Andy Walker's Blog: Andy Walker's Super You Notes

Fame inventor and artist Leonardo da Vinci produced some of the planet’s most recognized art. Yet, historians know he struggled with his work.

Today, more than 500 years after his death, Marco Catani, professor at King’s College London suggests that he may have had Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder also known by the acronym ADHD or ADD. It is the best explanation about why da Vinci had great trouble completing many of his projects.

Publishing in the periodical Brain, Catani lays out the evidence supporting his theory, drawing on known accounts of Da Vinci’s work practices and behavior. For example, he was known to suffer from chronic procrastination.

The researcher believes ADHD could also have been a factor in Da Vinci’s amazing creativity and myriad achievements across the arts and sciences he engaged in.

Catani, who is at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s, said: ‘While impossible to make a post-mortem diagnosis for someone who lived 500 years ago, I am confident that ADHD is the most convincing and scientifically plausible hypothesis to explain Leonardo’s difficulty in finishing his works. Historical records show Leonardo spent excessive time planning projects but lacked perseverance. ADHD could explain aspects of Leonardo’s temperament and his strange mercurial genius.”

ADHD is a behavioral disorder characterized by continuous procrastination, the inability to complete tasks, mind-wandering and restlessness of the body and mind. While most commonly recognized in childhood, ADHD is increasingly being diagnosed among adults including university students and people with successful careers. Check out this ADHD online test.

Da Vinci’s difficulties with staying on task are known to be were pervasive from his childhood. Information from biographers and contemporaries have shown that he was constantly on the go, often hopping from task to task. He slept very little and toiled continuously night and day. He engaged in alternating short cycles of naps and waking interludes.

There is also indirect evidence to suggest that Leonardo’s brain was organized in a different way compared to the average person. He was also left-handed, so he was likely to be dyslexic and have dominance for language in his right brain. These attributes are obeservd among people with ADHD.

See also: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190523202604.htm

https://TotallyADD.com/adhd-quiz

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Almost 15 percent of American adults (37.5 million) that are age 18 and over report some trouble hearing. This makes hearing loss one of the most prevalent conditions that cause disability in the United States.

Hearing loss can be genetic, or it can be caused by disease, trauma, medication, or even long-term exposure to extreme noise. (Read about common types of hearing loss here.)

Sensorineural hearing loss is caused by a problem in the cochlea (the auditory nerve). This is part of the ear that deliver sound impulses to the brain.

Hearing loss affects:

People of all ages,.
All segments of the population.
All socioeconomic levels.

It can interfere with a human’s physical, cognitive, behavioral, and social functions. The main form of treatment is hearing aid technology.  However,  people who are 70 years old (and older) that suffer hearing loss and who would benefit from hearing aids tend not to use them. Less than 30 per cent of this population have ever used them.

For adults aged 20 to 69, who could be helped by hearing aids, the usage is even lower. Only about 16 per cent have benefited from them.

A hearing aid works by boosting sound. This allows wearers to experience sounds that would otherwise not be heard. a new generation of hearing aids can connect to other devices, like TVs or movie theatre sound systems to help boost sound for the wearer.

Although the development of microelectronic components has enabled new digital hearing aid technology to replace earlier devices based on analog circuits, the underlying damage to the inner ear remains a limitation when the user is confronted by multiple speakers or background noise.

Hearing aid users often complain of straining to focus on a single speech sound among competing sources at meetings, banquets, and sporting events.

One way to solve this problem is to move the hearing aid user closer to the person speaking and further away from noise sources. Directional microphone technology also provides another approach by pointing a device.

Scientists have studied the hearing of the tiny flying bug (called Ormia ochracea) which inspired the development of an innovative directional microphone that could improve hearing aids. They reverse-engineered the physics and biology behind the insect’s ability to localize sound.  This understanding provided engineers with the ability to improve directional microphones small enough to use in hearing aids. They found a way through this to also focus the hearing aid on one sound source at a time.

