UK research calls for robot rights

The paper looked at Britain in 2056 and suggests that fully sentient robots will be commonplace by that time.

UK research calls for robot rights - vnunet.com

DEMO.com Reader Predictions for 2007

DEMO.com Reader Predictions for 2007

"Last week, I gave you my predictions for the coming year and asked you to send along yours. If even a few of these predictions come true, 2007 is going to be a very interesting year, indeed.

From Jonas Lamis, Founder of Singularity University, a community of Technology Futurists:

Virtual Worlds Get Real – Amazon Gets Worried. Second Life becomes a credible next-generation platform for consumer and business commerce. With an immersive collaboration and shopping experience and a strongly appreciating currency, Amazon gets worried.

The rise of the Agent. Next year will see the emergence of personal, cross-platform software services that will act as a proxy for the user. From sorting e-mail to scheduling travel, more administrative tasks will occur in the background. HAL, please book me a round trip ticket to Mars.

IT Management Software is Set Free. Watch out IBM, HP and CA, as a wave of nimble new IT management software vendors offer advertising-supported solutions to better manage the business of IT."

Computers 'could store entire life by 2026'

Some fear that the advent of 'human black boxes' combined with the extension of medical, financial and other digital records will lead to loss of privacy and a dramatic expansion of the nanny state.

Telegraph | News | Computers 'could store entire life by 2026'

The World In 2007 | Towards immortality

The World In 2007 | Towards immortality

From the Economist Magazine...

More and more drugs developed to treat disease are turning out also to offer the potential to “enhance” the cognitive powers of healthy people, and to push human life expectancy much further, perhaps to 115 years and beyond.

and covered on the Accelerating Future blog.

Doctors using Google to diagnose illnesses

One of the premises promoted by Singularity University is that we have to make it easier to connect researchers across disciplines. Innovation - especially that focused on bringing about The Singularity - needs to happen across domains, and the increasing narrowness of expertise of a given researcher is necessary, yet counter productive to that goal.

Consequently, I believe we will see a set of services emerge that will provide cross pollination of concepts for the research and clinnical community. This article points to some interesting trends regarding the availability of this type of information on the web, and the practitioner's increasing ability to find it.

Doctors using Google to diagnose illnesses | the Daily Mail

Venture backed Domantis acquired

From Venturewire today: In one of the largest acquisitions ever of a private biotech company, GlaxoSmithKline said this morning it agreed to buy venture-backed Domantis for about $454 million in cash.

Europe's biggest drug maker said Domantis will become part of GSK's Biopharmaceuticals Centre of Excellence for Drug Discovery while continuing to operate from laboratories in Cambridge, U.K.

One of Domantis' major backers, 3i, said the deal will generate an internal rate of return of 100% on its investment. 3i first backed Domantis in 2004, leading a GBP17.5 million Series B round and then another GBP17 million to extend the round in December 2005.

Also investors in the company are Danish biopharmaceutical group Novo Nordisk, Mitsubishi subsidiary MC Life Science Ventures Inc., Peptech, Albany Ventures and MVM Ltd.

Large pharmaceutical companies have been throwing their cash around as of late to enhance their drug pipelines. Domantis develops antibody therapies based on the smallest functional binding units of human antibodies which means they can be administered orally, by inhalation and topically as well as by injection.