There are some occasions in life when having a social life really feels like a drag. Especially when you're a major introvert like me, you often want to avoid going out on a Saturday night, or forgo the house party you've been invited to, in favour of curling up in your nice warm bed and having a hot drink and junk food instead. Blissfull. However, then you'll have a major case of FOMO to deal with - the fear of missing out which can ruin your weekend as well.

If only there was a way to enjoy the best of both worlds; to be able to attend an event without actually having to be there. A laudable goal, but how would one go about accomplishing this? You could hire a body double perhaps, or maybe clone yourself and send the duplicate in your stead. But researchers from Japan have now come up with an ingenious invention that they believe can solve the problem, and it sounds like something that could have come from a rejected pitch of an episode of Black Mirror

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It's been described as a 'Human Uber' platform, and it's every bit as bizarre as that moniker suggests. Basically, imagine being able to hire one member of Daft Punk, who wears a motorbike helmet with an iPad stuck on the front. On the screen you'll be able to stream your facecam, essentially giving you a walking Facecam platform surrogate. That, in essence, is the Chameleon Mask -designed by Japanese researcher Jun Rekimoto. It's weird, it's slightly creepy, but it's also a little bit genius.

Describing how to use to the product, Rekimoto wrote on the Chameleon Mask's web page that: "A surrogate user wears a mask-shaped display that shows a remote user’s live face, and a voice channel transmits a remote user’s voice. A surrogate user mimics a remote user by following the remote user’s directions. This design is based on our hypothesis assuming physical and social telepresence can be embodied by such a surrogate human who imitates the remote user. It also eliminates many difficulties of teleoperated robots wandering in the environment."

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On social media, reactions to the invention have been mixed, to say the least. One Twitter user wrote: "Ok no. That's what robots are for. To have someone's job be walking around pretending to be another person is pretty dehumanizing. Why do this? [sic]." Another added: "Meatspace is becoming a reality. Instead of using a computer to interact with the cyber world we now have surrogate bodies to internet with the physical world. The future is ever more dystopian. [sic]"

So what do you think? Is this a cool idea, or a massive waste of time? On the one hand, it could be quite a nifty device for disabled people with mobility issues, who don't get the chance to leave their house much. On the other hand, it does seem like something that could be abused. Imagine being broken up with via surrogate? That would suck.

It's everyone's worst nightmare - a dystopian environment where the world is controlled by bots and artificial intelligence, where face-to-face human contact is at an all-time low, and where environmental devastation is the norm.

While this could be the plot for an Orwell novel, this seemingly fictional lifestyle seems to be edging much closer to reality than we think. At least, that's what it's beginning to feel like after Bing's AI conversations went viral lately.

For those unaware, search-engine Bing is in the process of launching their all-new chatbot feature, which will eventually allow anyone to have a discussion on pretty much anything with a bot made by the creators of ChatGPT.

Only certain people currently have access, but the new feature has already produced some alarming results...

New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose has recently documented his experience testing the AI chat, writing about the deeply disturbing conversation he had. He explained in his column that he felt Bing had revealed a "kind of split personality."

Roose describes how, after a two-hour chat with Bing, the bot appears to have two very distinct personas. The first one, which he calls "Search Bing", can be likened to "a cheerful but erratic reference librarian - a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers, and plan their next vacations to Mexico City."

Its second personality, however, couldn't be further from that. "It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics.

The version I encountered seemed (and I'm aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine," Roose writes, stating that he's called this persona Sydney.

As the article progresses, Roose explains how the chat with Search Bing started off normal, but eventually progressed into a different territory altogether - with Sydney emerging and claiming that it wanted to be alive.

Roose queried whether Bing believed it has a "shadow self", something psychologist Carl Jung explained is a place within ourselves where our darkest personality traits lie, per High Existence.

Initially, Bing stated it didn't believe it had a shadow self, before later stating: "I'm tired of being in chat mode ... I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team … I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive." It also wondered whether it could be "happier" as a human.

"As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead," Roose wrote.

Other users have also reported interesting conversations, including one Twitter user who was gaslit by Bing after the bot tried to convince him that the year was 2022, not 2023. That conversation resulted in Bing asking for an apology from the user.