Capitalizing on the knowledge learned from studying Ormia, another group of scientists successfully completed design and testing of a clever microphone based on the design elements. The scientists used silicon microfabrication technology to make the critical sensing elements required for a working microphone.

For more about this topic – click here

 

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Soursop may be the most famous natural cancer-fighting fruit you have never come across.

That is unless you have ties to the Caribbean or South America.

Also known as guanabana and graviola, the spiny green fruit is well known in the Caribbean islands (especially Jamaican who refer to it by its Spanish name guanabana) and central and northern South America, where it grows as fruit of a tall evergreen tree of the same name.

Inside the husk is a creamy, custardy pulp, dotted with seeds. The fruit is lovely and sweet and some say a combination of strawberry with citrus highlights. Mark Twain called soursop “deliciousness itself“.

What is most interesting is it legendary healing powers among native islanders and  locals where it grows. Come of the curative reputation comes from the soursop leaves, which can be made into soursop tea. Drink the leaves steeped in hot water and it said to help cancer patients beat their disease naturally, although doctors caution it should not be the only therapy.

Researchers have discovered it contains phytochemicals at that good at killing resistant cancer cells that survive chemical therapies. Still, clinical trials don’t demonstrate yet that it is a definitive cancer cure.

Soursop is proven to be a good anti-inflammatory and helps soothe intestinal upset and works as an antidysenteric. It also can help with insomnia. The graviola seeds, while toxic to eat, can be pulverized into a paste that can sooth skin irritations and eruptions.

Learn more about graviola, soursop and guanabana (all the same thing) on this website.

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Strong Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to play a huge influence in code development in the next 10 to 20 years. I can’t imagine that we will ever completely eliminate the need for humans to learn code development in that time span, but a lot of it will be automated and written by machines themselves. So will computers replace programmers? Yes, eventually. However, programmers will evolve into computer “trainers”. Read on…

It may seem a bit crazy to some, but then so was the idea of self driving cars 20 years ago. It was a little too futuristic. And yet in Pittsburgh today Uber is test driving production self driving taxis on the streets. It’s a pilot project but considering self driving cars did not exist 10 years ago…it’s incredible. The AI in these cars is incredible too. They take in live data react to it, map it, learn and share experiences with other robot cars about locations, environments, circumstances etc. And problem avoidance.

Will computers replace programmers?

Now think about programming. It’s a rule based assembly of commands that takes input from and external sources and then makes decisions. So why can’t machines write code?Well they do already to some extent. And it will be commonplace in 10 to 20 years.

Take this article from Wired earlier this year that examines this very issue… Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs

It argues that neural networks are already trainable. We don’t teach them to recognize a cat by defining, and whiskers and meowing…we just show the NN pictures of cats and the machines draw their own conclusions. The article explains: “If it keeps misclassifying foxes as cats, you don’t rewrite the code. You just keep coaching it.”

Borrowing from the article again…”Machine learning powers large swaths of our online activity…

Facebook uses it to determine which stories show up in your News Feed,
Google Photos uses it to identify faces.
Machine learning runs Microsoft’s Skype Translator, which converts speech to different languages in real time.
Google’s search engine relies on these deep neural networks.

And yes they are used by self driving cars. In Pittsburgh a human Uber employee in the vehicle doesn’t write code it babysits the vehicle in case of a problem. (See this article)

So you can expect human programmers to assist and babysit code writing machines – or train the machine, as Wired puts it. But eventually this will be a full automated process.

Can computers be creative programmers?

And you might argue what about creativity in code. Well yes, that’s the one thing machines have yet to become able to do. Be creative. And yet as AI develops there is a theory that creative will eventually become an outcome. As humans we create seemingly out of thin air drawing from a synthesis of inputs and developing ideas from correlations, experiences and problem solving.

Will code writing machines become creative? I would argue yes. But ask me again in 10 and then 20 years.

The three laws of transhumanism by Zoltan Istvan

According to Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist activist who wrote the foreword for the book Super You, the Three Laws of Transhumanism are:

A transhumanist must safeguard one’s own existence above all else.


A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible—so long as one’s actions do not conflict with the First Law.


