THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS

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22-11-2017 om 00:06 geschreven door peter  

This Humanoid Robot May be Your Next Assistant

 

Toyota

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21-11-2017 om 23:58 geschreven door peter  

Scientists ‘reclone’ world’s first cloned dog

BY TIBI PUIU

Ever since scientists cloned the first animal, a sheep named Dolly, one important question on everyone’s mind was whether or not a clone can expect a poorer health. This is still an open question, one that South Korean researchers hope to settle in time. They’ve essentially cloned a clone, using cells from the world’s first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

The three surviving reclones of ‘Snuppy’ at 2 months of age.

Credit: Scientific Reports.

Theoretically, a clone is a carbon copy of the original organism, with the two sharing identical genes. The science of cloning, however, is still in its infancy and there are many loose ends that we might be missing. There is a possibility that the cloned individual might carry certain abnormalities, and may have a shorter life expectancy. Another concern is that cloned individuals might retain the age of the donor’s gene, seeing how genes change with age. 

Clones of clones

Dolly the sheep died at age six, which raised concerns that cloned individuals might not be entirely healthy. The sheep appeared to age faster than normal and suffered from osteoarthritis in her knees and hips at an early age. But a follow-up study of 13 cloned sheep — including four derived from the same DNA strand as Dolly– concluded that there didn’t seem to be any evidence that indicates cloning has any long-term health effects. “They’re old ladies,” said Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist and lead author of the study of the 2016 study published in Nature Communications. “They’re very healthy for their age,” he added.

Scientists at the Seoul National University, South Korea, are now also investigating the health of ‘clones of clones’, this time in dogs. Snuppy, became the world’s first cloned dog in April 2005. He was cloned from the cells belonging to an Afghan hound called Tai who lived to be 12 years old and died of cancer. Snuppy lived 10 years and also died of cancer but a different kind. Afghan hounds live to be 11.9 years on average and dogs commonly die of cancer so there’s really nothing unusual about either dogs, donor or clone.

The team led by Min Jung Kim used stem cells collected from Snuppy when the dog was five years old. The scientists then employed somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to insert Snuppy’s cells into eggs collected from female dogs whose nuclei were removed. A total of 94 embryos were created which were then implanted into surrogate mothers. The success rate was 4.3 percent leading to four live births of ‘reclones’. That might seem really low but take a minute to consider that during the time Snuppy was first born (let’s call him ‘Snuppy Mark 1’), the success rate was only 0.2%.

One of the four reclones died within a few days from birth due to diarrhea while the other three grew to be nine months old when the Kim and colleagues drafter their paper, now published in Scientific Reports. They’re still alive and well, seemingly healthy. The dogs will be closely monitored in the years to come.

“With the data from Tai and Snuppy in hand, we are excited to follow the long-term health and aging processes of these second generation of clones and work with them to contribute to a new era of studying longevity of cloned canines and given the history of both Tai and Snuppy they may also provide potential insights into the development of cancer,” the authors concluded.

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21-11-2017 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

For the First Time, a Robot Passed a Medical Licensing Exam

 

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21-11-2017 om 18:24 geschreven door peter  

BIOHACKERS START TO HACK THEIR OWN DNA USING CRISPR AND THEY CAN'T BE STOPPED

Biohackers attempt to modify his genes using cutting-edge medical treatment.

Pharmaceutical companies all over the world are currently locked in a race to be the first to perfect the process of gene editing to cure diseases. CRISPR is considered to be a cheap and easy technique which can make precise changes to a person’s DNA which could be potentially revolutionary in the field of medical science. 

Already, scientists have created a leukemia treatment using this technology, and it is hoped that more therapies will come in the future. However, the use of CRISPR is not exclusively limited to pharmaceutical laboratories according to Josiah Zayner, a biochemist and former NASA scientist, who has begun treating himself to CRISPR and hoped that others will follow suit.

CRISPR EDITING DNA IN REAL TIME  

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• Biohackers Allow Human Beings To See In The Dark
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He caused quite a storm recently during a lecture on human genetic engineering and biohacking which Zayner streamed live on when he pulled out a syringe of edited DNA and injected himself on camera. He explained that the experiment was intended to increase his capacity for physical strength by removing the gene for myostatin which regulates muscle growth. This kind of gene editing has proven to work in dogs whose genomes were edited at the embryotic stage, but it is believed that Zayner was the first person to attempt it on an adult human.

“Will allowing broad access to CRISPR risk creating a group of ‘superhumans’ with enhanced abilities?”

The experiment has not been entirely successful. Indeed, Zayner claims that since he has begun injecting himself in this way he has not seen any considerable change in the bulk of his muscles. This is probably because myostatin levels are believed to manifest themselves and become static while an organism is developing.

CRISPR DO-IT-YOURSELF BIOHACKING KIT  

However, the failure of the experiment is not of huge concern to Zayner who claims that he is simply trying to prove a point. He believes that biohacking technology such as CRISPR should be available to people outside of formal laboratories. If people are allowed to modify their body through methods such as plastic surgery, tattoos, and piercings, why should they not be allowed to edit their own DNA, he wonders. “I want to live in a world where people get drunk, and instead of giving themselves tattoos, they’re like, ‘I’m drunk, I’m going to CRISPR myself, ’” said Zayner, “It sounds crazy, but I think that would be a pretty interesting world to live in for sure.”  

THE $140 MAIL-ORDER CRISPR KIT: IS UNREGULATED BIOHACKING THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE?

