source: https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/xenotransplantation-pigs-heart-kidney-donor-virus.html#:~:text=Xenotransplantation%20could%20be%20the%20future,could%20be%20kept%20virus%2Dfree.&text=Not%20too%20far%20in%20the,busy%20creating%20pig%2Dhuman%20hybrids.

 

 

Date	9/23/2022
publishing company	STATEGROUP
Title	Xenotransplantation could be the future—if only the pigs could be kept virus-free.
summarize	This article is about xenotransplantation. There are over 100,000 Americans on the national transplant list in the United States, with an average of 17 dying waiting for an organ transplant. So, researchers were interested in xenotransplantation, which involves transplanting organs of other species into humans to prevent this from happening and to save human life. This article focuses on the heart, among many organs. Pigs are used for human heart transplantation, which are about 97% similar to human hearts. But this is said to be very dangerous. As reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, 57-year-old David Bennett, who received a pig heart transplant, contracted pCMV and died 60 days after surgery. This is due to an immune rejection reaction. This must be overcome in order to safely receive a pig's heart, which requires that the pig be "humanized" to be compatible with our bodies. To be humanized, at least three pig genes need to be knocked out using the gene-editing tool CRISPR. In addition, it takes an enormous amount of time, money and effort to bring pigs to birth aseptically.
My thought	It was amazing that a pig, a species different from a human, not a monkey or a chimpanzee, resembled a human heart, and that it survived for about 60 days after transplanting it into a human. And also It was surprising that transplanting pig hearts into humans requires a tremendous amount of time and effort, including genetic manipulation, sterility, and regular testing. But I focused more on the inside of this seemingly good study. Pigs judged to be free of viruses through the above complicated process, when they grow to the size of an adult human after 6 months, cut their organs and prepare for transplantation into humans. I believe that human life is important, but that of other animals is just as important. Pigs, born to give new life to humans, die in less than six months, without even enjoying freedom, only for humans. I think this kind of behavior is really unethical. Through this article, I became more interested in artificial organs that can create organs that can give people new life without killing animals, and I want to explore more about them.
New learn/ topics to explore further/	I want to explore more about artificial organs   1.   How can we make an artificial organ that resembles the structure of a human organ?       2.   What is the most important thing about artificial organs?   3.   Have there been any cases of artificial organs being transplanted into humans?   4.   If an artificial organ is transplanted into a human, will it be usable forever? Should I change it every year or every few years?   5.   The inner side of the artificial organ   6.    Prons and cons of artificial organs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 source:  https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/new-miniature-heart-could-help-test-heart-disease-cures/

 

 

 

Date	10/14/2022
publishing company	Boston University
Title	New Miniature Heart could help speed hear disease cures
summarize	According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every 36 seconds a person dies from heart disease. For this reason, it is important to create an artificial heart that can replace the real human heart. Boston University has created a replica of a heart chamber using a combination of nanoengineered parts and human heart tissue. There are no springs or external power sources—like the real thing, it just beats by itself, driven by the live heart tissue grown from stem cells.  In addition, this invention can be widely used not only for the heart but also for various organs, avoiding dangerous experiments that risk the lives of humans and animals.
My thought	As we all know, the heart is one of the most important organs in our body. There are many different types of heart disease, including coronary artery disease (CAD), cardiac arrhythmias, heart failure, etc. However, even if we do not have heart disease, as we get older, 1/3 of the heart muscle cells die, making it difficult to carry out our daily life. When I see this, the health of the heart seems to be the health of our whole body. Look at the article, Boston University has created an artificial heart for heart failure. Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle doesn't pump blood as well as it should. (Source: Mayo Clinic) The heart is made up of muscles, and when the muscles stop, we die. That's why the heart muscle is so important. Because the muscle of the heart is what makes the heartbeat,   I thought that to make the heartbeat, I had to give it a strong force or artificially tap it like a strong spring. However, according to the article above, the spring cannot simulate the force acting on the actual muscle of a person, so it is difficult to live a lifetime. So the Boston University students used human heart tissue and nano-engineered parts instead of a spring machine that beats itself by heart tissue. I had this kind of shock because I had never heard of it or seen it before. This made me more interested in nanotechnology and further wanted to explore more about medical devices for adults with poor heart health.
New learn/ topics to explore further/	1, What is nano-engineering?     2, about nanotechnology medical devices     3. What kinds of medical device that can help people who have heart disease, or poor heart health?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

The Real Threat From A.I. Isn’t Superintelligence. It’s Gullibility.

