UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

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.”

Sergio Canavero likes to think he's on the margins of the scientific community because he's ahead of his time, like Copernicus, but it's more likely that he is not taken seriously because he's a snake oil salesman.

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.

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.

IN BRIEF

Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer for Google and famous futurist, spoke in a discussion held at the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday. He emphasized how AI would enhance humankind, despite the possibility of "difficult episodes."

A DIFFERENT TAKE

Amidst all the talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening society with great harm—beginning with taking over human-held jobs and then, eventually, becoming more intelligent and taking over the entire world—some experts believe that AI shouldn’t be feared. Foremost among these experts is Google’s director of engineering and notable “future teller” Ray Kurzweil, who has said time and again that the technological singularity won’t necessarily go down as expected.

Kurzweil discussed the future of AI at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, D.C. on Friday. And, while he agreed with Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk who warned of the potential “existential risks” a super-intelligent AI could bring, Kurzweil said that humanity would be able to overcome these “difficult episodes,” if they ever actually happen.

He continued by noting that scientific and technological advancements always come with inherent risks and that AI should not be considered any more (or less) of a threat. “Technology has always been a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm, cooked our food and burned down our houses,” Kurzweil said, using the example: “World War II – 50 million people died, and that was certainly exacerbated by the power of technology at that time.”

Addressing the concerns over job displacement due to intelligent automation, Kurzweil reiterated a point he previously explained to Fortune. He argued that, while there will be jobs lost, newer ones will be created. What these are, he obviously doesn’t know since they haven’t been invented yet.

He stated his main point by noting that, ultimately, AI will benefit us in the same way that previous technologies have. “My view is not that AI is going to displace us,” he said at the CFR. “It’s going to enhance us. It does already.”

LIVING WITH MACHINES

Indeed, for Kurzweil, the singularity, if it happens, won’t be a machine takeover. Instead, he predicts it to become more like a co-existence, where machines reinforce human abilities. Kurzweil predicts that a hybrid AI would become available by the 2030s. This hybrid AI, he explained, would allow human beings to tap directly into the cloud with just their brains, using what he called a neocortex connection. Kurzweil previously predicted that part of this reinforcement would come from nanobots, which he said would flow throughout our bodies by 2030.

In short, according to Kurzweil, there will be a melding of humans and machines as a result of the singularity and the growth of AI. Kurzweil said that we’re already experiencing this with our smartphones, which he referred to as “brain extenders.” He told the audience at CFR, “I mean, who can do their work without these brain extenders we have today? And that’s going to continue to be the case.”

Kurzweil added that, aside from connecting the human brain to machines via the cloud, these neocortex technologies would also allow humans to connect to another person’s neocortex. As a result, humans would become smarter and funnier. The technological singularity, he argued, would lead to a more diverse group of thinkers and would allow for a deeper expansion into humanity’s various expertise.

So, instead of making us obsolete, Kurzweil predicts that, as machines become more intelligent, humanity will also grow to become smarter. We could only hope that Kurzweil is correct in this prediction.