Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial intelligence has historically over-promised and under-delivered. That routine leads to spurts of what those in the field call “hype”—outsized excitement about the potential of a core technology—followed after a few years and several million (or billion) dollars by crashing disappointment. In the end, we still don’t have the flying cars or realistic robot dogs we were promised.

But DeepMind’s AlphaGo, a star pupil in a time we’ll likely look back on as a golden age of AI research, has made a habit of blowing away experts’ notions of what’s possible. When DeepMind announced that the AI system could play Go on a professional level, masters of the game said it was too complex for any machine. They were wrong.

Now AlphaGo Zero, the AI’s latest iteration, is being set to tasks outside of the 19×19 Go board, according to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.

Continue reading “DeepMind wants to find the next miracle material—experts just don’t know how they’ll pull it off” »

Defeating age-related diseases may create challenges for society, but is that worse than not doing anything?

In these six years, I’ve spent as a rejuvenation advocate, I’ve had to deal with the traditional objections raised against the idea of longer lifespans. These objections touch a variety of different topics, but they aren’t terribly many: we’re talking about maybe a dozen of them, and these days, I hardly ever hear an objection I haven’t discussed before.

However few or many, and deserving of specific answers, these objections may be, they can all be reduced down to a single, general form: “Rejuvenation biotechnologies would cause [insert problem here], so it’s best not to go there.” And just like there are specific answers for each specific objection, there are general answers for their general form—Aubrey de Grey’s famous “two more general answers”.

Continue reading “Rejuvenation May Bring Challenges to Society but are they Worse than Age-related Diseases?” »

Clearly, the robot that previously made headlines because she said she’ll destroy humankind has since embraced “being human” to a certain extent.

Robot Citizenship

Continue reading “For the First Time Ever, a Robot Was Granted Citizenship” »

Homebiogas turns your trash into gas.

CHICAGO (Reuters) — Wal-Mart Stores Inc will roll out shelf-scanning robots in approximately 40 stores to replenish inventory faster on its shelves and save store employees time when products run out.

FILE PHOTO: Shopping carts are seen outside a new Wal-Mart Express store in Chicago July 26, 2011. REUTERS/John Gress/File Photo.

Need a reason for a settlement?

A demonstration of the pressure sensor built by bacteria in action as a researcher taps out some Morse code.

As wonderfully bizarre as it sounds, growing touch screens from a bacterial soup isn’t the team’s ultimate goal.

Continue reading “This ‘Living Touch Screen’ Is Made out of Bacteria and Gold” »

Have you heard of Dennis Hope? How about The Lunar Embassy of the Galactic Government—no? As space enthusiasts and investors, you really should be familiar with the infamous man who has spent nearly thirty years becoming Earth’s most successful interplanetary real estate agent. As (legitimate) terrestrial governments consider a return to the Moon and the establishment of permanent lunar settlements, however, Hope and his customers may soon face legal challenges from national space agencies and commercial ventures alike.

Read full details here: https://goo.gl/VoVoZz

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kRlb10nBWiM

Science fiction is plagued by the slow march of time. What might have looked sleek and futuristic ten or more years ago might today look fantastic-but-unrealistic at best, or silly and outdated at worst. But whatever the case may be, the bottom line is this: no speculative sci-fi, not even cyberpunk, survives contact with the time period it portrays.

Of course, the point of science fiction isn’t to make our best attempts at clairvoyance. In fact, one may argue that, since the genre’s birth, science fiction is more like a subgenre of fantasy; it draws upon concepts that are simply more plausible to modern sensibilities (and thereby more capable of suspending disbelief) than magic and sorcery. Early works within the genre depict grand feats of science unreachable by the technological constraints of the time period, (such as defeating death, traveling through time, or voyaging through space) and remain unfulfilled to this day. Even today, we make stories that stretch the truth of what humankind is capable of in our near future, enjoyable as they may be.

Continue reading “Blade Runner and the World of Tomorrow” »