Lifeboat Foundation

Love this article from Our World in Data which describes how far we have come as a species and what challenges remain ahead. “Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.”

The data in this article uses a previous release of the World Bank’s poverty and inequality data in which incomes are expressed in 2011 international-$.

The World Bank has since updated its methods, and now measures incomes in 2017 international-$. As part of this change, the International Poverty Line used to measure extreme poverty has also been updated: from $1.90 (in 2011 prices) to $2.15 (in 2017 prices).

Continue reading “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” »

Every cell is beholden to a phenomenon called cell fate, a sort of biological preset determined by genetic coding. Burgeoning cells take their developmental cues from a set of core genetic instructions that shape their structure and function and how they interact with other cells in the body.

To you or me, it’s biological law. But to a group of researchers at Stanford Medicine, it’s more of a suggestion. Unconstrained by the rules of evolution, these scientists are instead governed by a question: What if?

What if you could eat a vaccine? Or create a bacterium that could also detect and attack cancer? What if furniture could grow from a seed?

Kepler launched the Forerunner K2, a humanoid robot with advanced AI for perception and autonomous learning.

Kepler launches Forerunner K2, a full-sized humanoid robot with advanced software for perception, task planning, and autonomous learning.

Continue reading “Forerunner K2: New humanoid robot custom-built to meet industry needs” »

Title: Creating a persona for ChatGPT or other generative AI models serves several important purposes:

See…

I’ve been exploring the development of deep persona for the past few days.

Continue reading “The benefits of creating a persona for ChatGPT, Claude and other AIs” »

In 2019, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made headlines when they created the “blackest black” material made from carbon nanotubes —ten times blacker than any material that had been manufactured at that time—a material so black that it had the ability to absorb 99.995% of incident light. Such research in light absorption is not a trivial pursuit or mere aesthetics, there are many technologies that can benefit from maximizing light absorption—for instance, in photovoltaics because of the need to absorb and convert as much light as possible into electricity, or on the interior surface of a light sensor because of the need to minimize unwanted stray light. The physics of light absorption can get quite complex when you get into the details, as what we non-technically consider as “black” is usually not a perfect absorber. Indeed, there are many ways to create something that can absorb some light, but the endeavor gets increasingly more difficult the closer one attempts to achieve 100% absorption.

That takes some serious physics.

Now, physicists in Austria and Israel report in the journal Science that they have engineered a light trap that utilizes the quantum properties of electromagnetic waves— in which waveforms undergo constructive or destructive interference when combined in just the right manner—to generate an anti-laser that has near-perfect light absorption [1]. Because the light trap functions essentially as a time-reversed laser, where instead of multiple passes of single-wavelength light for maximum stimulated emission of photons the multiple passes are engineered for maximum absorption, the device is a veritable anti-laser.

But when something out of the ordinary happens, the situation can quickly get scary, because most updates are only delivered by audio announcements. A Deaf traveller may miss their train because it was moved to a different platform, or watch as their station whizzes by because the train isn’t stopping there today. They may also remain on a train carriage in an emergency after everyone else has evacuated, and have to be rescued by station staff.

Every single one of these examples has been drawn from the real life experiences of Deaf people in Sydney. But my colleagues and I are working with Sydney Trains and members of the Australian Deaf community to develop an advanced, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered signing avatar which can automatically translate audio announcements into Auslan.

Our universe might be growing by absorbing smaller “baby” universes, not just dark energy.

So Everyone is offering free AI because they have to. From X to more it is a spreading trend. Here’s one:

Aria helps with everything you do in Opera Browser: from shopping research to learning and creativity. Generate text, images and get answers with real-time access to the web on mobile and desktop.

Chat and create with Aria, Opera’s free AI, across devices. Aria answers questions and generates content with up-to-date information from the web.

Decomposing the dark matter of sparse autoencoders.

Joshua Engels, Logan Riggs, Max Tegmark MIT 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.

On mapping concepts in artificial neural networks with sparse autoencoders: we find that map errors exhibit…

Continue reading “JoshEngels/SAE-Dark-Matter: Code for our paper ‘Decomposing The Dark Matter of Sparse Autoencoders’” »