Lifeboat Foundation

Google appears to be more confident about the technical capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which it operates alongside NASA at the U.S. space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

D-Wave’s machines are the closest thing we have today to quantum computing, which work with quantum bits, or qubits — each of which can be zero or one or both — instead of more conventional bits. The superposition of these qubits can allow great numbers of computations to be performed simultaneously, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes.

In two tests, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab today announced that it has found the D-Wave machine to be considerably faster than simulated annealing — a simulation of quantum computation on a classical computer chip.

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Can we end violence? Can we create greater emotional well being and intellectual equality for the greater well being of humanity? Will we be able to keep up with machines? How can we augment our intelligence? Could we cure mental illness? After advancements in aging the next major area of research from a standpoint of eliminating personal and global suffering would be upgrades in intelligence. Transhumanist values at their core want to eliminate suffering and existential risk to people’s lives. With well founded logic, these goals are not completely out of reach, it is possible but as usual, we will have to take the complex issue from many angles and from the standpoint of a systems engineer, but let’s look at some fun stuff before we get into the heavy stuff.

The Benefits of Intelligence Upgrades

Continue reading “Transhumanism Solving Violence and Improving the Human Condition: IQ, EQi, and Intelligence Upgrades” »

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LIDAR units once cost $75,000. Now a $250 LIDAR, with no moving parts, is about to enter the market.

Giving a car “eyes” once cost a fortune. Now it’s affordable, a good sign for autonomous vehicles.

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Governments and leading computing companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google are trying to develop what are called quantum computers because using the weirdness of quantum mechanics to represent data should unlock immense data-crunching powers. Computing giants believe quantum computers could make their artificial-intelligence software much more powerful and unlock scientific leaps in areas like materials science. NASA hopes quantum computers could help schedule rocket launches and simulate future missions and spacecraft. “It is a truly disruptive technology that could change how we do everything,” said Deepak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Biswas spoke at a media briefing at the research center about the agency’s work with Google on a machine they bought in 2013 from Canadian startup D-Wave systems, which is marketed as “the world’s first commercial quantum computer.” The computer is installed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and operates on data using a superconducting chip called a quantum annealer. A quantum annealer is hard-coded with an algorithm suited to what are called “optimization problems,” which are common in machine-learning and artificial-intelligence software.

However, D-Wave’s chips are controversial among quantum physicists. Researchers inside and outside the company have been unable to conclusively prove that the devices can tap into quantum physics to beat out conventional computers.

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It seems like every day we’re warned about a new, AI-related threat that could ultimately bring about the end of humanity. According to Author and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, those existential risks aren’t so black and white, and an individual’s ability to influence those risks might surprise you.

Image Credit: TED

Bostrom defines an existential risk as one distinction of earth originating life or the permanent and drastic destruction of our future development, but he also notes that there is no single methodology that is applicable to all the different existential risks (as more technically elaborated upon in this Future of Humanity Institute study). Rather, he considers it an interdisciplinary endeavor.

“If you’re wondering about asteroids, we have telescopes, we can study them with, we can look at past crater impacts and derive hard statistical data on that,” he said. “We find that the risk of asteroids is extremely small and likewise for a few of the other risks that arrive from nature. But other really big existential risks are not in any direct way susceptible to this kind of rigorous quantification.”

Continue reading “Can The Existential Risk Of Artificial Intelligence Be Mitigated?” »

Who else wants one?

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http://blogs.technet.com/b/inside_microsoft_research/archive…-2015.aspx

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