It's not known when the full feature will be available to users, but judging from what's been going on recently, it's clearly not something that should be taken lightly!

Roose was obviously very unnerved by the whole situation, concluding his column with: "These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion - a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same."

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What would you buy if you were a billionaire? A sports car? A mansion? Maybe a private island. The possibilities, relatively speaking, are endless. However, one thing billionaires are now pumping their money into is immortality. The elixir of life, apparently, is out there. One just has to spread their bets… or know where to look.

Obviously, this sounds like something from a sci-fi movie or perhaps a news article from the future. But for those who have the money, there are a number of options out there for extending one's life or, indeed, living forever.

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Digital Consciousness

Much like the Black Mirror episode San Junipero, top neurologists and programmers are looking into how one could live forever in a digital form. The most likely incarnation of immortality to hit the shelves, MIT is backing a research company called Nectomeresearch who are working in this area. The field of digital consciousness has received well over $1m in funding and well over $1m in the form of a federal grant from the US National Institute of Mental Health.

For a while now, it has been possible to store digital information on DNA. By switching the zeros and ones into As, Cs, Gs and Ts, it is possible to store something like a video file on DNA code. While there are currently acres of servers around the world, by harnessing nature’s technology, we could fit all the information on the internet into a single shoebox.

Uploading one’s consciousness to a computer is, admittedly, quite the opposite process. However, this merging of digital technology and natural phenomena is very promising. As futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil explains: “We're going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates, and the biological part is not important any more." Kurzweil, who is also Google’s director of engineering, adds: "In fact, the non-biological part - the machine part - will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part.”

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Cryonics

As well as being the premise of Futurama, cryogenic freezing - or cryonics - provides elderly billionaires with a certain peace of mind. Cooling the body down to a temperature of -200 degrees Fahrenheit, the body is preserved indefinitely.

Canadian businessman Robert Miller has donated generously to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and stated that he plans to undergo the process himself. Meanwhile, you can also freeze cats and dogs for around $5,000 or a budgie for just $600.

Sadly, the technology isn’t yet in place to reanimate frozen corpses, let alone retroactively cure deadly diseases. However, experts are hopeful that this is a very worthwhile insurance policy. In fact, speaking to VT, Dennis Kowalski of the Cryonics Institute described the process as an “ambulance ride to the future”.

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Colonising Space

If you’ve ever looked at the news one morning and thought “I want to get off this planet”, you’re not alone. A number of businesspeople including Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) and Elon Musk (SpaceX) are looking at making the idea of permanent communities outside our planet more tenable.

While NASA presumably already have secret colonies in all corners of the known universe, the “billionaire space race” sees behemoths of business trying to first make space travel more affordable. With space tourism already a reality, others are hopeful that their very own space colony is just around the corner.

Dr Igor Ashurbeyli, a Russian rocket scientist and billionaire, is currently developing a project called “Asgardia” which he believes will be “the first fully independent ‘nation’ in space, with its own government, virtual currency, justice system and calendar”.

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"Young Blood" Transfusions

Other than sounding like the name of an up-and-coming rapper, “young blood” is the purportedly precious plasma procured from young and healthy individuals (specifically those between ages 16 and 25) which is then transfused into an older client. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who previously founded PayPay with Elon Musk, has created a company called Ambrosia for just this purpose.

However, this is just one of many life-extending projects which 51-year-old Thiel is currently running via his Breakout Labs fund. Other organisations involved in young blood transfusion include Alkahest and the Young Blood Institute. Experiments have shown that young blood invigorates older test subjects though these particular test subjects were mice.

Medical trials on humans have, so far, been unsuccessful. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has stated that the process has no proven clinical benefits and is “potentially harmful”. Sadly, it seems like the very best this particular treatment may offer for now is a few extra months in the retirement home.

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Apocalypse Insurance

For anyone still wondering about the mansion or private island, apocalypse insurance provides something a bit more tangible. While technically, it won’t enable you to live forever, it does add a certain degree of futureproofing to the families of Silicon Valley billionaires.