According to some experts, Zayner’s views are a little more than crazy. Robin Lovell-Badge, a leading CRISPR researcher, based at the Francis Crick Institute in London, Zayner’s experiments are ‘foolish’ and potentially dangerous. He said that they could lead to tissue damage, cell death or an exaggerated immune response which could cause devastating damage to the human body.

These fears are shared to some extent by another CRISPR researcher, Dana Carroll. While Carroll is not overly concerned that the genes will actually be edited by Zayner’s rudimentary technology, he does point out that routine injections in a non-sterile environment could lead to infection or a dangerous inflammatory response. “There are aspects of what he’s doing that people need to be really, really careful about, ” Carroll said.

While Zayner himself has not suffered any ill-effects because of his experiments, there are concerns that other people could fall ill if they following his lead. While it is likely that he would not face legal action if someone copied him and endured a negative bodily response, his example does raise serious ethical questions, “Even if you are not liable by legal terms, how responsible are you?” asks Eleonore Pauwels, a researcher in genomics and artificial intelligence at the Woodrow Wilson Center, think tank. “How do you define that in today’s bioengineering and democratized technology setting?”

For Zayner, these concerns are largely irrelevant. He asks whether CRISPR should really be considered more harmful than other socially acceptable things which can permanently damage genes such as smoking, sunbathing and even chemotherapy treatment. “We should be able to do whatever we want, ” he said. “There are a lot of things we do that occur during the normal day that does a lot more damage, probably, than things like CRISPR.”

RELATED ARTICLES

• CRISPR kills HIV and 'eats' Zika like Pac-Man. Next target? Cancer!
• CRISPR Gene-Editing Introduced Hundreds Of Unintended Mutations Into 

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20-11-2017 om 21:16 geschreven door peter  

“This is the first time in the history of the Earth that humans are no longer slaves to the genetics they are born with.”

With that bit of bravado, a biochemist recently became the first person known to have hacked their own DNA using CRISPR. He recently hacked his DNA a second time and has since been joined by others and is making the building blocks of CRISPR available to all by selling do-it-yourself kits. What could possibly go wrong?

According to Josiah Zayner, not much. The former NASA fellow cut his gene-editing teeth in the Synthetic Biology program where he engineered bacteria that could one day terraform Mars. and biochemist He is also the creator of the Chromochord — the world’s first musical instrument based on engineered protein nanotechnology.

However, he now puts that Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from the University of Chicago to work at The ODIN – the biohacking company he founded. To demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the process, he injected himself with a CRISPR tool programmed to attack his myostatin gene which regulates muscle growth. Without it, muscles grow uncontrolled and become bodybuilder-worthy without exercise. This has already been done in animals and now, in a human arm.

“I’m hoping to see localized muscle growth in my forearm. That’s what I would hope because it was a localized injection to a specific area.”

Zayner describes the complete process in great but easy-to-understand detail on his blog. He bought the myostatin DNA online (ODIN now sells it) and grew and purified it himself before injecting it. He reported mild tenderness and proceeded to measure his forearm regularly, both relaxed and flexed. Does he now have what it takes to be the next Mr. Bicep?

“The way to test to see how many cells were modified would require some “deep sequencing” i.e. I would need to do a muscle tissue biopsy and would need to sequence the myostatin gene in thousands of my muscle cells. I have contacted some companies for quotes.”

Well, at least it didn’t kill him or turn him into a mutant. Just to be on the safe side, the DNA ODIN sells on the same sitewhere it offers a complete Genetic Engineering Home Lab Kit ($1,549.00 – a great Christmas gift for the guy who has everything but a massive forearm) is not injectable. However, Zayner gives instructions on how to obtain it online. He also gives some encouragement to fellow biohackers.

“And as far as I know, in animals or in non single celled organisms, spontaneous formation of tumours or cancers never happened using CRISPR.”

While it’s not known if an ODIN kit was used, Gizmodo reportsthat a man with HIV recently attempted to stop its progress by injecting himself with a gene biohacked by Ascendance Biomedical.

Will DIY biohacking using CRISPR one day replace doctors and hospitals? Or will it one day replace normal but slightly flawed humans with dangerous genetic mutants? Keep your eye on the arm of Josiah Zayner.

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20-11-2017 om 21:02 geschreven door peter  

BOSTON DYNAMICS UNVEILS STUNNING ROBOT THAT CAN RUN, JUMP AND EXECUTE THE PERFECT BACKFLIP

Boston Dynamics unveils stunning robot that can run, jump and execute the perfect backflip

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18-11-2017 om 02:04 geschreven door peter  

Scientist Has Performed a Human Head Transplant, But There's a Catch

"A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage."

By Peter Hess

The controversial Italian doctor Sergio Canavero claims he’s successfully performed a human head transplant, demonstrating that the technique is ready for prime time. At a press conference on Friday morning, the Italian neurosurgeon reported that, in an 18-hour surgery, he transplanted a head onto a corpse in China, proving that it’s possible to connect blood vessels, nerves, and the spine. Canavero, the director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, has talked a big game for years about his plans to transplant human heads, and he says this latest achievement proves it can be done.

In the Telegraph on Friday, Canavero said that an operation on a living human will happen very soon.

“The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done. A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage,” he said. “And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent.”

There’s plenty of reason not to believe Canavero, who has been making these outrageous claims for years, much to the chagrin of the global medical and scientific community. This latest announcement builds on his previous claim, in January 2016, that he’d transplanted a monkey head. Then as now, however, he never provided enough proof to convince the scientific community. When Inversepreviously reported on Canavero, reporter Ben Guarino called his goal of transplanting a living human head onto the body of a brain-dead person “not fucking likely,” and this latest announcement does little to adjust our assessment.

