Insights March 25th, 2016
Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Future Trends: Curing AIDS and Accidental Racist Sex Robots we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, March 25th, 2016.
Curing AIDS by CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing
Rafal Kaminski, Yilan Chen, Tracy Fischer, Ellen Tedaldi, Alessandro Napoli, Yonggang Zhang, Jonathan Karn, Wenhui Hu & Kamel Khalili have released their research ‘Removing HIV-1 Genomes from Human T-lymphoid Cells by CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing’
We employed an RNA-guided CRISPR/Cas9 DNA editing system to precisely remove the entire HIV-1 genome spanning between 5′ and 3′ LTRs of integrated HIV-1 proviral DNA copies from latently infected human CD4+ T-cells. Comprehensive assessment of whole-genome sequencing of HIV-1 eradicated cells ruled out any off-target effects by our CRISPR/Cas9 technology that might compromise the integrity of the host genome and further showed no effect on several cell health indices including viability, cell cycle and apoptosis. Persistent co-expression of Cas9 and the specific targeting guide RNAs in HIV-1-eradicated T-cells protected them against new infection by HIV-1. Lentivirus-delivered CRISPR/Cas9 significantly diminished HIV-1 replication in infected primary CD4+ T-cell cultures and drastically reduced viral load in ex vivo culture of CD4+ T-cells obtained from HIV-1 infected patients. Thus, gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9 may provide a new therapeutic path for eliminating HIV-1 DNA from CD4+ T-cells and potentially serve as a novel and effective platform toward curing AIDS.
Amazing!
Via Nature.com
Swipe the Vote with Tinder
Starting today, users in the U.S. may see a ‘Swipe the Vote’ video card when they are swiping. Simply tap on the card and to swipe right on stances you agree with and left on those you don’t. To learn more about each issue, just tap the card before your swipe.
Once you’ve swiped through ten of the hottest issues, you’ll be matched with the candidate who best matches your views. We’ll show you how you compare with other candidates, too! Tap on candidates to learn more about the specific issues you agree and disagree on. From there, you can share who you matched with on social and – most importantly – easily register to vote with Rock the Vote.
Via Tinder
Microsoft deletes ‘teen girl’ AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours
A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11’-proclaiming robot.
Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as ‘The AI with zero chill’ – and that she certainly is.
Via The Telegraph
Kevin Kelly – 12 Inevitable Tech Forces That Will Shape Our Future
Via SXSW
The Future of Exobionic Sports with a 3200kg Robot
In this episode of The Modern Futures Podcast Nikolas interviews Engineer and Inventor Jonathan Tippett about the projects that defined the amazing eatART Foundation, his exobionic mech sports robot project PROSTHESIS, and what it takes to redfine the world of sports using kinetically-powered robotics.
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See the last 4 week’s Future Trends articles here:
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Future Trends: Facebook and Google go into Healthcare (as predicted)
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Future Trends: Smart Mosquitos, Microscopes, and Blood Cells
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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.
