Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI

Mind May Be Older Than the Brain | Michael Levin on Life and Intelligence

Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University whose work sits at the intersection of biology, bioelectricity, artificial life, regenerative medicine, synthetic biology, computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is known for his research on how cells communicate, make decisions, build bodies, repair tissues, and form collective intelligence through bioelectric signals. His work on Xenobots and Anthrobots has opened new questions about living robots, synthetic life forms, biological machines, morphogenesis, basal cognition, cellular intelligence, regeneration, cancer, aging, and the nature of mind beyond the brain.

In this conversation, Michael Levin and I explore whether mind and intelligence are binary or exist on a continuum, why cognition may be much older than brains, and how systems from cells to humans can pursue goals in different ways. We discuss the TAME framework, the spectrum of persuadability, cognitive light cones, bioelectricity, gap junctions, multicellular intelligence, Xenobots, Anthrobots, kinematic self-replication, neural wound healing, emergence, physicalism, mathematics, Platonic space, algorithms, bubble sort, Turing machines, evolution, human creativity, artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine, and the future of biology. This episode is for anyone interested in philosophy, consciousness, mind, intelligence, synthetic biology, developmental biology, AI, complex systems, evolution, and the deeper question of what it means for matter to become alive, intelligent, or aware.

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a like, subscribing, and leaving a review on Youtube, Spotify and Apple. #philosophy #science.

Michael’s website: https://drmichaellevin.org/

Socials:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/46hnFSg… Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… Linkedin: / masud-gaziyev Instagram (public): / philosophy.everyday Instagram (private): / masud.gaziyev Support the work: https://buymeacoffee.com/philosophy.e… Get new episodes, guest announcements, reading notes, and ideas worth thinking about. Subscribe here: https://philosophyeveryday.beehiiv.com/ Chapters: 00:00 Mind Beyond the Brain 01:19 Is Mind Older Than the Brain? 04:06 Why Intelligence Is Not All-or-Nothing 06:58 How to Interact With Different Kinds of Minds 09:54 From Single Cells to Collective Intelligence 13:17 How Cells Build Bigger Goals 16:05 Life Recreated — Xenobots and Anthrobots 18:54 Where Do New Behaviours Come From? 21:57 Synthetic Life and the Limits of Evolution 35:01 What Happens When Biology Is Freed? 43:00 Why Biology Eventually Leads to Mathematics 46:07 Is “Emergence” Just a Fancy Word for Surprise? 53:11 Platonic Space: A Strange New Map of Reality 01:03:21 What We Received from Platonic Space 01:11:24 Human Evolution, Technology, and the Patterns Behind Progress 01:16:43 Regeneration, Cancer, and Aging.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…
Linkedin: / masud-gaziyev.
Instagram (public): / philosophy.everyday.
Instagram (private): / masud.gaziyev.
Support the work: https://buymeacoffee.com/philosophy.e…

Get new episodes, guest announcements, reading notes, and ideas worth thinking about.

Continue reading “Mind May Be Older Than the Brain | Michael Levin on Life and Intelligence” | >

James Hughes on Citizen Cyborg: Interrogate and Engage the World

In 2012, I sat down with Dr. James Hughes, bioethicist, sociologist, and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Fourteen years later, the questions we wrestled with have only sharpened.

Why are transhumanist atheists so often drawn to Buddhism? Is optimism rational, or just a posture we adopt to keep moving? What does it mean to redesign the human being, and which democratic institutions are ready to respond when we do?

James does not flinch from any of it. He talks about his first book Citizen Cyborg, the then forthcoming Cyborg Buddha, moral enhancement, animal uplift, and what our actual chances are of surviving the technological singularity.

What struck me most was his refusal to retreat into easy camps.

Not a cheerleader, not a doomsayer. Someone who interrogates the world and engages it on its own terms.

Continue reading “James Hughes on Citizen Cyborg: Interrogate and Engage the World” | >

Hotter Than a Hot Tub: The 45°C Breakthrough to Cool AI’s Biggest Machines

In favorable climates, NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid-cooling architecture can enable chiller-less operation with dry coolers, reducing facility cooling water consumption from roughly 2.6 million gallons per megawatt per year for conventional cooling-tower-based systems to near zero — up to a 100% reduction in water use.

The reason: traditional air-cooled data centers depend on large volumes of cooled air to remove heat from IT equipment, often requiring energy-intensive cooling infrastructure during hot weather. With NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid cooling, heat is captured directly at the chip and transported through liquid loops operating at much higher temperatures, allowing outdoor dry coolers to reject heat efficiently for much of the year while significantly reducing mechanical cooling requirements and facility water consumption.

