Lifeboat Foundation

The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene.

The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost their Y chromosome and have lived to tell the tale.

A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows how the spiny rat has evolved a new male-determining gene.

A raft of industry experts have given their views on the likely impact of artificial intelligence on humanity in the future. The responses are unsurprisingly mixed.

The Guardian has released an interesting article regarding the potential socioeconomic and political impact of the ever-increasing rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) on society. By asking various experts in the field on the subject, the responses were, not surprisingly, a mixed bag of doom, gloom, and hope.

Continue reading “The rise of AI: ‘AI doomsday’ or the best thing since sliced bread?” »

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Geneticists have unearthed a major event in the ancient history of sturgeons and paddlefish that has significant implications for the way we understand evolution. They have pinpointed a previously hidden “whole genome duplication” (WGD) in the common ancestor of these species, which seemingly opened the door to genetic variations that may have conferred an advantage around the time of a major mass extinction some 200 million years ago.

The big-picture finding suggests that there may be many more overlooked, shared WGDs in other species before periods of extreme environmental upheaval throughout Earth’s tumultuous history.

The research, led by Professor Aoife McLysaght and Dr. Anthony Redmond from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, has just been published in Nature Communications.

As apocalyptic warnings go, today is right up there. Some of the world’s most influential tech geniuses and entrepreneurs say AI risks the extinction of humanity.

Having lobbed the ball firmly in the court of global leaders and lawmakers the question is: will they have any idea what to do about it?

It’s another high-profile warning about AI risk that will divide experts. Signatories include Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

A group of top AI researchers, engineers, and CEOs have issued a new warning about the existential threat they believe that AI poses to humanity.

The 22-word statement, trimmed short to make it as broadly acceptable as possible, reads as follows: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Continue reading “Top AI researchers and CEOs warn against ‘risk of extinction’ in 22-word statement” »

When will an asteroid hit Earth and wipe us out? Not for at least 1,000 years, according to a team of astronomers. Probably.

Either way, you should get to know an asteroid called 7482 (1994 PC1), the only one known whose orbital path will cross that of Earth’s consistently for the next millennium—and thus has the largest probability of a “deep close encounter” with us, specifically in 502 years. Possibly.

Published on a preprint archive and accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the paper states that astronomers have almost found all the kilometer-sized asteroids. There’s a little under 1,000 of them.

I had an amazing experience at the Foresight Institute’s Whole-Brain Emulation (WBE) Workshop at a venue near Oxford! For more information and a list of participants, see: https://foresight.org/whole-brain-emulation-workshop-2023/ I had the opportunity to work within a group of some of the most brilliant, ambitious, and visionary people I’ve ever encountered on the quest for recreating the human brain in a computer. We also discussed in depth the existential risks of upcoming artificial superintelligence and how to mitigate these risks, perhaps with the aid of WBE.

My subgroup focused on exploring the challenge of human connectomics (mapping all of the neurons and synapses in the brain).

WBE is a potential technology to generate software intelligence that is human-aligned simply by being based directly on human brains. Generally past discussions have assumed a fairly long timeline to WBE, while past AGI timelines had broad uncertainty. There were also concerns that the neuroscience of WBE might boost AGI capability development without helping safety, although no consensus did develop. Recently many people have updated their AGI timelines towards earlier development, raising safety concerns. That has led some people to consider whether WBE development could be significantly speeded up, producing a differential technology development re-ordering of technology arrival that might lessen the risk of unaligned AGI by the presence of aligned software intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is a superior lifeform that humans are creating, and many AI researchers have outlined various scenarios in which this technology can pose an existential risk to humanity that could result in the literal end of the world.

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Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Explosion: How AI May Cause The End of The World??” »