GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: An AI alternative to organised religion

domingo, 8 de octubre de 2017

BioEdge: An AI alternative to organised religion

An AI alternative to organised religion

by Michael Cook | 7 Oct 2017 | 2 comments

Tired of organised religion? Maybe you should join a Silicon Valley religious start-up.

Former Uber exec Anthony Levandowski, for example, has registered a non-for-profit religious organisation in California, going by the name of Way of the Future. According to Wired, Way of the Future aims to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society”.

Levandowski’s De ex Machina religion is just one of several quasi-religious organisations now operational in the Californian tech belt.

“The church does a terrible job of reaching out to Silicon Valley types,” says Christopher Benek, a pastor in Florida and founding chair of the Christian Transhumanist Association. Benek argues that AI can participate in Christ’s redemptive purposes,” he said, by ensuring it is imbued with Christian values. “Even if people don’t buy organized religion, they can buy into ‘do unto others’.”

Self-proclaimed transhumanist visionary Zoltan Istvan argues that religion and science converge conceptually in the singularity.

“God, if it exists as the most powerful of all singularities, has certainly already become pure organized intelligence,” he said, referring to an intelligence that “spans the universe through subatomic manipulation of physics”.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

The drugs used for executing American prisoners and the drugs used for assisting suicide are more or less the same. Do they guarantee that patients will, as in Keats' poem, "cease upon the midnight with no pain".

Um, no, or at least no guarantees. Just as some prisoners are tormented in botched executions, some patients in the state of Oregon have taken the lethal drug, gone unconscious, and awakened -- sometimes days later. Read all about it in our lead article.