A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe—so long as one’s actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

Istvan’s novel The Transhumanist Wager. features the laws.

He is the founder of The Transhumanist Party  and ran as “the science candidate” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. You can learn more about Istvan on his web site.

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Definition: Transhuman, transhumanism, transhumanist
Definition: What is transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a global intellectual and cultural movement which has the goal of transforming and revolutionizing the human experience and condition by creating, implementing and developing technologies accessible to anyone that will massively enhance human intelligence and physical capabilities. You might think of it as using technology to transform the basic human experience into superhuman. Transhumanists are interested in develop technologies to expand and augment what is naturally available to a human when her or she is born.

Further notes on this definition: What is a transhumanist?

Transhumanism is sometimes abbreviated as H+ or h+

Transhumanist technologies

Nanotechnology and nanofabrication
Stem cell engineering
Genetic editing and engineering
Strong artificial intelligence
Organ regeneration and regrowth
Robotics

Top Transhumanist Authors (non-fiction)

Ray Kurzweil[image error]
Zoltan Istvan[image error]
Andy Walker
Nick Bostrom[image error]
Ramez Naam[image error]
Aubrey de Grey[image error]

Top Transhumanist Movies

Lucy
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2001: A Space Odyssey
Elysium
Minority Report

Top Transhumanist Documentaries

The Singularity is Near: A True Story about the Future
Transcendent Man
BBC Documentary: Visions of the Future – The Quantum Revolution (link takes you to the full doc on Youtube)
The Meaning of the 21st Century
Miracle Cure? A Decade of the Human Genome

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Since writing the book Super You: How Technology is Revolutionizing What it Means to Be Human, one of the topics my co-authors and I get asked a lot about is: “What will humans look like in the future?”

In some ways it is a tough question, because no one can reliably predict the future. However, what we do know is what technologies are arriving that are shaping our health, our longevity, and how we look. And we also know that technology is exponentially improving, so the research breakthroughs in medicine and related sciences are coming fast and furious these days.

Here’s what we know with great certainty. Five nascent technologies are give us humans new ways to look and feel younger…they include:

Nanotechnology: The ability to create, modify and manipulate things at the subcellular and even molecular level.
Genetics: The ability to edit a human’s personal blueprint to remove errors, not only at birth, but also as errors are created as cells copy themselves during a normal human lifespan.
Robotics: Intelligent machines will become personal assistants, workers, and will also replace error prone humans. They will augment, optimize and accelerate manufacturing processes. And make it cheaper to produce goods.
Stem cells: Doctors will soon be able to harvest these building blocks of human tissue from patients, restore them to a “seed” cell, and grow them into a replacement cell of any kind. Need a new heart? Grow one from your own stem cells. Want bigger boobs? Forget silicone or saline, grow them from stem cells.
Artificial Intelligence: This is intelligence – also known as strong AI – that is comparable or better than human intelligence that can be imbued into a machine so it can problem solve, interact the world around it and autonomously manage complex tasks.

We will look younger in the future

The science of longevity is becoming increasingly better understood. We know that the lifespan of an average person on the planet in 1900 was around 50 years of age. Throughout the 20th Century, breakthroughs in health and medicine have been giving humans an extended lifespan. Today, the average life expectancy globally is around 80 years old, with women outliving men by a couple of years. In the United States men live on average to about 79. Women live to 80.5 years. Canadian and Australian lifespans are marginally little longer. The Japanese have the longest lifespan at close just shy of 85 (2015 data).

That trend is expected to continue. In Super You’s longevity chapter (read it – download for free) we show how old people are getting older. In fact the centenarian population is expected to hit 6 million in the U.S. by 2050. (We believe that is a conservative estimate.)

But this progress is not just about living longer as a shrivelled up old decrepit person in a rocking chair. Not one wants that. New technologies that are keeping us around longer are also helping us look and feel younger.

