QT:{{”
A few feet away from the detoxed toads, Spot and Blondie were sitting in their own tank, an even more elaborate affair, with a picture of a tropical scene propped in front for their enjoyment. They were almost a year old and fully grown, with thick rolls of flesh around their midsections, like sumo wrestlers. Spot was mostly brown, with one yellowish hind leg; Blondie was more richly variegated, with whitish hind legs and light patches on his forelimbs and chest. Cooper reached a gloved hand into the tank and pulled out Blondie, whom she’d described to me as “beautiful.” He immediately peed on her. He appeared to be smiling malevolently. He had, it seemed to me, a face only a genetic engineer could love.
…
To guard against a Vonnegutian catastrophe, various fail-safe schemes have been proposed, with names like killer rescue, multi-locus assortment, and daisy chain. All of them share a basic, hopeful premise: it should be possible to engineer a gene drive that’s effective but not too effective. Such a drive might be engineered so as to exhaust itself after a few generations, or it might be yoked to a gene variant that’s limited to a single population on a single island. It has also been suggested that if a gene drive did somehow manage to go rogue it might be possible to send out into the world another gene drive, featuring a “Cas9-triggered chain ablation”—or catcha—sequence, to chase it down. What could possibly go wrong? “}}
CRISPR and the Splice to Survive | The New Yorker
April 28, 2021Covid-19 vaccines have alerted the world to the power of RNA therapies | The Economist
April 27, 2021Manual for Bose Quietcontrol 30 Wireless Headphones, Noise Cancelling – Black – Google Search
April 27, 2021https://www.amazon.com/Bose-Quietcontrol-Wireless-Headphones-Cancelling/dp/B01HETFQA8
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Quotes from the book Missing Each Other
April 27, 2021Quotes I liked below from
Missing Each Other: How to Cultivate Meaningful Connections
Book by Ashley Pallathra and Edward Brodkin
QT:{{”
Attunement is the ability to be aware of your own state of mind and body while also tuning in and connecting to another person. It is the fundamental social skill and the foundation of human relation- ships, without which we are isolated from others and cut off from our own inner life. Attunement relies not only on spoken language, but also on the communication of feeling states through unspoken signals that we exchange, such as facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. Reciprocal communication is a dance between attention and gesture that flows most effectively when people are in tune with one another.6 The nonverbal components of commu- nication start to develop almost as soon as we are born, and they are nurtured in our interactions with our parents or caregivers. We continue to develop them over the course of a lifetime. In relation- ships and interactions of any depth, attunement plays an important role.
An important characteristic of attunement is that it has both inner and outer aspects. In other words, attunement involves pay- ing attention inwardly to our own emotional state, thoughts, and feelings, as well as paying attention outwardly to the cues from the person we’re interacting with
While
it may seem paradoxical, when we’re in conflict with someone, we’re actually much more effective in navigating that conflictual
The first component of attunement is relaxed awareness, which is the ability to be aware of yourself—your own body, feelings, and thoughts—as well as the ability to be aware of what is going
Relaxed awareness is the foundation for the second component of attunement, listening. When you are able to stay relaxed while being aware, you’re in a much better position to “listen,” in the broadest sense of that term
In addition to the raw sensory information about the other
person and yourself that you attend to while listening, attunement requires an ability to understand or interpret this information, to decipher the other person’s cues and put them in perspective
Finally, in addition to relaxed awareness, listening, and under‑ standing, attunement involves an active interchange, a back-and- forth mutual responsiveness, which includes an ability to maintain the connection during the twists and turns of a conversation, and to keep pace with the timing of the interaction. You can think about this as the quality of a conversation that makes it feel “natural.”
Artificial attunement has its roots in the computer science of the 1940s and ’50s, when the field of artificial intelligence (AI) was first emerging, with the aim of developing computers that could simulate aspects of human intelligence. In 1950, Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer scientist, developed a test to assess a computer’s ability to generate humanlike responses using language.2 If a human could not distinguish the text responses of a computer from that of a human, then the machine passed what became known as the Turing test. In 1990, an American inventor, Hugh Loebner, established the Loebner Prize, an annual compe- tition to determine which computer programs can best simulate humans in a Turing test
The Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories plan to market these geminoids to individuals who are living alone or are socially isolated for use as conversational robot companions.30 Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong is also developing a robot, called Sophia, which is extraor- dinarily humanlike in its appearance. Sophia can use AI protocols called Loving AI that enable the robot to interact with humans in fluid dialogs “that are emotionally sensitive and relationally con- nective,” according to the Loving AI website. Hanson Robotics founder, David Hanson, is known for creating “the world’s most humanlike, empathetic robots, endowed with remarkable expres- siveness and interactivity.”31
The key technological development that could provide such
access to brain activity is brain-machine interfaces. With the goal of pursuing better treatments for neurological and psychiatric dis- orders, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) was launched in 2013 to develop more powerful technologies—
including brain-machine interfaces—to measure and manipulate the activity of cells and neural circuits in the human brain
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