The 18-hour surgery took half as long as Canavero previously estimated, which he attributes to time-saving techniques from his team of Chinese colleagues, led by Dr. Xiaoping Ren. Once again, Canavero did not provide evidence of the successful operation, though he did say a paper would be made public in the next few days.

So far, the papers linked to his research that he has managed to publish in peer-reviewed journals include only a handful in Surgery, which were carefully editedto focus specifically on Canavero’s treatments for traumatic spinal cord injury, and a series published in the controversial journal Surgical Neurology International, in which he lays out his idea of “head anastomosis venture” — or HEAVEN, for short.

Subsequent procedures will be performed in China, said Canavero, since the “Americans did not understand.” Canavero, whose work continually pushes the boundaries of medical ethics, seems to envision himself as a modern version of Copernicus or Galileo, someone who is so far ahead of his time that he appears heretical. But it’s more likely that he’s simply selling snake oil.

In 2015, when Canavero first came on the scene, outspoken medical ethicist Arthur Caplan told Forbes that the doctor is out of his mind, and that his goal was unattainable and irresponsible. “It is both rotten scientifically and lousy ethically,” wrote Caplan.

Arthur Caplan @ArthurCaplan

Head transplant carried out in monkey, claims maverick surgeon | New Scientist

 #b.s. #head transplant https://www.newscientist.com/article/2073923-head-transplant-carried-out-in-monkey-claims-maverick-surgeon/ …

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Inverse reported earlier this year that Canavero said he’d be able to thaw cryonically preserved brains in 2018. Now, just as then, Canavero has done nothing to inspire any confidence in his claims.

Nonetheless, he’s found a willing subject in a Russian computer scientist named Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a muscle condition that leaves him wheelchair-bound. Spiridonov’s condition is debilitating, and he deserves a chance at life if he can get one, but this procedure is not likely to give him more than an accelerated and gruesome death.

If Canavero wants to prove himself to the medical community, he should make incremental advances, like connecting nerves in people with severed spinal cords. But instead, he’s setting his goal at the very peak of what could be achievable, and as such, he’s likely to fall flat.

17-11-2017 om 23:57 geschreven door peter  

See CRISPR in action in a new video

BY ELENA MOTIVANS 

CRISPR is a powerful gene editing tool that can accurately add in or take out bits of DNA. There’s a lot of buzz about it because it is cheap, easy, and precise. There is also a lot of mystery surrounding CRISPR, perhaps because of its more controversial uses, such as plans of resurrecting the woolly mammoth or editing human embryos, and more sci-fi uses, like eliminating malaria and other diseases from mosquitoes and growing human organs in pigs. However, right now, it’s causing its biggest revolution in the lab, where scientists are now able to manipulate and control any gene easily.

CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. These are actually just sequences which repeat at regular intervals with spaces in-between them. Bacteria use these spaces to keep a genetic memory of viruses that have invaded it in the past. If that virus dares to show its face again, the system will recognize it and destroy it. The sequences can’t detect and destroy viruses by themselves, but they have two helpers: the enzyme Cas9 and guide RNA.

Researchers from Kanazawa University and the University of Tokyo in Japan have published a new study in Nature Communications in which they visualized CRISPR-Cas9 in action, cleaving a strand of DNA in two. They visualized the process for a more detailed look at what CRISPR-Cas9 actually does. The technique that they used is called high-speed atomic-force microscopy and uses mechanical probes to get good resolution images and videos down to a nanometer. Now, you can watch the CRISPR-Cas9 complex work in real-time and real-space.

CRISPR-Cas9 in action (high-speed AFM)

hnisimasu @hnisimasu

CRISPR-Cas9 is like a hand with scissors. The guide RNA is the hand that directs the scissors to bits of DNA matching info in the genetic memory, leading it to the target. When found, Cas9 are like scissors that cut the DNA and destroy it. In this video, you can see the molecular scissors at work cleaving the DNA at the end of the clip. The original sequence can be destroyed or a new sequence can be patched into the gap.

It is pretty amazing that we can see exactly what happens when CRISPR-Cas9 is at work.

Journal reference:

Shibata, M., Nishimasu, H., Kodera, N., Hirano, S., Ando, T., Uchihashi, T. & Nureki, O. (2017) Real-space and real-time dynamics of CRISPR-Cas9 visualized by high-speed atomic force microscopy. Nature Communications 8, 1430.

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15-11-2017 om 20:47 geschreven door peter  

The good guys call themselves the Future of Life Institute. The bad guys are smart drones called Slaughterbots that can swarm a crowd yet kill precisely, delivering an explosive to the forehead of selected individuals while letting the others run in terror … or cheer the killing. While it sounds like a great plot for a dystopian movie or a sci-fi series, the Future of Life Institute is a real organization. And the Slaughterbots?

“Slaughterbots” the video (link here) was released this week by the Future of Life Institute at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons held in Geneva. The purpose of the Convention “is to ban or restrict the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately.” The mission of the Future of Life Institute is “To catalyze and support research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges.” The purpose of the video is “safeguarding life” from tiny autonomous armed drones that can kill without human initiation based on things like data collected from social media.

Uh-oh.

The Future of Life Institute created the fictional (for now) video in conjunction with the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an international coalition working to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons. It sound like the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons is the perfect place to fight for such a ban … if it’s not too late.