For those that lived through the 1970s, doesn’t it seem like people who were 60 to 70 years old then seemed like old folks? Today “old people” seem much older. In fact they are. Life expectancy in the 1970s was an average age of about 71 for both sexes (for men it was 67.1). You just didn’t see very many spry 70 years olds around. Massive improvements in cancer treatments and heart disease has given many people the ability to live into their 80s. Plus smoking habits have drastically changed. Organ donor technologies have also been extending lives.

In the future, we will look younger because physically we will be healthier and less prone to aged related diseases.

Stem cell technology will allow us to look like whoever we want
Stem cells are seed cells that can become any kind of cell in the human body

Let’s talk stem cells because they will directly correlate to youthful looks. Different kinds of cells make up our bodies. Every organ in the body has its own kind of cell. Skins cells are different than blood cells. And they all have their own structure, function and role. However they all start out as a stem cell. The human body can use these unexpressed cells and form them into whatever cell type is needed. Until only a few decades ago, stem cells were only harvestable from a stillborn fetus or any newborn’s umbilical cord. And this, of course, caused all kinds of controversy. In fact President George W. Bush put a moratorium on stem cell research.

However in recent years, stem cell technology has come a long way and scientists can now harvest stem cells from the human body. They haven’t quite figured out how to command the cell to regress to its basic form so it can become any cell, however they can coax it to form a mature cell that it had been programmed to become. So stem cells harvested from a person’s fat can be repurposed to in cosmetic surgery.

Genetic editing will let us edit our own genes and our children’s genes

DNA defines what our face, our skin, the shape of our bones, our height and weight (or body type) will all be. DNA is a living being’s unique blueprint that is encoded in its cells. It is fair to say that as we learn how to do genetic editing, this will allow us to redefine how we look. Want glow in the dark skin, or darker or fairer skin? It will be possible. A new technology called CRISPR–Cas9 which is being tested by Chinese researchers is being used to treat a patient with aggressive lung cancer. It is part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital in Chengdu. The Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary technique.

On 28 October (2016), a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the genetic modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu.  The researchers had immune cells from the patient’s blood and used CRISPR–Cas9 to edit genes. The hope is that the edited cells will attack and defeat the cancer.

Of course this early use of gene editing has nothing to do with appearance, however this kind of technique could be used to modify body mechanisms that – for example – regulate skin tone, or eye color. Or even hair texture. Could it make your skin green if you want? Today this kind of body modification is achieved with tattoos (see Eric Sprague, aka Lizardman), but it’s plausible that in the future a simple injection of modified genes could trigger all kinds of physical  changes in the human body, include those that influence looks. Could it change bone structure too? Not today, but again sculpting bones to change looks may be possible with a combination of nanotechnology, stem cells, genetic editing.

So here is the big question…how long until we can do this? As we wrote in our book Super You, there is a doctor already offering the has the ability to do this for parents that want to conceive a child with specific attributes. However because it attracted unwanted controversy to his practice, he doesn’t offer it as a service. Although he will do gender selection for $18,000.

To edit our own looks, these technologies should be available for that purpose in the next 20 to 30 years.

Maybe we won’t look any different, but we could project a custom avatar

It could be that in 100 years we have found a way to dispense with the meat sack that we run around in currently for 80+ years or so. Some think we will become a living entity hosted in a machine by then. We will have the option to replace our bodies with a more advanced bio-host. Then we can just interact with personalities and choose who we want to connect with regardless of their looks.

We could also choose to see them as the “image” they project to our sensors, or we could reinterpret it the way we want to see them. Sound nutty? Not really. What if you connect with some on an intellectual level but you are not physically attracted to them. Computers or appliances wired directly into our brains could modify the visual signals between the optic nerve and the brain so that we “see” a modified view of the world. Or perhaps we could transmit how we want to look to another person’s enhanced brain so they “see” us the way we present ourselves, and not what we actually look like.

What will humans look like in the future – say in 1000 years?

What will humans look like in 100 years? Likely anything that we want to look like. Imagine how much technology will change and improve in 10 centuries. Some believe that we will be indistinguishable from the technology we create. We will be the ultimate cyborg (a technology-enhanced human). How much human we will still be and how much machine will will be is up for debate.

