Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: policy

Using global land use and carbon storage data from the past 175 years, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Cognizant AI Labs have trained an artificial intelligence system to develop optimal environmental policy solutions that can advance global sustainability initiatives of the United Nations.

The AI tool effectively balances various complex trade-offs to recommend ways of maximizing carbon storage, minimizing economic disruptions and helping improve the environment and people’s everyday lives, according to a paper published today in the journal Environmental Data Science.

The project is among the first applications of the UN-backed Project Resilience, a team of scientists and experts working to tackle global decision-augmentation problems—including ambitious sustainable development goals this decade—through part of a broader effort called AI for Good.

Read more | >

Neuroscientists at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center (SWC) at UCL have discovered that the brain uses a dual system for learning through trial and error. This is the first time a second learning system has been identified, which could help explain how habits are formed and provide a scientific basis for new strategies to address conditions related to habitual learning, such as addictions and compulsions.

Published in Nature, the study in mice could also have implications for developing therapeutics for Parkinson’s. The study is titled “Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal.”

“Essentially, we have found a mechanism that we think is responsible for habits. Once you have developed a preference for a certain action, then you can bypass your value-based system and just rely on your default policy of what you’ve done in the past. This might then allow you to free up cognitive resources to make value-based decisions about something else,” explained Dr. Marcus Stephenson-Jones, Group Leader at SWC and lead author of the study.

Read more | >

Countries in the Global South risk being left out of the quantum revolution — along with its economic, technological and security benefits — due to growing export controls, siloed research initiatives and national security concerns, a new policy analysis argues.

In the first of a series of articles on quantum technologies published by the policy journal Just Securit y, researchers Michael Karanicolas, of Dalhousie University, and Alessia Zornetta, of UCLA Law, examine how the geopolitics of emerging quantum technologies are replicating long-standing patterns of technological exclusion. The authors argue that absent meaningful interventions, quantum could become another engine of global inequality, one that threatens to lock poorer nations out of the next era of technological and economic development.

The authors trace the roots of this divide to export control regimes that are quickly expanding in response to the strategic potential of quantum systems. Since 2020, governments in the U.S., EU and China have implemented targeted restrictions on quantum-enabling hardware, software, and communications systems.

Read more | >

We use cookies to make sure that our website works properly, as well as some optional cookies to personalise content and advertising, provide social media features and analyse how people use our site. By accepting some or all optional cookies you give consent to the processing of your personal data, including transfer to third parties, some in countries outside of the European Economic Area that do not offer the same data protection standards as the country where you live. You can decide which optional cookies to accept by clicking on “Manage preferences”, where you can also find more information about how your personal data is processed. Further information can be found in our privacy policy.

Read more | >

Given the complexity of multi-tenant cloud environments and the growing need for real-time threat mitigation, Security Operations Centers (SOCs) must adopt AI-driven adaptive defense mechanisms to counter Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). However, SOC analysts face challenges in handling adaptive adversarial tactics, requiring intelligent decision-support frameworks. We propose a Cognitive Hierarchy Theory-driven Deep Q-Network (CHT-DQN) framework that models interactive decision-making between SOC analysts and AI-driven APT bots. The SOC analyst (defender) operates at cognitive level-1, anticipating attacker strategies, while the APT bot (attacker) follows a level-0 policy. By incorporating CHT into DQN, our framework enhances adaptive SOC defense using Attack Graph (AG)-based reinforcement learning. Simulation experiments across varying AG complexities show that CHT-DQN consistently achieves higher data protection and lower action discrepancies compared to standard DQN. A theoretical lower bound further confirms its superiority as AG complexity increases. A human-in-the-loop (HITL) evaluation on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) reveals that SOC analysts using CHT-DQN-derived transition probabilities align more closely with adaptive attackers, leading to better defense outcomes. Moreover, human behavior aligns with Prospect Theory (PT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT): participants are less likely to reselect failed actions and more likely to persist with successful ones. This asymmetry reflects amplified loss sensitivity and biased probability weighting — underestimating gains after failure and overestimating continued success. Our findings highlight the potential of integrating cognitive models into deep reinforcement learning to improve real-time SOC decision-making for cloud security.

Read more | >

Whar may happen when the first truly smart robots appear, based on brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.

Train them to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply.
within perhaps a century, they will displace humans in most jobs.
In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.
Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics.
and use ofstandard theories indicate a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems.

Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. Joined George Mason’s economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory. Recent book: The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule The Earth. Oxford University Press, 2016.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Read more | >

There are two ways of dealing with this public health problem. One is to devise a comprehensive strategy to combat social inequality that will prevent disease before it happens. Another way is to develop a pill that treats the wear and tear of stress and toxins on the body.

Believe it or not, there are experiments on such pills underway.

Candidates include dasatinib, quercetin, metformin, rapamycin and fisetin among many others. These drugs may slow or even reverse aging in anyone, but they hold the greatest promise for improving America’s health because they disproportionately help the disadvantaged. This population bears the greatest burden of disease by far, so even small health gains in this population can go a long way.

Americans would much prefer a pill or a vaccine over a contentious policy battle.

Read more | >

Copper is the mineral most fundamental to the human future because it is essential to electricity generation, distribution, and storage. Copper availability and demand determine the rate of electrification, which is the foundation of current climate policy. Many studies have raised concerns that copper supply cannot meet the copper demands of both the green energy transition and equitable global development, but the seemingly universal presumption persists that the copper needed for the green transition will somehow be available. This need not be the case for even the first step of vehicle electrification.

This paper addresses this issue by projecting copper supply and demand from 2018 to 2050 and placing both in the historical context of copper mine output. Discussion is focused on a single diagram that illustrates the unprecedented nature of the copper mining challenge and ways to reduce copper demand.

Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now. To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing into production 55% more new mines than would otherwise be needed. On the other hand, hybrid electric vehicle manufacture would require negligible extra copper mining.

Read more | >

An unusual public health policy in Wales may have produced the strongest evidence yet that a vaccine can reduce the risk of dementia. In a new study led by Stanford Medicine, researchers analyzing the health records of Welsh older adults discovered that those who received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia over the next seven years than those who did not receive the vaccine.

The remarkable findings, published in Nature, support an emerging theory that viruses that affect the can increase the risk of . If further confirmed, the new findings suggest that a preventive intervention for dementia is already close at hand.

Read more | >