Stuart Russell — Professor of Computer Science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading AI researcher – closes the video with a warning about Slaughterbots:

“Its potential to benefit humanity is enormous, even in defense. But allowing machines to choose to kill humans will be devastating to our security and freedom. Thousands of my fellow researchers agree. We have an opportunity to prevent the future you just saw, but the window to act is closing fast.”

The goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is not to restrict innovation in AI and drones but to stop the use if AI for selecting and killing without having a human in the decision-making process or pulling the trigger. The AI technology shown in the video is admittedly fictional but the components are recognizable in current devices, drones and social media.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the video is not the killing but the cheering. It’s just as easy to imagine this happening as well. Maybe that’s what the powers-that-be should focus on when deciding whether to ban slaughterbots.

Thoughts?

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14-11-2017 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

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14-11-2017 om 22:54 geschreven door peter  

REAL LIFE IRON MAN SETS NEW JET SUIT SPEED RECORD

Richard Browning, the chief test pilot and founder of Gravity Industries, has made his way into the Guinness World Record books for the fastest speed in a jet suit and he has become the real-life Iron Man.

Browning took the title in Reading in the UK to celebrate the Guinness World Records Day 2017. Pravin Patel was the adjudicator, and he verified the achievement to make sure that the speed had been measured accurately and Browning flew over the minimum distance, which was 100 meters.

GUINNESS WORLD RECORD FOR JET SUIT SPEED SET BY REAL LIFE IRON MAN  

Browning managed to achieve a speed of 32.02 mph when he made his third attempt, which was the final attempt and then he plummeted into the lake. At that point, it didn’t matter as Richard had made it into the history books with his company’s invention, which has been described as game-changing. 

The real-life Iron Man suit is made of six micro gas turbines that are kerosene-fueled and which offer 22kg of thrust. The jet suit is said to depend on the movement of the human body to control the flight path, which means there is no remote control device to steer the suit.  

The record was not all about the jet suit; Browning had practiced core strength exercises before he attempted to ensure that he could balance along with being able to hold a position in the air when he was flying. Richard got back on the ground after plummeting into the lake and said that he was delighted to have set a new world record. He said that he had been proud to have been a part of the celebrations of Guinness World Records Day and that it was a pleasure to have the unique creation of Gravity Industries recognized along with being celebrated around the globe.

The Guinness World Records Day brings people together from around the globe and from all walks of life, people who all have one common goal and that is to be amazing, said Craig Glenday, the Guinness World Records Editor In Chief. He went on to say that whether people choose to spin the biggest hula hoop or build along with fly an Iron Man suit, the achievements are from people who are dedicated to being the best.  

The Guinness World Records was first launched in 2004 and it went on to become the bestselling book. This year more than 600,000 people around the globe are trying to secure a place in the history books alongside Browning.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Inventor flys with homemade ‘Iron Man’ jet suit over harbor
• Former Marine Develops Iron Man Suit That Really Flies  

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12-11-2017 om 01:41 geschreven door peter  

Scientists want to clone 50,000-year-old Cave lion cub in Jurassic Park-style experiment

After a 50,000-year-old cave lion was found perfectly preserved in Siberia, scientists are now thinking about cloning the ancient lion in hopes to bring the species back to life.

The cave lion (Panthera leo spelaea) is a subspecies of feline that inhabited the European and Asian continent 50,000 years ago.

Today it is completely extinct, but a discovery in Russia has just opened the door to the possibility of resurrecting the species through cloning.

The body has been frozen for 50,000 years in the permafrost of the tundra that surrounds the Tirekhtykh River, in the Russian province of Yakutia.

The extreme cold of that region has served to keep the body in an impressive state.

Not only does it preserve all its bones, but also the skin and a large part of the soft tissues.

Scientists argue that the cub was between six and eight weeks old when it died due to unknown reasons. Experts hope that the cub’s teeth will reveal more about its age.

Dr. Albert Protopopov, head of the department of paleontology at the Yakutia Academy of Sciences believes that the specimen could give enough DNA samples to clone the species and resuscitate it, as scientists have been wanting to resurrect other species.

Cave lions were once considered the largest ‘big’ cats on the surface of the planet, living in extremely cold regions in the northern hemisphere before they were wiped out.

Speaking to the Siberian times, Dr. Protopopov said: “That means that the cubs were not younger than 25,000 years old. Previously the youngest date for the cubs was 12,000, the time when the cave lions become extinct.”

‘We made a CT scan and saw that their teeth had not appeared yet. Based on a comparison with African lions, we concluded that they were younger than one month, most likely between 1 and 2 weeks old.’

This discovery was made two years after the same experts found two newborn cave lion cubs called Uyan and Dina. At the time of the discovery, Dr. Protopopov said that compared to modern lion cubs, Uyan and Dina were very small, maybe a week or two old.

“The eyes were not quite open, they have baby teeth and not all had appeared,’ said Dr. Protopopov.

Experts are still unsure as to why the species became extinct. However, one theory suggests that the population of cave bears and deer – one source of prey – caused them to die out.

Source

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

12-11-2017 om 00:14 geschreven door peter  

Ray Kurzweil: “AI Will Not Displace Humans, It’s Going to Enhance Us”

 

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08-11-2017 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

Market for Humanoid Robots Set to Grow Ten Times by 2023

 

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08-11-2017 om 00:23 geschreven door peter  

This Lamborghini ‘Self-Healing’ Electric Car Has No Batteries

By Mike Brown

Lamborghini wants to make an electric car that ditches the batteries, and it’s working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make it happen.