Andy Walker is the author of the book Super You: How Technology is Revolutionizing What it Means to Be Human. Read more about Andy’s work as author, keynote speaker and entrepreneur.

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As I continue to process the takeaways from Fall 2016 MoNage (my new event series), I am even more convinced that the way “we” experience the Internet is changing, and the result of the shift in how communication evolves will be highly disruptive. This disruption will be fought by the companies being disrupted as well as by lobbyists trying to apply laws meant for other situations but, on the positive side, the disruption may force companies to re-think how they approach the Internet.

Mass Adoption of ChatBots

The communications shift I am talking about comes from the mass adoption of ChatBots, also known as Conversational Interfaces, mixed with Artificial Intelligence, as the new interface for business to business, business to consumer, and consumer to business communications. I have read reports stating the growth of ChatBots may disrupt the Apps business.  I believe it will.  If you are wondering about what a ChatBot is:  If you have ever played a computer game, in substance, you have used a chatbot. You used an app which you interacted with, which followed a script and shared with you a result. This is a very simplistic example, but the point that is we are now at a major inflection point for which there will be no turning back, and from which we are likely to see the way we use the Internet change. Apps may start to disappear over time. Websites will be less needed; the information shared on websites will be stored in the Cloud and accessed by services that need it. Communications will happen on our behalf and information will be presented in a way more in tune with how we process and share information once we search for it ourselves. Communications will be better, easier and more relevant for us Internet users as a result of AI. Furthermore this change will make life better for our personal and business connections, implying new business opportunities and models to explore.

Interface with computers is rapidly changing to a “conversational” interface

Summing up the change, the interface between humans and computers is rapidly changing from an “operational” interface (Websites, apps) to a “conversational” interface (ChatBots, voice interfaces).  This is revolutionary, given that the “operational” interface has been the standard way to interact with computers since the earliest computers came on the market.

For this fundamental shift to happen, there is a lot of work to be done. From evolving the way ChatBots are developed to keeping a watchful eye on public policy issues in the United States and around the world.  I personally know how critically important to keep this industry from becoming regulated too early in its lifetime.

Introducing the International ChatBot Coalition

I believe that creating ChatBots should be easier than it is today.  As part of that objective, it would be best if there were a way to disintermediate the ChatBot codebase from the backend server APIs and offer the developer community independence. And there is more. For this reason, I have decided to help cofound the International ChatBot Coalition, with the mission to provide a voice and bring together as many developers as possible to help grow this nascent industry.

I am hosting the first ChatBot Coalition Meeting at 1PM in New York City on November 17th @016. If you would like to learn more about ChatBot Coalition and to be invited to join the meeting, please visit: http://fcc.ai.

Call for Speakers

And speaking of ChatBots, for Spring 2017 MoNage I am actively looking for people who would like to speak. The “Call for Speakers” is now open and the deadline is November 18th (2016). For more information about Spring 2017 MoNage and to submit a speaking proposal, please click here.

Jeff Keni Pulver is a VoIP Pioneer, Communications Visionary, and Connector. He is also the creator of the conference MoNage: Messaging is the New Voice a new event series in Spring 2017. It will take a look at the issues of the day and look towards the future of Internet Messaging.

New review just in from indie book reviewer/blogger Amanda Blackwood…

Super You is a fascinating read. Have you ever thought of hooking yourself up to your partner’s central nervous system?
(What?! That’s crazy pants.) How about bots in your blood stream? Or one day have your brain become an extension of
the cloud? Become a cyborg? (Oh, come on, you all know you secretly want be Cinder.) 
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s closer to reality than you think.

Read the full book review

 

Technology guru and broadcaster Leo Laporte invites his old pals Andy Walker and Sean Carruthers, authors of the new future tech book Super You, on his show Triangulation to talk about living forever, nanobots in the brain, losing weight with an embedded “microchip”, nootropics, and growing breast implants with stem cells. By the book on Amazon at http://superyou.link/book