Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon is using a “simulated dog” to test its delivery drones, according to IBTimes.

The e-commerce giant wants to use drones to deliver parcels to customers in less than 30 minutes but it clearly has some concerns about how dogs might interfere.

At least one simulated dog is being used to “help Amazon see how UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] would respond to a canine trying to protect its territory,” according to IBTimes.

Continue reading “Amazon’s delivery drone tests reportedly involve a ‘simulated dog’” »

WASHINGTON—Challenging commonly held misperceptions, the U.S. Department of Justice published a report this week revealing that the vast majority of UFO abductions are perpetrated by aliens a person knows rather than extraterrestrials unfamiliar to victims. “The popular notion of UFO abductions is of a person being beamed up into the sky by strange, hostile beings from Sirius or Andromeda, but the reality is that most of these abductions are committed by an extraterrestrial acquaintance the victim trusts and feels comfortable around,” DOJ spokesman Devin Shane said of the estimated 2,800 reported victims of UFO abduction last year, many of whom were taken against their will into an advanced spacecraft and subjected to psychological experiments and medical examinations by nonhuman entities they already knew through family or friends. “While it’s true that a significant number of abductions are still carried out by extrasolar reptilian beings with planetary invasion-related motives, data shows that known relationships with extraterrestrials are by far the greater danger to civilians, with many aliens committing abduction for personal reasons, such as indulging their own cravings for power, control, or revenge, or siphoning human energy from host bodies in order to replicate.” Officials noted, with a degree of optimism, that evidence now shows only 10 percent of all UFO abductions result in aliens impregnating the victim with thousands of eggs.

We’ve developed an unsupervised system which learns an excellent representation of sentiment, despite being trained only to predict the next character in the text of Amazon reviews.

A linear model using this representation achieves state-of-the-art sentiment analysis accuracy on a small but extensively-studied dataset, the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (we get 91.8% accuracy versus the previous best of 90.2%), and can match the performance of previous supervised systems using 30-100x fewer labeled examples. Our representation also contains a distinct “sentiment neuron” which contains almost all of the sentiment signal.

OpenAI vs. Deepmind in river raid ATARI.

AI research has a long history of repurposing old ideas that have gone out of style. Now researchers at Elon Musk’s open source AI project have revisited “neuroevolution,” a field that has been around since the 1980s, and achieved state-of-the-art results.

The group, led by OpenAI’s research director Ilya Sutskever, has been exploring the use of a subset of algorithms from this field, called “evolution strategies,” which are aimed at solving optimization problems.

Continue reading “OpenAI Just Beat Google DeepMind at Atari With an Algorithm From the 80s” »

Transhumanism stuff out in these stories: http://z-news.link/the-future-of-the-earth-through-the-eyes-of-futurists-photo/ & http://yemcentral.com/2017/03/29/would-robots-make-better-po…an-humans/ & https://player.fm/series/lions-of-liberty-podcast/287-zoltan…nd-liberty

Futurism, or more precisely, futurology, is the study of possible hypotheses, probable and preferred options for the future. To understand what futurists predict in the improvement of the human condition, consider the progress happening in the field of science, medicine and computing.

Continue reading “The future of the Earth through the eyes of futurists. Photo” »

OpenAI researchers were surprised to discover that a neural network trained to predict the next character in texts from Amazon reviews taught itself to analyze sentiment. This unsupervised learning is the dream of machine learning researchers.

Much of today’s artificial intelligence (AI) relies on machine learning: where machines respond or react autonomously after learning information from a particular data set. Machine learning algorithms, in a sense, predict outcomes using previously established values. Researchers from OpenAI discovered that a machine learning system they created to predict the next character in the text of reviews from Amazon developed into an unsupervised system that could learn representations of sentiment.

“We were very surprised that our model learned an interpretable feature, and that simply predicting the next character in Amazon reviews resulted in discovering the concept of sentiment,” OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company whose investors include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman, explained on their blog. OpenAI’s neural network was able to train itself to analyze sentiment by classifying reviews as either positive or negative, and was able to generate text with a desired sentiment.

Continue reading “AI Learns to Read Sentiment Without Being Trained to Do So” »

Until now, men have had only two serious options for preventing baby-making: condoms or ‘the snip’.

A promising new product could be set to change all that, with animal trials indicating that it’s not only close to 100 percent effective, but that it can also be fully reversed, making it less drastic than the vasectomy while still offering similar benefits.

Trademarked under the name Vasalgel, the contraceptive is a polymer gel being developed by the non-profit Parsemus Foundation in California, which aims to “find low cost solutions that have been neglected by the pharmaceutical industry”.

Continue reading “This New Type of Male Contraceptive Not Only Prevents Babies; It’s Completely Reversible” »

Although some thinkers use the term “singularity” to refer to any dramatic paradigm shift in the way we think and perceive our reality, in most conversations The Singularity refers to the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence. What that point looks like, though, is subject to debate, as is the date when it will happen.

In a recent interview with Inverse, Stanford University business and energy and earth sciences graduate student Damien Scott provided his definition of singularity: the moment when humans can no longer predict the motives of AI. Many people envision singularity as some apocalyptic moment of truth with a clear point of epiphany. Scott doesn’t see it that way.

“We’ll start to see narrow artificial intelligence domains that keep getting better than the best human,” Scott told Inverse. Calculators already outperform us, and there’s evidence that within two to three years, AI will outperform the best radiologists in the world. In other words, the singularity is already happening across each specialty and industry touched by AI — which, soon enough, will be all of them. If you’re of the mind that the singularity means catastrophe for humans, this likens the process for humans to the experience of the frogs placed into the pot of water that slowly comes to a boil: that is to say, killing us so slowly that we don’t notice it’s already begun.

Continue reading “Human-Level AI Are Probably A Lot Closer Than You Think” »

Trying to estimate the maximum cost of a devastating cyber event before one actually happens.