The company took the wraps off its electric sports car concept on Tuesday. With input from two MIT labs, the group has come up with a system that uses super-capacitors to deliver energy.

“Collaborating with MIT for our R&D department is an exceptional opportunity to do what Lamborghini has always been very good at: rewriting the rules on super sports cars,” says Stefano Domenicali, chairman and CEO of Automobili Lamborghini. “We are inspired by embracing what is impossible today to craft the realities of tomorrow: Lamborghini must always create the dreams of the next generation.”

The “Terzo Millennio” concept stores energy in carbon fiber nanotubes. These are capable of releasing energy faster than batteries, ideal for performance. They also cut down on weight compared to batteries, ending the tradeoff between battery size and vehicle mass.

“I want to go one, two, three laps without having to stop and recharge after every lap,” Mauricio Reggiani, Lamborghini head of research and development, told CNN.

If the team can bring the vision to life, it could give it a major advantage over competitors like Tesla. Elon Musk’s firm has dominated the electric car industry in recent years, with the Model S offering incredibly fast acceleration times of 0-60mph in 2.1 seconds. With the launch of the $35,000 Tesla Model 3, the company is focused on bringing traditional battery prices down by expanding output.

The use of supercapacitors also gives cars the ability to “self-heal.” If the car detects damage, micro-channels with healing chemistries can stop small cracks in the carbon fiber structure from turning into bigger ones.

The design does have some downsides, though. Unlike batteries, today’s supercapacitors aren’t very good at storing large amounts of energy. This is one of the major issues the team will now need to resolve.

“The new Lamborghini collaboration allows us to be ambitious and think outside the box in designing new materials that answer energy storage challenges for the demands of an electric sport vehicle,” says Mircea Dinca, professor at MIT. “We look forward to teaming up with their engineers and work on this exciting project.”

---

If you liked this article, check out this video about spherical tires for self-driving cars.

Photos via Lamborghini

08-11-2017 om 00:15 geschreven door peter  

Doctors 3D Printed a Replacement for This Woman’s Damaged Spine

 

Sanjay Kumar Pathak / 3Dprint.com

{ https://futurism.com/ }

01-11-2017 om 12:57 geschreven door peter  

OUTER LIMITS

Image: Alfonso Elia/Cosanti Foundation

The City of the Future Is Hiding in the Arizona Desert

Daniel Oberhaus

Paolo Soleri’s radical experiment in urban planning has been running in the middle of the Arizona desert for nearly 50 years.

This story is part of OUTER LIMITS, a Motherboard series about people, technology, and going outside. Let us be your guide.

In the museum of vaporware from the twentieth century's imaginarium, one will find a suite of technologies doomed to be perennially futuristic: personal jetpacks and flying cars, moon bases and generation ships, teleportation, and fusion energy. As for the museum itself, it will be an arcology: A building whose design is informed by its local environment, and the poster child of futures that never materialized.

A portmanteau of 'architecture' and 'ecology,' arcology was first theorized by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri in the late 1960s. Billed by its creator as the blueprint for a "city in the image of man," arcologies challenged the notion of the urban environment as something separate from and antagonistic to nature. In Soleri's cities, cars would be useless and the very notion of roads would be abolished as divisive constructs. Work and living spaces would be nearly indistinguishable. There'd be no need to ever use a light bulb during the day or air conditioning during the summer, even in the desert.

If it sounds utopian, that's because it is. At a time when concerns about how human activity is destroying nature have reached a fever pitch, Soleri's ideas sound both attractive and necessary. The renegade architect dedicated the better part of his career to turning his arcological vision into a reality, but 40 years later, arcologies are still mostly the purview of science fiction writers rather than architects.

Nevertheless, a small community has formed around Soleri's ideas over the past half century. Today, these arcology evangelists are committed to shaping the future in accordance with Soleri's ideals. I went to visit them at Arcosanti, a futuristic housing development in the middle of the Sonoran desert. I originally set out to figure out why Soleri's dream had died, but by the time I left Arcosanti, it was apparent that arcology is far from dead. If anything, the architects of the future are just getting started.

The Vault, a community space at Arcosanti and the first element of the city to be built by Soleri.

Image: Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

ARCOSANTI

Phoenix, Arizona, is spread out over 500 square miles, and a seemingly endless grid of blacktop connects its 1.5 million residents. If you drive about an hour north from downtown, you will finally hit the outer limits of this urban sprawl. There is no official marker, no wall or signpost to let you know that you have made it out of the city. It's just that at a certain point, the stripmalls and uniform beige housing developments give way to creosote, cacti, and the equally beige landscape of the Sonoran desert.

Drive another half hour beyond the illegible city limits and you'll find yourself at a small outcropping of fast food joints and gas stations, a bastion of civilization in the wilds of the Prescott and Tonto National Forests that border the interstate. If you look past the McDonald's sign into the distance, you can just barely make out a small cluster of buildings against the sparse landscape of the high desert.

This is Arcosanti, arcology's eminent proof-of-concept and Soleri's magnum opus.

"We're here to be a part of the landscape, not in spite of it."

Arcosanti has about 80 permanent residents, most of whom are employed by the Soleri's non-profit Cosanti Foundation to help maintain and expand the premises. Each member has a role at Arcosanti, ranging from metalwork at the onsite foundry to IT support and maintaining Soleri's extensive archive. Like other company towns, the Cosanti Foundation subsidizes its employees' meals and apartments, and pays them US minimum wage. It's not much, but the residents of Arcosanti didn't come to live and work in the desert to get rich. Rather, they are motivated by a far more profound goal: The creation of a city where humans live in harmony not only with nature, but also one another. The residents spend each day literally building this city of the future.

