Will There Be Superintelligence and Would It Hate Us?

Will He Be There?

This paper focuses on an unsettling example of experimental labour - the Human Landing Catch (HLC). The HLC is a cheap and reliable technique to produce data on mosquito densities in a defined area. It requires only a human volunteer to sit over night with his legs exposed, a headlamp to spot mosquitoes, and a rubber tube and plastic cup to catch them as they come to feed on him. The HLC formed...

What got us here will not get us there.

This is an exciting yet trying time for people living with neuromuscular diseases and those who care for them. The exciting aspect is that at last the advances in genetics and translational research have resulted in clinical trials testing novel compounds. Examples include the exon-skipping approaches in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). Resulting from a sophisticated understanding of the cons...

There Will Never Be Another You.

“There will be blood” from fibroblasts

The blood system is continuously replenished from a rare population of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that balance self-renewal and differentiation. It is believed that HSCs emerge during embryogenesis from a population of hemogenic endothelial cells at sites like the aorta-gonad-mesonephros (AGM) region and placenta. Transplantation of HSCs is a widely utilized cell therapy for a range of gen...

IJEE Soapbox: A World free of pArAsites And vectors: Would it be heAven, or Would it be hell?

This is of course impossible, but Gould’s thought experiment is a useful conceptual exercise which brings out key issues of determinism versus randomness in history. More broadly, it can be illuminating to ponder all kinds of implausible and radical scenarios, in effect bracketing the real world with visions of possible worlds. What would our world now be like if, at some time in the past, a ma...