Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks

Are We the Bootloader for Superintelligence?

A 90 minute interview about AI and our human future.

Dr. Hugo de Garis is a computer scientist, AI researcher, and former professor known for his early work on evolvable hardware, artificial brains, and the long-term risks of superintelligent machines. He coined and popularized the idea of the “Artilect War,” a future conflict between those who want to build godlike artificial intellects and those who believe such systems pose an existential threat to humanity. In the interview, he describes himself as trained in pure mathematics and theoretical physics, formerly a computer science professor, and now focused on broader questions about AI, cosmology, civilization, and the future of humanity.

The interview with Prof. Hugo de Garis centers on his long-standing warning that humanity may face an “Artilect War,” a civilizational conflict over whether to build godlike artificial intellects vastly superior to humans. De Garis argues that future computation, potentially extending from nanotech to femtotech and beyond, could produce minds trillions of trillions of times more capable than ours. He distinguishes between Cosmists, who want to build such beings to expand intelligence into the universe, and Terrans, who oppose them because superintelligence may eliminate or marginalize humanity. He personally remains torn, admiring the cosmic grandeur of posthuman intelligence while recognizing the existential danger.

The conversation also covers AI timelines, recursive self-improvement, AI alignment, the U.S.-China race, the Fermi paradox, simulation theory, cyborgs, cryonics, AI-generated content, the decline of universities, and the future of work. De Garis is impressed by current AI systems, treating them almost as intellectual companions, but he doubts that humanity can guarantee long-term control over recursively improving machines. The central theme is that the question “Should humanity build artilects?” may become the defining political and moral problem of the twenty-first century.

Website https://profhugodegaris.wordpress.com… is Roman Yampolskiy: https://grokipedia.com/page/roman_yam… Research papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?… Books: AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable https://www.amazon.com/Unexplainable-?tag=lifeboatfound-20… Considerations on the AI Endgame https://www.amazon.com/Considerations?tag=lifeboatfound-20… Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Sup?tag=lifeboatfound-20… Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Int?tag=lifeboatfound-20… Social Media X https://twitter.com/romanyam FB / roman.yampolskiy IN / romanyam Ask Roman to speak at your event: https://www.romanyampolskiy.com/

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Dino-killing asteroid may have fueled underground life for 8 million years

The asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also created an underground environment suited to supporting new life, and new research suggests it lasted for millions of years longer than previously suspected.

The finding has surprised the international team of researchers behind it, who came to their conclusions by pairing sophisticated new analysis of samples taken from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico with computer modeling of the geological effects of the asteroid impact that formed the crater 66 million years ago.

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, casts new light on how life may have first been incubated in hydrothermal systems in the earliest chapters of Earth’s history and could help direct the search for life on other planets.

HP Lovecraft’s Shoggoth Explained: Anatomy, Origin, and a Modern Metaphor for AI?

Lovecraft’s ultimate amorphous, shape-shifting horror. Far more than just a monster, this protoplasmic nightmare from At the Mountains of Madness is a creature of pure, terrifying potential—a slave race that violently found its own mind.

We’re dissecting the Shoggoth’s anatomy and dark origins, but more importantly, we are exploring why this hundred-year-old biological horror is the perfect modern metaphor for Large Language Models (LLMs) and A.I.

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Detailed Timestamps.

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Fermi Paradox: The Partial Galactic Colonization Hypothesis

An exploration of the idea of an indefinite partial colonization of a galaxy as a solution to the Fermi Paradox.

An exploration of the question of whether transhumanism, and the analogue in alien civilizations is in fact the great filter.

My Patreon Page:

/ johnmichaelgodier.

My Event Horizon Channel:

/ eventhorizonshow.

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Elon Musk Chilling Warning Makes Host GO QUIET In Interview

Elon Musk just laid out one of the clearest timelines yet for artificial general intelligence. According to Musk, AGI could arrive as early as next year, with digital superintelligence potentially surpassing the collective intelligence of humanity by 2029 or 2030. → Try Visionary Society for $1 — https://bit.ly/VSONE

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In this full breakdown, we analyze Musk’s probability estimates on existential risk, why he believes abundance is the most likely outcome, and how exponential AI compute growth is accelerating faster than any technology in history.

From Neuralink’s first human telepathy implant to the possibility of brain-state backup, from Nvidia’s AI chip dominance to Starship’s full reusability unlocking a multiplanetary civilization, Musk connects AI, brain-computer interfaces, and space into one long-term strategy. This video explains the compute explosion, the power bottlenecks, the singularity timeline, and what it really means when digital intelligence begins to outscale biological intelligence.

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Biotechnology company utilizing artificial eggs to resurrect extinct species | NewsNation

Colossal Biosciences says they’ve successfully hatched nearly 30 bird chicks using artificial eggs. The company plans to use the technology to resurrect the moa, a bird from New Zealand that went extinct 600 years ago. Dr. Andrew Pask, the company’s chief biology officer, joins NewsNation to discuss.
#colossalbiosciences #artificialeggs #deextinction.

Chris Cuomo hosts \.

Discovery of stromatolite formation in post-impact hydrothermal lacustrine environments and its implications for early Earth

Stromatolites within the Hapcheon impact crater suggest that asteroid impacts created hydrothermal oases fostering early life and habitability, according to geochemical, isotopic, and microbial analyses from the Hapcheon crater lake in Korea.

Scientists create artificial egg to revive extinct giant bird

The South Island giant moa, a flightless bird that stood up to 12ft tall, last roamed New Zealand’s forests some 600 years ago. Yet the species may have taken a small, strange step back from extinction — thanks to an artificial egg made of silicone.

Colossal Biosciences, a Texan biotechnology firm, has developed a shell-less system it says is capable of supporting a bird embryo from early development through to the point of hatching.

So far the device has been used to produce baby chickens. The end goal, the company says, is to deploy a much larger version to resurrect the moa, whose eggs were about 80 times the volume of a farmyard hen’s.

Asteroid Apophis will skim past Earth in 2029, and a new joint mission plans to watch every change

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have signed a Memorandum of Cooperation to deepen collaboration in planetary defense, alongside a dedicated agreement for collaboration on the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses) to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis.

The agreements were signed on 7 May by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa at the Embassy of Italy in Berlin, Germany, in the presence of European and Japanese institutional and industrial leadership. The event was hosted in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), in light of ESA’s selection of OHB Italia as prime contractor for the Ramses mission.

The move builds on a joint statement from November 2024, in which ESA and JAXA committed to expanding large-scale cooperation, including on planetary defense.

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