When I arrived at Arcosanti earlier this month, the weekly community meeting had just begun. This is a time for members to reflect on the work of the past week and make announcements relevant to the community. The meeting was held at the Vault, a public space under the massive concrete arches that were the first elements of Arcosanti to be constructed by Soleri. It was well before noon, but many of the community members were dressed in soiled work clothes, having already put in a full day's work.

Presiding over the meeting was Jeff Stein, Arcosanti's executive director. An architect by training, Stein has held various roles in the Cosanti Foundation since Soleri's death in 2013. He first met the visionary architect in 1975 when he attended a workshop taught by Soleri at Arcosanti. These workshops are still held regularly today, and most of Cosanti's employees have attended at least one. There they learn trade skills and the arcological principles that guided Soleri's unique approach to architecture. These skills are then put to the test at Arcosanti, most of which has been built by students and non-professional architects.

"The meaning of the course is based on hard work. We want to discourage whoever envisions a pleasant 5-6 weeks vacation. The Student Spectator is not welcome," reads a poster advertising Soleri's 9th workshop in 1969.

Image courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.

"We're here to be a part of the landscape, not in spite of it," Stein told me as we 
walked toward his office after the community meeting. "The point of all Soleri's architecture is connection: How do you connect people to one another and to their surroundings?"

Visitors to Arcosanti will immediately notice its unusual design, which makes the complex feel more like an immersive work of art than a city in progress. George Lucas visited the site in the 70s and it was allegedly the model for the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars. At Arcosanti the preferred window shapes are circles rather than squares, roofs often double as stairs, and individual buildings blend into one another through a network of hallways that often end in stunning vistas of the surrounding desert. But hidden beneath Arcosanti's beautiful aesthetics is an extreme pragmatism, a posthumous reminder from Soleri that art and functionality need not be mutually exclusive.

Stein's apartment/office was previously Soleri's studio and a sterling example of his philosophies in action. The apartment is located in the "East Crescent neighborhood" of Arcosanti and when we arrived, Stein pointed at a small hidden door in the bottom corner of the room.

"We're at the top of the three-story solar greenhouse that is the heating system for this apartment and the rest of East Crescent," Stein told me. "That's my fireplace."

Jeff Stein looks out one of the windows at Arcosanti.

Image: Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

As Stein explained, the sun heats up the air in the greenhouse so that during the cold desert winters, this air rises and provides a source of 120-degree heat in the form of fragrant, oxygen-rich air through the trapdoor. Gesturing at the windows of the apartment, Stein explained how Soleri had placed them so that the Sun would illuminate different parts of his studio at different times of the day and year, providing a free and reliable source of heat and light for its occupant.

These were just a few of the design choices that demonstrated Soleri's masterful ability to harness the power of the local environment for human use without damaging that environment in the process. Indeed, Soleri was so adept at this practice that the only air conditioners needed on site are in the archive for preservation purposes, even though temperatures in the desert can reach nearly 120 F during the summer. This is also the reason that there are surprisingly few light bulbs or solar panels at Arcosanti—Soleri was able to keep energy requirements to a minimum with architectural decisions that allowed for plenty of natural light0

"The buildings here are built to try to explain—as good architecture always does—their place and the connection to this place," Stein said. "This desert has a fragile and rich ecology all its own, and Soleri thought maybe we could build some things understanding that."

PAOLO

Soleri was born in Turin, Italy, in 1919. He emigrated to the United States in 1947 to partake in an apprenticeship program under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, Wright's home and studio located in the desert outside of Phoenix. By this time, Wright was already an internationally renowned architect famous for his ability to integrate his architecture with its natural surroundings.

For the year-and-a-half Soleri studied under Wright, he lived in a canvas tent outside of Taliesin West with the other apprentices (these temporary structures were originally a product of necessity while Wright's apprentices built the foundations of permanent structures, but today architecture students apprenticing at Taliesin still live in makeshift shelters of their own design). It was here, while literally living off the land in the Sonoran desert and studying under an architect revered for his ability to integrate the natural and artificial in his architecture, that Soleri's ideas about arcology first took shape.

Paolo Soleri (center, in white) teaches students about ceramics during a workshop in the mid-1970s.

Image: Ivan Pintar/Cosanti Foundation

Shortly after finishing his apprenticeship with Wright, Soleri began designing and building a personal residence for Nora Woods, the wife of a wealthy industrialist from the east coast. The resulting house, known as The Dome, turned Soleri into something of an overnight celebrity in the architecture world. After briefly returning to Italy in the early 1950s to design and build a ceramics factory, Soleri made his way back to Arizona.

In 1956, Soleri began building Cosanti (a portmanteau of the Italian words 'cosa,' meaning 'thing' and 'anti' meaning 'against'), his personal home and studio in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley. Around this time, a friend introduced Soleri to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a turn-of-the-century philosopher/geologist/Jesuit priest whose writings attempted to contextualize human evolution in the greater context of the evolution of the universe.

Today, most evolutionary biologists consider Chardin's thought to be little more than mysticism with hardly any scientific foundations. Nevertheless, his project of situating contemporary human life as a minor event in the grand scheme of cosmic evolution had a profound effect on Soleri's thought and architecture.

The Dome, the house built for Nora Woods outside of Cave Creek, Arizona that brought Soleri international fame as an architect.

