Artificial Intelligence  

Sam Harris sat down recently with Joe Rogan and discussed the implications of artificial intelligence on the future. The discussion ranges from economics to DeepMind's AlphaGo and much more.

Speaking recently with Joe Rogan, Sam Harris responded to a question about solving global poverty with an answer that immediately jumped to the dramatic potential of artificial intelligence.

"You are talking about the ultimate wealth-creation device."

"You are talking about the ultimate wealth-creation device," states Harris. "In the right political and economic system, this would just completely cancel the need for people to have to work to survive." The question then leads us to ask if we do have that kind of political and economic system, Harris describes.

We are talking about the implications of intelligence that can make refinements to itself over a time-course that bears no relationship as to what we experience as apes. We are talking about a system that can make changes to its own source code to become better and better at learning and more and more knowledgeable and, if we give it access to the Internet, it has instantaneous access to all human and machine knowledge. It does thousands of years of work every day of our lives--thousands of years of equivalent human intellectual work. Our intuitions completely falter to capture how immensely powerful such a system would be and there is no reason to think this isn't possible.

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Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, spirituality, violence, human reasoning—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

SOURCE  Joe Rogan University

By 33rd Square

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 Anti-Aging  

Aubrey de Grey appeared recently on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and shared his thoughts on combating aging and his work at the SENS Research Foundation.

A slightly under-the-weather Aubrey de Grey appeared recently on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Despite his cold, de Grey captures the audience with his ideas about anti-aging research.

Well known to 33rd Square readers, de Grey is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation.

de Grey and Rogan discuss anti-aging research, how aging is like a disease; how we will stop aging, repairing the body by regenerative medicine and other means, diet and aging, life expectancy around the world.

Related articles Aubrey de Grey, Natasha Vita-More and Sean Elliott Discuss How Technology Will Change The World  Aubrey de Grey Explains How Regenerative Medicine Will Combat Aging  Scientists Now Able To Convert Human Skin Cells Into Embryonic Stem Cells

"I would say there is a really good chance, say a 50/50 chance, that we will be able to say 10 years from now, Parkinson's disease has genuinely been cured with stem cell therapy."

The difference between longevity in the USA and Japan is really only four years points out de Grey. So despite the widespread belief that certain things have a dramatic effect on aging, de Grey shows that they are really not significant anti-aging factors.

According to de Grey, there are seven main types of damage that need to be addressed by regenerative medicine in order to solve the aging problem:

1. Cell loss / cell atrophy
2. Division-obsessed cells (cancer)
3. Death-resistant cells
4. Mitochondrial mutations
5. Intracellular junk
6. Extracellular junk
7. Extracellular cross-links

Stem cells therapy holds some of best promise for counteracting the effects of aging, says de Grey. Discussing work done on Parkinson's disease he states, "I would say there is a really good chance, say a 50/50 chance, that we will be able to say 10 years from now, Parkinson's disease has genuinely been cured with stem cell therapy."

Rogan and de Grey also discuss downloading consciousness, living forever, the population, and natural resources; how bad could it be living forever; philosophy of living forever. Check it out!

SOURCE  Joe Rogan Experience

By 33rd Square

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