Last April, an excited crowd gathered at a campus in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. This was part of a two-month long residency that hosted a variety of events ranging from drug regulation to cryonics to exploring devices that could be deployed in the fight against death.
One of the main goals, however, was to promote Vitalism, a radical movement founded a few years earlier by Nathan Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries. Consider this longevity for the most fanatical followers – an all-encompassing mission for which nothing less than complete dedication will do.
Although interest in longevity has certainly increased in recent years, not everyone in the broader longevity field shares vitalists’ commitment to making death virtually obsolete. And vitalists feel there is growing momentum not only for the science of aging and the development of life-extending treatments, but also for acceptance of their philosophy. Defeating death should be humanity’s supreme concern. Read the full story.
-Jessica Hamzelau
This is the latest in our Big Story series, home to MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. you can Read the rest of the series here.
What AI “remembers” about you is the next frontier of privacy
-Miranda Bogen, Director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Ruchika Joshi, Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, specializing in AI security and governance
The ability to remember you and your preferences is fast becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents.
Personalized, interactive AI systems are built to improve our ability to act on our behalf, maintain context during conversations, and perform all types of tasks from travel booking to tax filing.
But their ability to store and retrieve more and more intimate details about their users over time introduces dangerous, and all-too-familiar, privacy vulnerabilities – many of which have emerged since “big data” first teased the power to recognize and act on user patterns. Worse, AI agents now appear poised to solve whatever security measures were taken to avoid those vulnerabilities. So what can developers do to fix this problem? Read the full story.