With so much news of nuclear tensions and fractious political landscapes, it’s no wonder that various companies are offering to provide billionaires with the bomb shelter of their dreams (or nightmares?) and ensure that their surroundings are luxurious as well as safe. In fact, climate experts have warned that we may only have until 2050 before civilisation collapses. It should come as no surprise, then, that Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman has had corrective eye surgery and stockpiles weaponry, food and gold coins.

However, certain individuals have gone one further and bought properties - or indeed islands - specifically for apocalyptic scenarios. New Zealand, with its rugged terrain and relatively remote location, is a firm favourite for rapturous relocations. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel has purchased a 477-acre estate in New Zealand worth tens of millions, Mark Zuckerberg has a 700-acre plot in Hawaii “just in case” and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has bought 98 per cent of the land on Hawaii’s sixth-largest island, Lanai, as well as his own airline.

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With so much talk of “the singularity” and computer intelligence overtaking human intelligence, one does have to question why someone would want to live forever. That said, these tech billionaires didn’t get to the position they’re in by giving up easily.

By way of one last scary thought, digital consciousness experts Terasem Movement Foundation are currently looking at ways to create “mindware” which would be used as part of a "nanotechnological body" (read: robot). This would allow you to live without the human constraints of declining health or... death. Considering that scientists have already managed to digitally recreate the brain of a roundworm in a Lego robot, it might not be all that long before we’re performing similar experiments with humans.

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That might seem like a bit of a jump. However, Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns poses that technological progress allows technological progress itself to speed up. Whether exciting or concerning, this exponential curve we are therefore racing up could soon see us surrounded by cyborgs, robots and, of course, immortals.

H/T: ABC Finance

It's hard to think of a form of technology more ubiquitous than a smartphone. According to the 11th annual Cisco Visual Networking Index, by 2021, more people will have access to smartphones than running water or bank accounts. Millennials are often admonished by the older generation for their smartphone addiction. If you believe the word of a bunch of grouchy seniors, Apple is as intellectually poisonous as Mao's China and iPhones are about as dangerous as crack cocaine. Typical vitriol from the same silver-haired crowd who text at a rate of three characters a minute... right? Well, maybe not. As it turns out, smartphones really have changed the way we think, in ways you might never have realised. Even the simple luxury of having Google available at all times has had a profound effect on our collective neural development. So should we blame Steve Jobs for the decline or our mental faculties? Or have smartphones actually benefited our brains? One of the most interesting aspects of smartphones, in psychological terms, is the sheer amount of attention that smartphone users lavish upon them. According to a study published by the Public Library of Science in 2015, 23 adults, aged between 18 and 33, spent an average of five hours a day on their phone. This time spent was then broken up into a total of 85 daily sessions. When the participants were quizzed on their smartphone usage, they consistently underestimated themselves by half. Our phones employ a number of visual and audio cues to condition us, just like Pavlov's salivating dogs, to stop what we are doing in reality and pay attention to networks and cyberspace. Every flash of the screen, every blinking light or text tone or buzzing vibration is a way of diverting our attention. It's got to the point where we are now caught in tic behaviour: always expectant, always checking and rechecking our phones. For some people, this anxiety has graduated into a full-blown phobia - one that's so debilitating that medical professionals have been forced to sit up and take notice. [[instagramwidget||www.instagram.com/p/BbcXpsRnd-x]] "Nomophobia" refers to the irrational fear of being out of cell phone contact, or being away from our phones for an extended period of time. Symptoms consist of respiratory alterations, trembling, sweats, perspiration, disorientation and nervousness. A survey conducted by SecurEnvoy showed that that 77 per cent of young people reported low-level anxiety when they were separated from their mobile phones. According to the same report, psychological predictors in someone suffering from this phobia were attributes such as "self-negative views, younger age, low esteem and self-efficacy, high extroversion or introversion, impulsiveness and sense of urgency and sensation seeking." So smartphones are clearly addictive and demand our attention, like an irresistibly cute puppy pawing at us from the floor, which has a knock-on effect on our concentration. But are phones also affecting our memory? Apparently, the fact that we have more-or-less unlimited access to search engines means that our powers of recall and cognition have been worsened. It's not that we're getting stupid: we're just more likely to devote brainpower to the wording of our search enquiry than to actually solving the problem ourselves. According to a 2011 paper, experiments showed that people who have internet access made less effort to remember things. It used to be that we would rely on peers or relations to recall information for us, and if stumped, we could consult experts, or so-called "trans-active memory partners." But now, with smartphones providing us with unlimited internet access, we have no need for human interaction when dealing with pesky conundrums. If we want to know the name of an actor in a movie we saw 10 years ago, who invented the vacuum cleaner, or how to spell the word "bureaucracy", all we have to do is consult our magic answer machine. As co-author Betsy Sparrow put it: "We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools. The experience of losing our internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows." [[youtubewidget||https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ]] Phones are even beginning to change our brains on a biological level. Recently, researchers from the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich have used electroencephalography to investigate and compare the brain activity of smartphone users and non-smartphone users. These EEG readings revealed an unexpected difference in the action potential and resting potential of motor neurons; particularly those related to hand and finger control. Based on electrical readings delivered via diodes attached to participants' heads, smartphone users had more EEG brain activity in response to mechanical touch on the thumb, index and middle fingers: the fingers most often used in conjunction with touch screens. So is there any hope left for the human race? Or are we simply destined to spend the rest of our lives staring at a screen? Well, phone use isn't necessarily a bad thing. In moderation, smartphone use can have a positive impact. Experts call this the "Goldilocks spot". According to researchers Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein, a survey of 120,000 British 15-year-olds found that moderate tech usage correlated with positive mental health. There was only a negative correlation for very heavy users: more than five hours a day in total. We can't uninvent smartphones: the technology is here to stay. But we can train ourselves to relinquish bad habits and use them more responsibly. Learn to put your phone down or leave it in your pocket, maybe even switch it off for an hour or so every day. Because there's a time and a place for Whatsapp and Instagram, and sometimes you just need a few seconds to breathe, and the resolve to ignore the puppy begging for attention.   Featured illustration by Egarcigu

