Are we in danger of extinction?  What kind of things could cause us to go extinct?

The article touches on AI and if it could threaten our existence in the future.

‘There is important research going on in those areas, but the really impressive stuff is hidden away inside AI journals,’ he said. He told me about a team from the University of Alberta that recently trained an AI to play the 1980s video game Pac-Man. Only they didn’t let the AI see the familiar, overhead view of the game. Instead, they dropped it into a three-dimensional version, similar to a corn maze, where ghosts and pellets lurk behind every corner. They didn’t tell it the rules, either; they just threw it into the system and punished it when a ghost caught it. ‘Eventually the AI learned to play pretty well,’ Dewey said. ‘That would have been unheard of a few years ago, but we are getting to that point where we are finally starting to see little sparkles of generality.’

Bostrum also talks about why he hopes we don't find life on Mars.  By "great filter" he's talking about the idea that either advanced life on Earth is a cosmic fluke or there is something that prevents civilizations from becoming more space-worthy than our own…in other words, how come we don't see aliens out in the universe.

That’s why Bostrom hopes the Curiosity rover fails. ‘Any discovery of life that didn’t originate on Earth makes it less likely the great filter is in our past, and more likely it’s in our future,’ he told me. If life is a cosmic fluke, then we’ve already beaten the odds, and our future is undetermined — the galaxy is there for the taking. If we discover that life arises everywhere, we lose a prime suspect in our hunt for the great filter. The more advanced life we find, the worse the implications. If Curiosity spots a vertebrate fossil embedded in Martian rock, it would mean that a Cambrian explosion occurred twice in the same solar system. It would give us reason to suspect that nature is very good at knitting atoms into complex animal life, but very bad at nurturing star-hopping civilisations. It would make it less likely that humans have already slipped through the trap whose jaws keep our skies lifeless. It would be an omen.

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Ross Andersen – Humanity’s deep future
When we peer into the fog of the deep future what do we see – human extinction or a future among the stars?

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I just finished writing a small program that, every 5 minutes, takes a screenshot of my whole screen and uploads that along with text describing every window I have open along with which window is active to my Evernote account.  I'll upload it to github after I test it for a few days.

Next up is figuring out a way to get a list of every tab I have open in Chrome and uploading that as well.

After that, I'm going to figure out a way to upload to clip every page I have open for longer than … maybe 5 minutes? … into Evernote.  I'd also like to write an extension for Chrome to clip articles that I view in Google Reader for longer than a certain amount of time as well.

I was spurred into this by reading the below linked article about +Chris Dancy.

I'm a little worried about dropping all this data into Evernote.  I mean, what if the company goes under?  In the future, in addition to clipping to Evernote, I will FTP this data onto storage that I control as well as dropping it into a database.

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The Quantified Man: How an Obsolete Tech Guy Rebuilt Himself for the Future | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Our work is being re-quantified — in a big way — and Chris Dancy, a director in the office of the chief technology officer at BMC Software, thinks it’s time for employees to take these metrics into …

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Absolutely fantastic article in Time by Steven Brill investigating why medical bills are as much as they are in the US.

I was going to do a pull quote, but I couldn't choose just one.  

Just read it.

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Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.com
How outrageous pricing and egregious profits are destroying our health care

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Reshared post from +Alan Williamson

Come here you little basterd!!

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Peter Williams @ Universe Today, explains how scifi shows and movies misrepresent what nebulae actually look like.

So if nebula are too faint for to see from Earth with the naked eye — and they are — getting up close and personal doesn’t help any.

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In Reality, Nebulae Offer No Place for Spaceships to Hide
In the Battlestar: Galactica universe, nebulas are a nifty spot to hide from the Cylons that are plotting to kill humanity. There’s just one problem with th

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 Doesn't give a flying flip.

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Cinetonic |Реакция на метеорит
Watch the “Реакция на метеорит” like you’re in the cinema.

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This is awesome for people with the right type of blindness.  

However, what really excites me personally is that it's only a short amount of time until these are better than a regular human retina.  They'll have Bluetooth 6.0 (or whatever) and overlay images over what you're seeing (think Google Glass).  The image quality will be better than any screen, so say good bye to phone screens, computer screens, TV screens, movie screens.

In fact, they will be able to completely subsume everything you see.  That is, such an implantable device will be able to completely replace what you see with a virtual environment.  Imagine Call of Duty where you're not looking through a screen into a virtual world, but you're just looking around in a virtual world without any intermediary screen between you and that world.

Of course, this is definitely a technology I wouldn't want to be an early adopter of…what with the surgery on your eyeballs.

A distinct advantage of the Alpha IMS is that, unlike other similar devices such as the recently released Argus II, it does not rely on an external camera. Instead, light is detected inside the eye, enabling the patient to look around by moving his eyes rather than the head. It also has a much higher resolution grid and is implanted under the retina, allowing the middle layer of the retina to process the input before it is sent to the visual cortex.

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Retinal Implant Alpha IMS Brings Sight to Blind in New Study (w/video)
Retina Implant AG, a German developer of subretinal implants to help restore sight of people with retinitis pigmentosa, has announced publication of result

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Think of it as 3D printing, but with squishier ingredients! There's a lot of work being done at research labs and big companies like Organovo on print human tissues and human organs, with an eye towards drug testing, and transplantation into humans.
[…]
All this sounds incredible complex, but the fact is that the basic technologies are very accessible – it's all based on inkjet and/or 3D printing! So a bunch of us at BioCurious decided we wanted to play around with this technology ourselves – and the BioPrinter Community Project was born!

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DIY BioPrinter
Bioprinting is printing with biological materials. Think of it as 3D printing, but with squishier ingredients! There’s a lot of work being done at res…

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So, there's a new study that purports to show that resveratrol protects against loss of hearing and cognitive abilities.  Good stuff, I say.

I also say that most medical studies turn out to be wrong or to be only kinda right.

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Resveratrol shows promise to protect hearing, cognition | ScienceBlog.com
Resveratrol, a substance found in red grapes and red wine, may have the potential to protect against hearing and cognitive decline, according to a published

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