Lifeboat Foundation

Software engineer Zhang Yiming started out producing apps for sharing jokes before focusing on news aggregation. That pivot proved lucrative.

The 35-year-old founder of Bytedance Ltd. is worth about $13 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him China’s 9th-richest person and one of the fastest in modern times to amass a mega-fortune. The business, founded in 2012, has more than 1 billion active monthly users across eight mobile apps, including a news aggregator powered by artificial intelligence and a video-sharing platform.

In this week’s Mr Futurist Podcast, I will discuss, Is a Universal Basic Income (UBI) a good idea for the US?

Why the Southern United States is headed for a deep economic crash? What US industries will be the most impacted by business automation? Why will automation affect white collar jobs first? Is the US Becoming a Third World Country? How would a Universal Basic Income (UBI) impact large US companies? Illiteracy in the US. Could we have a Great Technological World-Wide Depression? All this and more in this podcast!

Mr Futurist Podcast – Should We Have a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the US? Get my weekly podcast/article on business automation, AI and advancing technology and how it can and will affect your company, your job and career. The Right Knowledge is a Powerful thing! This weeks podcast transcript: This week’s article will be on the dark side. I promise by the end, I will flip this around and offer solutions, and make what appears to be something gloom and doom, have a possible happy ending. Having studied artificial intelligence and business automation for the last couple of years. I believe the unemployment numbersRead More →

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Climate change is a sprawling, complex problem. But there is an astonishingly simple way to make a difference: plant more trees. Trees scrub pollution from the air, reduce erosion, improve water quality, provide homes for animals and insects, and enhance our lives in countless other ways.

It turns out that ecosystem restoration is also an emerging business opportunity. A new report from the World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy says governments around the world have committed to reviving nearly 400 million acres of wilderness — an area larger than South Africa. As countries push to regrow forests, startups are dreaming up new, faster ways to plant trees. For some innovators, like NASA veteran Dr. Lauren Fletcher, that means using drones.

Fletcher said his conversion from stargazer to eco-warrior was driven by his worry about climate change, which has been dramatically worsened by deforestation. To tackle the problem, he created BioCarbon Engineering, which he describes as an ecosystem restoration company. Working with colleagues, he came up with a 30-pound unmanned aerial vehicle nicknamed “Robin.” It can fly over the most rugged landscapes on earth, planting trees in precise locations at the rate of 120 per minute.

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Unmanned systems’ global inroads are including European agriculture. GNSS for precision guidance of tractors and harvesters is already in place. More recent innovations include fully driverless and smart systems, while drones remain poised to fly.

The experience of one Dutch company is instructive. Precision Makers is an up-and- coming manufacturer of automated farm systems. The company delivers two main products. One, a conversion kit called X-Pert, turns existing mowers and tractors into driverless machines. The other is a fully robotized, unmanned vehicle called Greenbot. Both systems enable automated precision operations, but while one has been successful in terms of sales, the other has not.

Precision Makers Business Development Director, Allard Martinet, told Inside Unmanned Systems, “Sales of our X-Pert conversion system have been very good. We started in 2008, first converting the Toro golf course mower, and then we expanded that into solutions for other vehicles. Today, there are more than 150 X-Pert converted vehicles running.”

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On July 11-12th, we return to the Cooper Union in New York City for our second annual Ending Age-Related Diseases conference, which focuses on the progress in aging research as well as the business side of biotech.

We will be bringing you the latest aging research, investment, and business knowledge from some of the top experts in the industry. We will be packing two days full of talks and discussion panels featuring the people who are developing the technologies that could change the way we regard and treat aging forever.

We are currently offering reduced ticket prices until March 31st, after which the price increases to the regular $400 cost. If you would like to take advantage of this special offer, head on over to our event ticket page to secure your place now.

Continue reading “Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference: March Update” »

In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Decades later, the concept of an “intelligence explosion” — leading to the sudden rise of “superintelligence” and the accidental end of the human race — has taken hold in the AI community. Famous business leaders are casting it as a major risk, greater than nuclear war or climate change. Average graduate students in machine learning are endorsing it. In a 2015 email survey targeting AI researchers, 29% of respondents answered that intelligence explosion was “likely” or “highly likely”. A further 21% considered it a serious possibility.

Continue reading “The implausibility of intelligence explosion” »