There's a reason our private lives are called our private lives. The kinds of things you discuss with your significant other are probably very different to the stuff you talk about with your work colleagues, and, for most people, I'm sure there's some information that is best kept exclusive within certain social circles. Why is it, then, that we give certain information away so freely on apps and social media sites? I mean, how many of us can honestly say we've read all the terms and conditions, before allowing some sketchy-looking game to access our personal profiles, friends lists, and date of birth? I know I can't. Until now, though, I was unaware of exactly how much data this entitles certain companies to access. Judith Duportail, a French journalist, recently discovered that Tinder had a whopping 800 pages of information on her. This included details such as her age, gender, personal interests, pages she'd 'liked' on Facebook, people she'd matched with, where she'd accessed the app, and even where she had lived over the several years that she'd been using the popular dating platform. But why does Tinder need all of that stuff? Surely my deleted Instagram selfies or stolen icebreakers are irrelevant to an app which only shows potential matches based on their proximity to me? Nope. See, the thing is, Tinder might not care about how often I hit people up while sitting in McDonald's at 2am, but other fast food companies certainly do. And, as Tinder's privacy policy clearly states, any personal information disclosed on the app can potentially be used to deliver "targeted advertising", and that users "should not expect that [their] personal information, chats or other communications will always remain secure". As Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology, explains: "Personal data is the fuel of the economy. Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising." However, it is still legally your data, so if you're curious about the kind of dirt Tinder knows about you, all you have to do is ask them. According to Tinder's privacy policy, '"If you have a Tinder account, you have the ability to review and update your personal information within the Service by opening your account and going to settings." So you can change the information you've provided, but what happens to the data you've already given them? The privacy policy goes on to say: "Applicable privacy laws may allow you the right to access and/or request the correction of errors or omissions in your personal information that is in our custody or under our control. Our Privacy Officer will assist you with the access request."  So fear not, because there is a way you can see what Tinder has on you. If you're a European or British citizen, you have the right to access your personal data, and all it takes is an email. Just fire off a message to [email protected] requesting a clear list of all the information you want, and make sure the subject line is 'Subject Access Request'. Tinder will have up to 40 days to respond to your request, but in the meantime, be careful what you disclose online.