Lifeboat Foundation

DeepMind’s co-founder believes the Turing test is an outdated method to test AI intelligence. In his book, he suggests a new idea in which AI chatbots have to turn $100,000 into $1 million.

A co-founder of Google’s AI research lab DeepMind thinks AI chatbots like ChatGPT should be tested on their ability to turn $100,000 into $1 million in a “modern Turing test” that measures human-like intelligence.

Mustafa Suleyman, formerly head of applied AI at DeepMind and now CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, is releasing a new book called “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.”

Continue reading “DeepMind’s co-founder suggested testing an AI chatbot’s ability to turn $100,000 into $1 million to measure human-like intelligence” »

The foremost physiological effect of psychedelics in the brain is to significantly reduce activity in multiple brain areas, which contradicts the mainstream reductionist expectation. Physicalist neuroscientists have proposed that an increase in brain noise explains the subjective richness of a psychedelic experience, but a psychedelic experience isn’t akin to TV static, argues Bernardo Kastrup.

Before 2012, the generally accepted wisdom in neuroscience was that psychedelic substances—which lead to unfathomably rich experiential states—stimulate neuronal activity and light up the brain like a Christmas tree. Modern neuroimaging, however, now shows that they do precisely the opposite: the foremost physiological effect of psychedelics in the brain is to significantly reduce activity in multiple brain areas, while increasing it nowhere in the brain beyond measurement error. This has been consistently demonstrated for multiple psychedelic substances (psilocybin, LSD, DMT), with the use of multiple neuroimaging technologies (EEG, MEG, fMRI), and by a variety of different research groups (in Switzerland, Brazil, the United Kingdom, etc.). Neuroscientist Prof. Edward F. Kelly and I published an essay on Scientific American providing an overview of, and references to, many of these studies.

These results contradict the mainstream metaphysics of physicalism for obvious reasons: experience is supposed to be generated by metabolic neuronal activity. A dead person with no metabolism experiences nothing because their brain has no activity. A living person does because their brain does have metabolic activity—or so the story goes. And since neuronal activity supposedly causes experiences, there can be nothing to experience but what can be traced back to patterns of neuronal activity (otherwise, one would have to speak of disembodied experience). Ergo, richer, more intense experience—such as the psychedelic state—should be accompanied by increased activity somewhere in the brain; for it is this increase that supposedly causes the increased richness and intensity of the experience.

Cultured meat starts with the extraction of cells from an animal’s tissue, be it a pig, cow, chicken, fish, or any other animal we consume. The cell extraction doesn’t kill or even harm the animal. The cells are mixed with a cocktail of nutrients, oxygen, and moisture inside large bioreactors. Mimicking the environment inside an animal’s body, the bioreactors are kept at a warm temperature, and the cells inside divide, multiply, and mature. Waste products are regularly removed to keep the environment pure.

Once the cells have reached maturity—that is, grown into small chunks of muscle-like material—they’re harvested from the bioreactors to be refined and shaped into a final product. This can involve anything from extrusion cooking and molding to 3D printing and adding in artificial fat.

JBS says the factory it’s building in Spain will be able to produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated beef per year, and could expand capacity to 4,000 metric tons per year in the medium term. That’s smaller than Believer Meats’ facility in the US, which will have an annual production capacity of 10,000 metric tons. But what’s noteworthy about the JBS factory is that it’s focused on producing beef.

On this day 52 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Here’s what they said about “The Overview Effect” and how it transforms the way you think forever.

Have you heard of the overview effect? It’s an interesting phenomenon that, for the time being, is exclusively reserved for astronauts. It refers to the overwhelming feeling astronauts get when witnessing for the first time the Earth from space.

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Digs around the ‘open-air sanctuary’ started in 2017, but the results have only just been made public.

An international team of researchers, led by University of Toronto Engineering Professor Yu Zou, is using electric fields to control the motion of material defects. This work has important implications for improving the properties and manufacturing processes of typically brittle ionic and covalent crystals, including semiconductors—a crystalline material that is a central component of electronic chips used for computers and other modern devices.

In a new study published in Nature Materials, researchers from University of Toronto Engineering, Dalhousie University, Iowa State University and Peking University, present real-time observations of dislocation motion in a single-crystalline zinc sulfide that was controlled using an external electric field.

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A fascinating eVTOL project is about to come out of stealth, showcasing a “breakthrough HyperDrive propulsion technology” that MagLev Aero claims is “dramatically more quiet, efficient, safe, sustainable and emotionally appealing to the mass market.”

Representatives from the Boston-based company have made their way to the Paris Air Show, where they’re preparing to reveal a very different approach to electric vertical lift aircraft, drawing on the magnetic levitation technology used in high-speed trains.

What we appear to have here is an annular lift fan arrangement. The aircraft’s cabin appears to be surrounded by a huge ring-shaped duct, into which at least one large-diameter, many-bladed fan is mounted.

Tesla is an interested buyer of a small Germany-based wireless charging startup following the automaker’s indications that it might launch its own EV wireless charger.

Several companies have been working on wireless charging for electric vehicles in recent years, but the technology has never taken off.

There are several issues with it. For example, it’s not as efficient as charging with a cable – though the technology has been closing the gap in recent years. It’s also more expensive, as you generally have to embed a charging pad securely in the ground instead of just mounting a charger on the wall.

Making the yogurt of the future requires a cast of 21st-century helpers: machine learning, gut science and even a mysterious artificial stomach.

At a new Danone facility near Paris, researchers feed dollops of yogurt into globular glass vessels and plastic tubes designed to mimic the human gut. Once the bacteria inside show they can survive the digestive juices, artificial intelligence is put to work to probe their potential health benefits.

To consumers bombarded with claims about the supposed power of probiotics, the goal may sound familiar: souped-up yogurt. But the owner of Activia and Actimel is betting technology can yield answers on which friendly bacteria work best and why, giving its products a scientific edge at a time when revenue is lagging and consumers are growing wary of processed food.