 

 

Possessed Photography/Unsplash

 

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence over the past few decades, from pipe dream to reality, has been staggering. A.I. programs have long been chess and Jeopardy! Champions, but they have also conquered poker, crossword puzzles, Go, and even protein folding. They power the social media, video, and search sites we all use daily, and very recently they have leaped into a realm previously thought unimaginable for computers: artistic creativity.

 

Given this meteoric ascent, it’s not surprising that there are continued warnings of a bleak Terminator-style future of humanity destroyed by superintelligent A.I.s that we unwittingly unleash upon ourselves. But when you look beyond the splashy headlines, you’ll see that the real danger isn’t how smart A.I.s are. It’s how mindless they are—and how delusional we tend to be about their so-called intelligence.

 

Last summer an engineer at Google claimed the company’s latest A.I. chatbot is a sentient being because … it told him so. This chatbot, similar to the one Facebook’s parent company recently released publicly, can indeed give you the impression you’re talking to a futuristic, conscious creature. But this is an illusion—it is merely a calculator that chooses words semi-randomly based on statistical patterns from the internet text it was trained on. It has no comprehension of the words it produces, nor does it have any thoughts or feelings. It’s just a fancier version of the autocomplete feature on your phone.

 

Chatbots have come a long way since early primitive attempts in the 1960s, but they are no closer to thinking for themselves than they were back then. There is zero chance a current A.I. chatbot will rebel in an act of free will—all they do is turn text prompts into probabilities and then turn these probabilities into words. Future versions of these A.I.s aren’t going to decide to exterminate the human race; they are going to kill people when we foolishly put them in positions of power that they are far too stupid to have—such as dispensing medical advice or running a suicide prevention hotline.

 

It’s been said that TikTok’s algorithm reads your mind. But it’s not reading your mind—it’s reading your data. TikTok finds users with similar viewing histories as you and selects videos for you that they’ve watched and interacted with favorably. It’s impressive, but it’s just statistics. Similarly, the A.I. systems used by Facebook and Instagram and Twitter don’t know what information is true, what posts are good for your mental health, what content helps democracy flourish—all they know is what you and others like you have done on the platform in the past and they use this data to predict what you’ll likely do there in the future.

 

Don’t worry about superintelligent A.I.s trying to enslave us; worry about ignorant and venal A.I.s designed to squeeze every penny of online ad revenue out of us.

 

And worry about police agencies that gullibly think A.I.s can anticipate crimes before they occur—when in reality all they do is perpetuate harmful stereotypes about minorities.

 

The reality is that no A.I. could ever harm us unless we explicitly provide it the opportunity to do so—yet we seem hellbent on putting unqualified A.I.s in powerful decision-making positions where they could do exactly that.

 

Part of why we ascribe far greater intelligence and autonomy to A.I.s than they merit is because their inner-workings are largely inscrutable. They involve lots of math, lots of computer code, and billions of parameters. This complexity blinds us, and our imagination fills in what we don’t see with more than is actually there.

 

In 1770, a chess playing robot—or “automaton,” in the parlance of the day—was created that for almost a century traveled the world and defeated many flabbergasted challengers, including notable individuals such as Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. But it was eventually revealed to be a hoax: This was not some remarkable early form of A.I., it was just a contraption in which a human chess player could hide in a box and control a pair of mechanical arms. People so desperately wanted to see intelligence in a machine that for 84 years they overlooked the much more banal (and obvious, in hindsight) explanation: chicanery.

 

While our technology has progressed by leaps and bounds since the 18th century, our romantic attitude toward it has not. We still refuse to look inside the box, instead choosing to believe that magic in the form of superintelligence is occurring, or that it is just around the corner. This fanciful yearning distracts us from the genuine danger A.I. poses when we mistakenly think it is much smarter than it actually is. And if the past 250 years are any indication, this is the real danger that will persist into our future.

 

Just as people in the 18th and 19th centuries overlooked the banal truth behind the chess playing automaton, people today are overlooking a banal but effective way to protect our future selves from the risk of runaway A.I.s. We should expand A.I. literacy efforts to schools and the wider public so that people are less susceptible to the illusions of A.I. grandeur peddled by futurists and technology companies whose economic livelihood depends on convincing you that A.I. is far more capable than it really is.

 

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

 

[Source https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/artificial-intelligence-superintelligence-gullibility.html]