Opening Statement: Will computers out-compete us all?

Will Computers Put Us Out of Work?

In 1996, a world chess champion was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue. Early in 2016 a human master of Go, a game considerably more complex than chess, lost to AlphaGo from Google’s DeepMind. As arti cial intelligence (AI) improves, some predict that computers will be able to do any human task. The ctitious “steel-driving man” John Henry died competing against his machine replacement. Will computers ...

Will Diet and Exercise Save Us All?

How many times have you been to the doctor and was told that a balanced lifestyle is key for a healthy, disease-free, long life? How many times did genetics take the blame? But do we really know whether genetic risk associated with complex diseases can be offset by behavioral changes? A recent study at the New England Journal of Medicine now brings us some answers. The idea that most human dise...

Anticipating the Changes That Will Touch Us All.

Will Empathy Save Us?

Recent prescriptions for rescuing civilization from collapse involve extending our human capacity for empathy to a global scale. This is a worthy goal, but several indications leave grounds for cautious optimism at best. Evolutionary biology interprets non-kin helping behaviors as products of natural selection that rewarded only the transmission success of resident genes within ancestors, not t...

How results will out

The Manchester base will be set up as a charitable company limited by guarantee, jointly owned by the funding partners; the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health. Under the scheme half a million middle-aged people will be picked at random and invited by their doctor to provide general information about their health. They will be asked to give a blood sample, ...