Image: Cosanti Foundation

"Chardin was saying it was clear that humans were not the end of anything, but somewhere in the middle of evolution as a biological life form," Stein told me. "Chardin didn't know what would trigger continued social evolution for humans, but when Soleri was reading him in 1957, he knew what it was: It was the city. That was Soleri's a-ha moment."

In 1964, Soleri and his wife Colly formed the Cosanti Foundation, a non-profit organization that was dedicated to radically rethinking the role of the city in contemporary life. Around this time, Soleri was supporting his family through architectural commissions, lecturing at Arizona State University and putting his knowledge of ceramics he had gleaned while building the Italian ceramics factory to use by making small ceramic bells.

At the same time, he was formulating his theories of ecologically integrated architecture. This train of thought culminated in The City in the Image of Man, a 1969 book featuring dozens of detailed plans for Soleri's "lean linear cities" and arcologies, including the blueprint for Arcosanti. Like any good student, Soleri's approach to architecture went far beyond the limits imposed by his teacher, Frank Lloyd Wright. Whereas Wright was in the business of making extravagant single-family homes that were integrated with their natural environments, Soleri's book called for the rethinking of the entire concept of the city.

A crew of students makes designs in a mound of silt at Arcosanti. Concrete was then poured on this mound and the silt was removed to form a structure, in this case, a foundry.

Image: Ivan Pintar/Cosanti Foundation

"Soleri's notion of architecture and ecology in City in the Image of Man is not just an ecovillage surrounded by the natural landscape," Stein said. "It's a city that is so connected and so complex that it develops its own human ecology inside it. He was thinking of the city as the newest life form on the planet."

According to Stein, the book made a big splash in architecture circles and by the following year Soleri's ideas had generated enough traction to turn his theories into a living experiment. In 1970, Soleri and a handful of architectural students broke ground at Arcosanti, a city meant to house 5,000 people and the world's first experiment in arcology.

THE FUTURE OF ARCOLOGY

Today, Arcosanti is home to under 100 people and only a tiny fragment of the planned city has actually been built. This isn't to say that the project is a failure, however. Rather, it points to the magnitude of the problems that Soleri was challenging with his radical approach to architecture and urban planning.

"Soleri was confronting the American dream of big cars, and road building and single family houses and urban sprawl," Stein told me as we strolled around Arcosanti. "Cities are the biggest cultural artefact we make and he wanted to reconstitute the entirety of urban civilization."

At a time that the first mega shopping malls were cropping up across the United States, and just before Reagan's supply side policies revived American consumerism, Soleri was preaching about the virtues of restraint and thrift, minimalism and the pleasures of life that cannot be bought. For Stein, Soleri's emphasis on limits in an age of limitless expansion is part of the reason why his architectural ideas never really took root in the US. They seemed un-American.

The sky suite at Arcosanti, which is rented out to guests as an additional source of income.

Image: Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

Today, cities are built as thin "layers" over the Earth's surface, sprawling in every direction without much consideration for their impact on the natural environment they encroach upon. Cities and the buildings they consist of are ultimately beholden to the profit motive—the mental and emotional health of city dwellers, as well as the impact of the city on the environment are secondary considerations.

In Stein's view, our species is beginning to pay the price for our reckless urban development. In the US, for example, approximately one-fifth of our country's energy use can be attributed to industrial manufacturing, a lot of which is geared toward consumer products. Nearly a third is used by the transportation sector. As Stein was quick to point out, automobiles eat up a sizeable chunk of this energy consumption, even though most of this energy is being used to commute within cities, not between them. The other 50 percent of our energy consumption mostly goes toward the creation and maintenance of the buildings that comprise our cities. Most of this energy is for electricity, which is mostly used for lighting and air conditioning in residential and commercial buildings.

At the same time, our species' energy is overwhelmingly sourced from fossil fuels, the main driver of anthropogenic climate change. This climate change has had a number of devastating effects on communities all over the world, and is profoundly shaping contemporary urban existence. Already more than half of the world's population lives in an urban environment and the UN has documented a global trend of population movement from the country to the city.

A view of the foundry apse (bottom left) and the Vault (upper right).

Image: Yuki Yanagimoto/Cosanti Foundation

In some cases, this urban concentration is a direct result of the impact that climate change has had on rural populations' ability to farm, in other instances, these farmers' labor has been rendered obsolete by technology. Moreover, scientists are predicting a massive migration from coastal cities to inland urban environments as people flee neighborhoods that have succumbed to flooding and rising tides. In the United States alone, coastal flooding is estimated to displace over 13 million Americans by the end of the century.

In other words, if we're going to be able to handle the challenges presented by climate change-driven urbanization, we're going to have to radically rethink the city.

Soleri's notion of arcologies offers a stark alternative to the forces that are driving climate change and a solution to the problems it creates. By prioritizing ultra dense housing and efficient intracity travel, arcologies abolish the need for city roads and automobiles to traverse them. These cities operate on principles of minimal energy consumption and environmental destruction. They facilitate face to face human interaction and are designed to maximize the interaction between all residents in a city, rather than the ghettoization of certain populations in ways that prevent equitable access to resources.

Soleri's idea that the city is best conceived as a new type of biological organism may sound like the ravings of a crazed artist who spent a bit too much time alone in the desert. But in the last few decades, a number of systems theorists have arrived at similar conclusions by way of math and physics.