The data center ambient temperature is flexible — warm summer air is fine — because nothing in the server depends on cool air. The liquid does all the work — and the same liquid can be recirculated in a closed loop so no new water is consumed to cool the chips.

NVIDIA’s latest AI servers can run on coolant warmer than a hot tub — and that counterintuitive choice is one of the biggest efficiency leaps in data center history.

Mouse moves unlock realistic AI video control with no extra computing cost

A technology developed at the Technion enables ordinary users to create realistic video clips intuitively, without the need for massive computing resources. Called Time-to-Move (TTM), it offers unprecedented control over the movement of objects and characters in AI-generated videos using nothing more than mouse movements, eliminating the need for complex and expensive infrastructure or training on millions of videos.

Dr. Or Litany of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, who led the research together with faculty colleague Prof. Ron Kimmel and students Asaf Singer, Noam Rotstein and Amir Mann, presented the work at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 conference, held in Brazil last month. ICLR is one of the world’s leading conferences in deep learning and AI.

“Our development,” Litany explains, “solves one of the main limitations of AI-based video generation: the difficulty of precisely controlling the movement of objects and characters over time. TTM does not require retraining and can be integrated as a plug-in into existing video models. Unlike previous approaches, which require model-specific adaptation and substantial computing resources, this technology operates with no additional computational cost. In doing so, it helps democratize AI video creation by expanding access beyond giant companies such as Google and Meta.”

Feeding data to AI to speed up drug discovery

Developing new medicines can require thousands of chemistry experiments to identify the right recipe for a safe, effective and ideally affordable drug.

The process is slow and labor-intensive, and many of the reactions depend on hard-to-source metals that act as essential catalysts.

While artificial intelligence is helping speed up the process of drug discovery, it can only learn from the data available, and when it comes to chemical reactions, the large, high-quality data sets needed to train powerful AI tools aren’t there.

OpenAI Expands Daybreak With GPT-5.5-Cyber to Help Defenders Patch Security Flaws

OpenAI on Monday said it’s releasing an improved version of its GPT‑5.5‑Cyber model to trusted defenders as part of the Daybreak initiative the artificial intelligence (AI) company announced last month.

Calling GPT‑5.5‑Cyber its “strongest model yet for finding and helping patch software vulnerabilities,” OpenAI said the model can “sustain deeper analysis across large codebases” to identify security issues, validate them in a controlled environment, and develop and test patches.

In tandem, the tech upstart is releasing an update to the Codex Security plugin⁠ to speed up the process of discovering and patching vulnerabilities in existing systems, alongside preventing new vulnerabilities from entering production codebases.

Microsoft fixes AutoGen Studio flaw that enabled code execution

A vulnerability chain dubbed AutoJack in Microsoft’s AutoGen Studio interface for prototyping AI agents could let attackers manipulate an agent into executing arbitrary commands on its host system simply by visiting a malicious webpage.

AutoGen Studio is the graphical component for AutoGen, Microsoft’s open-source framework for building multi-agent AI systems. The framework allows developers to create AI agents that can collaborate with one another, use tools, browse the web, execute code, interact with APIs, and connect to external systems.

The project is very popular, with more than 59,000 stars and nearly 9,000 forks on GitHub. Microsoft notes that AutoJack’s impact was limited because the issue was addressed during development.

The Cost of Intelligence

It is awe-inspiring to reflect on the velocity of this generational shift. In an incredibly compressed timeline, AI has transitioned from a boardroom novelty into the underlying infrastructure of global enterprise labor.

We are living through a historic economic anomaly: even as raw capability scales exponentially, the unit cost of intelligence continues to plummet toward zero. The future of corporate margin expansion will not belong to those who consume the most compute, but to the strategic architects who best optimize this collapsing cost.

Yet, beneath this cognitive abundance lies a stark paradox. While token unit prices have plunged 99.7% over the last 24 months, actual enterprise AI invoices are soaring—with average budgets expanding from $1.2M to over $7M. This is the structural reality of moving from simple, episodic chatbots to multi-step, autonomous agentic workflows that incur heavy context taxes and recursive reasoning loops.

To help technology and financial leaders navigate this landscape, we just released our latest research and report: The Macroeconomics of the Hyperscale AI Market and the New Enterprise Frontier.

Stop projecting AI margins using outdated software frameworks. Read the full report at the link below to master the new rules of token economics. Let us know in the comments: Are your teams experiencing bill shock, or have you already cracked the code on dynamic model routing?

The macroeconomics of the hyperscale AI market and the new enterprise frontier.

Continue reading “The Cost of Intelligence” | >

/* */