A Frankenstein's lab for growing'spare' human bodies sounds like something ripped straight from an episode of Black Mirror. But scientists really want to make this gruesome concept a reality. In an article published in the MIT Technology Review, three Stanford University scientists argue that so-called'bodyoids' could'revolutionise' medicine. Bodyoids would be physiologically identical to a normal human but engineered not to have consciousness or experience pain, they write. The researchers argue that modern medical science is being held back by a severe shortage of'ethically sourced human bodies'.

To tackle the challenge of how to distribute organs, vaccines, and other kinds of health care, organizations are relying on AI and analytics. But many of them treat ethical considerations as an afterthought. Such factors should be taken into the account at the outset of the effort to create the AI algorithm or analytics model. Health care organizations, like many other enterprises, face steep challenges in their attempt to maximize operational efficiency in the face of resource constraints. Whether it is a hospital's attempt to optimize staffing or a government trying to fairly allocate and distribute limited doses of Covid-19 vaccines, these tasks can be formidable.

Sergey is the founder of the Longevity Vision Fund. Most people may not know this, but we have a modern-day oracle. We have a tool that has already predicted the future several times. What is it, you ask? In 1962, The Jetsons hit our airwaves.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner was a game changer in the world of science-fiction. In 1982, the same year that kid-friendly films like E.T. were released conveying the adventures of a cuddly extra-terrestrial, Scott's vision of the near-future was introducing thought-provoking questions about the advancement of artificial intelligence, humankind's desire to play God, and what constituted being "human" with the rise of genetic engineering. Set in 2019 Los Angeles after the degradation of Earth from a nuclear war, resources are scarce and anyone wealthy enough to do so ventures off-world. Off-world planets are colonized by replicants, synthetic beings created for the purpose of slave labor and dangerous activities unfit for humans. After a replicant revolt, they're forbidden from returning to Earth, but a few escape in a shuttle intent on making a better life for themselves. Deckard is the "Blade Runner" sent to "retire" them, along the way discovering more about his own humanity as he hunts those considered "more human than human."

In Part 1 of this 3-part miniseries, we discussed the origins of artificial intelligence (AI), and we considered some low-hanging AI-enabled fruit in the form of speech recognition, voice control, and machine vision. In Part 2, we noted some of the positive applications of AI, like recognizing skin cancer, identifying the source of outbreaks of food poisoning, and the early detection of potential pandemics. In fact, there are so many feel-good possibilities for the future that they can make your head spin. In a moment, we'll ponder a few more of these before turning our attention to the dark side. Another topic we considered in Part 2 was the combination of mediated reality (MR) and AI, where mediated reality encompasses both augmented reality (AR) and deletive reality (DR). In the case of AR, information is added to the reality we are experiencing.

At the same time, my relaxed post-vacation disposition was quickly rocked by the news of the day and recent discussions regarding the extent of AI bias within New York's financial system. These unrelated incidents are very much connected in representing the paradox of the acceleration of today's inventions. Last Friday, The University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) became the first hospital system to safely transport, via drone, a live organ to a waiting transplant patient with kidney failure. The demonstration illustrates the huge opportunity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to significantly reduce the time, costs, and outcome of organ transplants by removing human-piloted helicopters from the equation. As Dr. Joseph Scalea, UMMC project lead, explains "There remains a woeful disparity between the number of recipients on the organ transplant waiting list and the total number of transplantable organs. This new technology has the potential to help widen the donor organ pool and access to transplantation."

From cofounding Sirius Satellite Radio to launching a biotech company to find a cure for her daughter's illness, Martine Rothblatt has had so much career success that any one of her accomplishments would be a crowning achievement for another entrepreneur. "I always try to convert a moonshot into an earthshot," Rothblatt told hundreds at the Forbes Women's Summit on Tuesday. As the CEO of United Therapeutics, which now sells five FDA-approved pills for pulmonary arterial hypertension, Rothblatt is constantly innovating. Her company has been experimenting with pig cloning and genetic modification to create organ transplants the body doesn't reject. She's also now figured out how to save the some 80% of donated lungs that end up unusable. On the side, Rothblatt is also working on the first electric helicopter and, as a transhumanist, Rothblatt experiments with robots.

Scientists have reversed diabetes in mice by giving them an organ grown in a different species - rats. This is the first time an inter-species organ transplant has successfully treated a medical condition. The breakthrough is seen as proof of principle that'spare-part surgery' could one day be used to overcome disease in humans. Scientists have reversed diabetes in mice (stock image pictured) by giving them an organ grown in a different species - rats. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a genetics professor at Stanford injected rat embryos with mouse stem cells.

It is striking just how little we know about human development, especially given we are now decades into the modern era of biology. How is it possible that we understand exquisitely well how worms, fruit flies, and rodents develop, but our own species' development remains a black box? Paul Knoepfler (@pknoepfler) is a stem cell biologist at UC Davis and writes about science at The Niche. His most recent book is GMO Sapiens: The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies. One big reason is that for a long time, the politics of doing science on human embryos and fetuses have been radioactive.

It is said of the ancient Chinese game go that the number of possible positions on its board exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. This is old news, presumably, to masters of go and master mathematicians. To the rest of us it came as something of a shock when it became common knowledge in March, the occasion being the defeat -- shocking in itself -- of a world-ranking go master by a mere (so we would have said, once upon a time) computer. Or perhaps, giving it a positive spin, we should say "victory" instead of "defeat": a computer's victory over a mere human. What is the human brain to make of such facts?