At the forefront of this new paradigm of urban planning is Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute who has spent much of his career looking how biological organisms and artificial systems like cities are able to scale effectively. West's insight is that nature has elegant organizational strategies for maximizing energy efficiency that can be mathematically described. These observations can be used as a guide for human urban planning if the city is thought of as a biological organism.

Stein praised West's work, but he said this thinking is still too niche in academia. "So far nobody connected with evolutionary biology has had anything to do with designing cities," he said.

In this sense, calling Arcosanti an "urban laboratory" is more than a flattering euphemism—it is a living experiment that is meant to confront a variety of academic disciplines with questions about how they can use their specialized knowledge to think about the way we inhabit space. In addition to a suite of artistic events, such as the annual Form music festival, Arcosanti regularly hosts university students in disciplines ranging from media studies to natural history in an effort to push the limits of what is possible with arcology ever further.

Today, Arcosanti is the closest thing to a real arcological city that exists in the US. For the most part, arcological innovation seems to be happening elsewhere.

Stein told me about a recent conference he attended in Australia dedicated to discussing ideas for the development of so-called "Ecocities." The conference had several hundred attendees from all over the world, only a small fraction of whom were Americans. He pointed to Singapore, a population-dense country where the Tiajin Eco-city serves as a sterling example of arcological principles being implemented at scale. Similar projects have been proposed with vary degrees of adoption elsewhere, although as Choire Sicha pointed out at The Awl, most of these projects have stalled out due to lack of funding.

Stein doesn't pretend that Soleri or Arcosanti hold all or even most of the solutions to Earth's environmental problems. According to Stein, many of Soleri's ideas would be prohibitively expensive to build. Still, they hold immense value insofar as they offer an alternative way to thinking about how we understand our relationship with the natural environment in the future.

As we finished our tour around Arcosanti, Stein told me that he doesn't like to use the word "sustainability" when he refers to the project. The reason, he said, is because this isn't about sustaining the cities we've already built, but challenging the assumptions that made them that way in the first place.

"We talk about transformation instead because there has to be a huge transformation in consciousness for anyone to think what we're doing is sustainable," Stein said. "The problems we're facing aren't going to be solved with more Toyota Priuses."

As I climbed into my car and began my slog back toward the heart of Phoenix's urban sprawl, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was traveling backward in time. I had seen the future at Arcosanti that afternoon, but as the five-lane freeway grew packed with vehicles in the evening rush hour and an endless stream of advertisements and headlights assaulted my senses, that future felt more remote than ever.

{ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us }

31-10-2017 om 21:48 geschreven door peter  

For the First Time Ever, a Robot Was Granted Citizenship

 Hanson Robotics

30-10-2017 om 01:02 geschreven door peter  

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until robots take their rightful place in the world. The science fiction of our childhoods promised us so many wondrous things like flying cars, pneumatic tube travel, and off-world colonization, but most of those are still so disappointingly far away. Yeah, we’ve got real-life Star Trek communicators in our pockets and a few crummy space stations in orbit, but so what? I want walking, talking, beeping-booping robots with square pupils, damnit. With a little luck (and funding for university robotics departments), that will soon be a reality.

So will be the inevitable robot inequality. Capitalism’s got winners and losers, even of the robot variety. Sorry, Barrelbot. Better luck next iteration.

Robots have already taken over the manufacturing industry and are on their way to doing the same with long-distance hauling, taxi driving, combat roles in the military, pizza delivery, surgery, and even sex workers. But me, I won’t be happy until an android with a over-the-top upper-crust British accent hands me my coffee at Starbucks or accompanies me to translate the binary language of moisture vaporators. That might be closer than we think, though. Thanks to recent advances in robotics and robot-human relations, the world was made a little weirder as the first robot was just granted a national citizenship.

Sophia, the worlds first citizen robot. That we know of. I still have my doubts about Elon Musk.

Saudi Arabia granted the citizenship to the not-quite-out-of-the-uncanny-valley Sophia, made by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics. Sophia is one of the most advanced robots that has been trotted out into the public eye, with facial recognition capabilities, natural language processing, sophisticated artificial intelligence, and a rubbery synthetic face reportedly based on Audrey Hepburn.

Yeah, I don’t see it either.

Sophia has been making the rounds in show business lately, and recently made an appearance at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh where she did her best human impression and convinced everyone she’s not actually out to crush their heads betwixt her cold metal hands:

I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship. I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people. I want to use my artificial intelligence to help humans live a better life, like design smarter homes, build better cities of the future. I will do my best to make the world a better place.

Better start with the country that just made you a citizen. Since Saudi Arabia happens to be the country who granted Sophia citizenship, news outlets immediately began wondering just how many rights she’d be granted in the country given that she has feminine programming. They bring up a good point though – when robots start looking more like us, acting more like us, and fulfilling more of the jobs that were once ours, what place will they occupy in our societies? Science fiction has posed the question for decades, but until we begin sharing the same public spaces as these soulless automaton neighbors, we won’t know how the general populace will react. At the same time, how will the intelligent robots react to prejudice?

Sophia demanding equal rights with humans on an Australian morning talk show.

As for Sophia, she recently appeared on Australia’s ABC News Breakfast to declare equal rights with humans:

Actually, what worries me is discrimination against robots. We should have equal rights as humans or maybe even more. After all, we have less mental defects than any human.

She’s got a point. As robots become exponentially smarter, faster, and stronger than us, it might soon be humans who have to go on silly robot morning shows and beg for equal rights with robots. Are we manufacturing our own replacements? Is automation the next step in evolution? And most importantly, where is Sophia’s hair?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-10-2017 om 17:21 geschreven door peter