Category: Techniques to prevent suffering
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A Brain Implant that Automatically Detects and Kills Pain?
It’s basically a tag-team of spy and sleeper agent. The “spy” listens to electrical chatter in a brain region that processes pain—along with dozens of other tasks—and decodes it in real time. Once it detects an electrical signal that suggests “pain found,” it sends the information to the “sleeper agent,” a computer chip implanted in…
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Could CRISP eliminate the need for opioids?
Pain can soon be genetically eradicated. Chronic pain, which is classified as a pain that lasts for 3 months or more, affects between 19 to 50 percent of the world population. Despite its prevalence, it remains a difficult diagnosis to treat well. In a new study, researchers say there may soon be a new treatment…
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The Challenge of Determining Whether an A.I. Is Sentient, by Carissa Véliz
“…sentience may go unnoticed for years, as was the case with Martin Pistorious [1] … Because brain death can be misdiagnosed [2], and because we have little understanding of the necessary and sufficient causes for consciousness and therefore cannot be certain of when someone might be in pain, some experts have called for the use…
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An overview of wagers for reducing future suffering
“Pascal’s wager is a famous argument for why one should believe in God. If God exists, then eternal life in heaven or hell is at stake, but if God doesn’t exist, one’s belief does not matter much – so one should wager on the former. (The validity of this argument has been discussed at length.)…
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Researchers discover technique to alter a patient’s DNA that could cut chronic agony for sufferers
Scientists have discovered how to switch off a key ‘pain gene’, dramatically raising hopes of a long-term treatment to relieve the agony of serious illness for millions. The revolutionary technique alters a patient’s DNA, silencing a gene that transmits pain signals up the spine. Preliminary studies on mice have already proven successful and US researchers…
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Opportunities for an astronomical reduction of suffering
This is a list of situations, projects or initiatives in which there could be an “astronomical” (huge) reduction in the amount of suffering compared to what currently exists or is expected. Many of these situations (but not necessarily all of them) involve a high risk in the sense that they are difficult projects whose probability…