Lifeboat Foundation

The growth of human and computer intelligence has triggered a barrage of dire predictions about the rise of super intelligence and the singularity. But some retain their skepticism, including Dr. Michael Shermer, a science historian and founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

The reason so many rational people put forward hypotheses that are more hype than high tech, Shermer says, is that being smart and educated doesn’t protect anyone from believing in “weird things.” In fact, sometimes smart and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for not-so-rational reasons. The smarter and more educated you are, the better able you are to find evidence to support what you want to be true, suggests Shermer.

“This explains why Nobel Prize winners speak about areas they know nothing about with great confidence and are sure that they’re right. Just because they have this great confidence of being able to do that (is) a reminder that they’re more like lawyers than scientists in trying to marshal a case for their client,” Shermer said. “(Lawyers) just put together the evidence, as much as you can, in support of your client and get rid of the negative evidence. In science you’re not allowed to do that, you’re supposed to look at all the evidence, including the counter evidence to your theory.”

Continue reading “Why Pessimistic Predictions For Future of AI May be More Hype than High Tech” »

My new story for Vice Motherboard on why transhumanists wage a war against death:

In the fight against death, sometimes you have to fight the government.

Continue reading “The Church of Perpetual Life Wants to End Deathism” »

Twenty six hundred years ago, a band of Judahite soldiers kept watch on their kingdom’s southern border in the final days before Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar. They left behind numerous inscriptions—and now, a groundbreaking digital analysis has revealed how many writers penned them. The research and innovative technology behind it stand to teach us about the origins of the Bible itself.

“It’s well understood that the Bible was not composed in real time but was probably written and edited later,” Arie Shaus, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University told Gizmodo. “The question is, when exactly?”

Shaus is one of several mathematicians and archaeologists trying to broach that question in a radical manner: by using machine learning tools to determine how many people were literate in ancient times. Their first major analysis, which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, suggests that the ability to read and write was widespread throughout the Kingdom of Judah, setting the stage for the compilation of Biblical texts.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Sheds New Light on the Origins of the Bible” »

A Nevada real estate magnate has poured $290 million into a wild dream of being a landlord in outer space. His first tenant: NASA.

A new measurement of how fast space is expanding disagrees with estimates based on the early universe, potentially pointing toward a break from the standard model of physics.

By Clara Moskowitz on April 11, 2016.

Jason Dunn Made In Space, Inc.

The objective of this study is for Made In Space (MIS) to establish the concept feasibility of using the age-old technique of analog computers and mechanisms to convert entire asteroids into enormous autonomous mechanical spacecraft. Project RAMA, Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata, has been designed to leverage the advancing trends of additive manufacturing (AM) and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) to enable asteroid rendezvous missions in which a set of technically simple robotic processes convert asteroid elements into very basic versions of spacecraft subsystems (GNC, Propulsion, Avionics). Upon completion, the asteroid will be a programmed mechanical automata carrying out a given mission objective; such as relocation to an Earth-Moon libration point for human rendezvous or perhaps to set an Earth-threatening NEO on course to the outer solar system and out of harm’s way. This technique will create an affordable and scalable way for NASA to achieve future roadmap items for both the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) and the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) such as Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), New Frontiers Comet Surface Sample Return, and other Near Earth Object (NEO) applications. It is estimated that an order of magnitude increase in NEO targets can be explored for the same mission cost with the RAMA approach compared to the SOA Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) architecture by removing the need to launch all spacecraft subsystems and instead converting the asteroid into them in-situ. Assuming the development trends continue for industry based AM methods as well as NASA and industry investments in ISRU capabilities, Project RAMA will create a space mission architecture capable of achieving the aforementioned NASA goals within a 20–30 year time frame. Furthermore, as described in the proposal, the identified study path will provide insight into near term Mission ‘Pull’ technologies worth investment in order to create the development roadmap for the proposed ‘Push’ technologies for achieving NASA’s long term strategic goals.

From science fiction to reality.

It goes without saying that any given piece of computer code—be it an app, a part of your operating system, or even a browser plug-in—may contain flaws that could leave your PC open to attack. But a team of researchers from Northwestern University have come across a new method of attack that can take advantage of holes in one or more installed Firefox add-ons.

According to the team’s research paper (PDF), this newly discovered attack “leverages capability leaks from legitimate extensions to avoid the inclusion of security-sensitive API calls within the malicious extension itself.”

Put another way: Firefox doesn’t enforce any isolation between the add-ons you install, as Ars Technica notes, which could potentially result in security problems. As a result of this lack of isolation, researchers say, an attacker could write a malicious Firefox add-on that appears harmless, but can use security flaws in other installed add-ons to do its bidding.

Continue reading “Researchers: Attackers could use holes in Firefox add-ons to target your PC” »

It’s a radical shift waiting a couple decades down the line.