Lifeboat Foundation

In the popular TV show Sherlock, visual depictions of our hero’s deductive reasoning often look like machine algorithms. And probably not by accident, given that this version of Conan Doyle’s detective processes tremendous amounts of observed data—the sort of minutiae that the average person tends to pass over or forget—more like a computer than a human.

Sherlock’s intelligence is both strength and limitation. His way of thinking is often bounded by an inability to intuitively understand social and emotional contexts. The show’s central premise is that Sherlock Holmes needs his friend John Watson to help him synthesize empirical data into human truth.

In Sherlock we see the analog for modern AI: highly performant learning machines that can achieve metacognitive results with the assistance of fully cognitive human partners. Machine intelligence does not by its nature make human intelligence obsolete. Quite the opposite, really—machines need human guidance.

Continue reading “Why the Rise of AI Makes Human Intelligence More Valuable Than Ever” »

In this video series the Galactic Public Archives takes bite sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future.

In this entry, we take a look at the rapidly developing technology of Brain to Machine interfaces.

Continue reading “Brain to Machine Interface: Future A to Z” »

A curated list of blog posts, eBooks, reports and ecosystem experts that might be useful to founders and investors interested in the Australian tech startup ecosystem.

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A trailer for this 80s ‘movie’…

Happy Pi Day from Carnegie Mellon University! Professor of mathematical sciences Po-Shen Loh explains why Euler’s Equation is the most beautiful equation in math. The video was filmed as part of a pi and pie discussion with CMU alumna, baker and blogger Quelcy Kogel (A 2007). For more: https://youtu.be/2sC1-DXT9Oo

IBM recently announced that its speech recognition system achieved an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, coming closer to human parity. Here’s what it means for enterprises.

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning.

Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that’s longer than a football field but feels like a single room. “My desk is all the way at the other end,” he says. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened his laptop and surfed back to the page. But the class was already full.

Internet giants have vacuumed up most of the available AI talent—and they need more.

Continue reading “I Took the AI Class Facebookers Are Literally Sprinting to Get Into” »

With so many players jumping headlong into AI, it’s understandable that investors may not be aware of them all. Here are a few you may not know about.

Humanity’s first church on another world could be a dome perched on the rim of a huge crater near the moon’s south pole.

European Space Agency (ESA) artist-in-residence Jorge Mañes Rubio has drawn up plans for a “moon temple” that would help meet the spiritual, social and psychological needs of lunar settlers.

Those needs will likely be considerable, given that the pioneers will be isolated from the rest of humanity on a world hostile to life as we know it, Rubio said. [Visit the Moon Temple: Jorge Mañes Rubio’s Lunar Art in Pictures].