founder and chief executive of iCog, the first artificial intelligence (AI) lab in Ethiopia, and a stone’s throw from the home of Lucy. iCog Labs launched in 2013 with $50,000 and just four programmers. Today, halfway up an unassuming tower block, dozens of software developers type in silence. Their desks are cluttered with electronic components and dismembered robot body parts, from a soccer-playing bot called Abebe to a miniature robo-Einstein. An earlier prototype of Sophia, a widely recognized humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics (she appeared with late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon last year) is here too. Arguably the world’s most famous robot of her kind, Sophia’s software was partly developed here in Ethiopia’s capital.

In stark contrast to the famine-stricken images that linger in the minds of many Westerners, Addis Ababa has, in recent years, become a hub for international business and diplomacy. Glitzy new office blocks and hotels continue to rise across the sprawling capital, and while Ethiopia is still ranked among the world’s poorest countries in terms of GDP per capita, it is also among the fastest growing.

[…]

Artificial intelligence is the latest technology sweeping the world, and consultancy firm McKinsey predicts that up to 30 percent of the global workforce could be displaced by 2030 because of advances in AI, robotics, and digitization. And that’s why Assefa and other stakeholders think Ethiopia would do better to skip the manufacturing stage of development and invest instead in a high-tech workforce — including one that at the cutting edge of AI. This, he argues, would help Ethiopians find a new path to development by riding the wave of technological disruption.

“We should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies — that is already done,” Assefa argues.

That makes sense to academics like Singh — though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. “But any time we have a technological revolution, the political institutions have to catch up.””

https://undark.org/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-ethiopoia/

Do not include vulnerable AI (which is any AI) in your nuclear decision-making.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

How Will Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War? https://suhub.co/2IU20sU

My mind immediately (before I’d read the article) went to the idea of coming across empty terraformed planets that a forerunner race had seeded with engineered microbes but never used.

That’s not in the piece. But a lot of great space applications of biotech are, including making fuel (as in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet).

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Microbes in Space: Bioengineered Bugs Could Help Colonize New Planets https://suhub.co/2LDnDLM

I’ve had an idea for a while for a setting in which hollowed-out asteroids at the Lagrange points are “extensions” of terrestrial cities: High New York, High Hong Kong, High Tokyo…

Via Isaac Kuo.

Originally shared by Troy

I agree with Bezos. Nobody lives in Antarctica besides visiting scientists and workers. But at any one time, nearly a million people are in the air at any one time. So a million people in space is hardly a stretch of the imagination (though it still sounds crazy to say it). Nobody has to go to Mars and give birth to babies amidst radiation and dust storms and await the apocalypse on Earth, which may or may not come. If you’re going to live in space, it ought to be pleasant.

What is the MacGuffinite we could use to justify living out there? This is crazy now, but how about office space. A square metre of Hong Kong real estate costs $3 000 a year. Now, if you take the ISS, its operating costs are on the order of $2 million a year per square metre* of office space: $3 to $4 billion total.

If you drop launch costs to 1% of what they are now, let’s say you can have 600 people in an equivalently large station, giving you $20 000 a year office space.

Now the interesting thing is this. How expensive is your HK real estate in 30 years, when the big cheap rockets like New Armstrong and BFR are flying? $30 000 a year, assuming 8% growth.

Now, this is a very simplistic treatment, but imagine now that a space station is zoned as an extension of Singapore. Singapore has run out of space (no pun intended), and is busy trying to cram all its business and residential areas into a tiny island, building up and dredging to make additional land. How long before there are some operations that start becoming worthwhile? Tech and research comes first, but then as the station gets bigger, other business opportunities appear, more people are needed and the station gets bigger again – only without any limits to expansion. This is what Bezos has in mind. Mines aren’t settlements. Settlements arise from continual opportunities to make money, and also simply because they are there. People move there because they want to be there, and they will find some way to engage in economic activity in order to do so.

*1 cubic metres of pressurised volume to 2 square metres of floor space, because the floor and ceiling also provide work space

Via Robbie Yarber. Cheers mate.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-space-colonies-oneill/

What could we do if we had all the genetic information about all macroscopic life on Earth?

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

The Epic Project to Record the DNA of All Life on Earth https://suhub.co/2xhOkCR

Delivery drones don’t have to be short-haul.

Originally shared by Judah Richardson

Volans-i’s drones are able to travel for up to 500 miles carrying 20 pounds of cargo at a time at a top speed of 200 miles per hour. (A delivery from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take three to four hours.) They are able to do this by employing fixed wings along with vertical-take-off-and-landing systems for flight, and both batteries and fuel for propulsion.

Because the Volans-i drones can take off or land on any flat 15-by-15 foot platform, the company and its customers don’t have to build any special infrastructure to make or take deliveries.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/26/volans-i-drones-can-haul-cargo-for-500-miles-and-land-on-a-moving-ship.html

Big, if true; carbon nanotubes are an amazing material with all kinds of useful properties. The actual percentage impact on atmospheric CO2 is surely minimal, though.

Originally shared by C. A. Wilke

High-quality carbon nanotubes made from carbon dioxide in the air break the manufacturing cost barrier | Kurzweil

For those interested in SCIENCE-y things… This could be huge. Like invention-of-mass-production-huge… as in something that could very well change most aspects of technology. Carbon nanotubes are such weird and interesting things and have a ridiculous amount of potential uses from power storage to stronger-than-steel materials, even super-fast computers.

https://buff.ly/2GOqEpb

via Adam Cross

https://buff.ly/2GOqEpb

Reminding us that there often isn’t just one solution to a big problem. There are various solutions that attack different parts of it.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

5 Organizations Using Cool Tech Solutions and Research to Clean Up the Oceans https://suhub.co/2rYtuSL

Via private share. Just because travel was slow and hard and sometimes dangerous didn’t mean that there wasn’t plenty of long-distance trade going on in the Middle Ages.

https://merchantmachine.co.uk/medieval-trade-routes/

Nowhere near an actual self-aware android yet, of course, but a step in that direction.

Originally shared by Judah Richardson

Meet Sophia, a social robot created by former Disney Imagineer David Hanson. Modeled in part after Audrey Hepburn and Hanson’s wife, the robot was built to mimic social behaviors and inspire feelings of love and compassion in humans.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2018/05/sophia-robot-artificial-intelligence-science/