Lifeboat Foundation

• Basic income will be widespread by the 2030s, according to Google futurist and director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.
• Kurzweil is known for making seemingly wild predictions. In 2016, he predicted that by 2029, medical technology will add an extra year to human life expectancies on an annual basis.
• ” We’re going to have more and more powerful technology to keep our physical bodies going. We’ll think, ‘Wow, back in 2018, people only had one body, and they couldn’t back up their mind file,’” he said onstage at TED.

As it becomes apparent that artificial intelligence will replace ever-more jobs in the coming years, a growing number of politicians, nonprofits, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have started thinking about how we’ll cope with a world in which not everyone can — or needs to — work.

Basic income experiments, in which people are given a regular salary just to live, no strings attached, are popping up all over Europe, Africa, and North America.

That, he said, will lead to new forms of expression, such as music, that will be as different from today’s communication as current human expression is from that of primates.

Asked how the U.S. and other countries would pay for a basic income, given existing large deficits, Kurzweil predicted that massive deflation would make goods much cheaper.

Separately: Kurzweil debuted a new Google project called “Talk to Books,” a new free tool that allows people to use their voice to ask a question and that will go find the best answers from hundreds of thousands of books. Unlike traditional search, it is based on semantics, not keywords.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil: Universal Basic Income will arrive in the 2030s” »

Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do now. In factories, labs, and of course science fiction, imaginary robots keep fueling our imagination about artificial humans and autonomous machines.

Real-world robots remain surprisingly dysfunctional, although they are steadily infiltrating urban areas across the globe. This fourth industrial revolution driven by robots is shaping urban spaces and urban life in response to opportunities and challenges in economic, social, political, and healthcare domains. Our cities are becoming too big for humans to manage.

Continue reading “Robot Cities: Three Urban Prototypes for Future Living” »

Russia is actively implementing a lunar program through 2030, aiming to send astronauts to the moon, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, Russia’s Cosmonautics Day.

Putin said “yes” to the question “We are going to fly to the moon, right?” when he visited the Space Pavilion at the all-Russian Center of Achievements of the National Economy, according to the Kremlin.

The industry partners will use the money to train artificially intelligent laboratory robots.

Many people assume that when robots enter the economy, they’ll snatch low-skilled jobs. But don’t let a PhD fool you — AI-powered robots will soon impact a laboratory near you.

The days of pipetting liquids around were already numbered. Companies like Transcriptic, based in Menlo Park, California, now offer automated molecular biology lab work, from routine PCR to more complicated preclinical assays. Customers can buy time on their ‘robotic cloud lab’ using any laptop and access the results in a web app.

Continue reading “DARPA Awards Ginkgo Bioworks and Transcriptic $9.5M to Bring AI into the Lab” »

“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.” Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric

The second wave of digitization is set to disrupt all spheres of economic life. As venture capital investor Marc Andreesen pointed out, “software is eating the world.” Yet, despite the unprecedented scope and momentum of digitization, many decision makers remain unsure how to cope, and turn to scholars for guidance on how to approach disruption.

The first thing they should know is that not all technological change is “disruptive.” It’s important to distinguish between different types of innovation, and the responses they require by firms. In a recent publication in the Journal of Product Innovation, we undertook a systematic review of 40 years (1975 to 2016) of innovation research. Using a natural language processing approach, we analyzed and organized 1,078 articles published on the topics of disruptive, architectural, breakthrough, competence-destroying, discontinuous, and radical innovation. We used a topic-modeling algorithm that attempts to determine the topics in a set of text documents. We quantitatively compared different models, which led us to select the model that best described the underlying text data. This model clustered text into 84 distinct topics. It performs best at explaining the variability of the data in assigning words to topics and topics to documents, minimizing noise in the data.

Continue reading “What 40 Years of Research Reveals About the Difference Between Disruptive and Radical Innovation” »

Bank is latest to harness tech as a cheaper and better way of tackling crime.

Australia’s major cities are growing more rapidly than ever before, gaining three million residents in a decade. Concerns about the risks to their long-term liveability and health are growing too. Is the consistent placing of Australian cities at the top of most liveable city rankings a reason for complacency?

The fastest-growing city, Melbourne, is experiencing unprecedented growth and yet has topped The Economist Intelligence Unit global liveability ranking for seven years running. However, much like Australia’s remarkable record of 26 years of continuous economic growth, many of the policy and institutional reforms that delivered this liveability legacy occurred decades ago.

Australia is now undergoing its third great wave of population growth, putting pressure on infrastructure, services and the environment. During the past two waves of growth, in the late-19th and mid-20th centuries, cities implemented visionary responses. It’s largely because of these past phases of planning and investment that our cities have until now been able to sustain their liveability and a reasonably healthy natural environment.

Continue reading “Our legacy of liveable cities won’t last without a visionary response to growth” »

If we are to have truly smart cities our transport systems will have to be more cost-effective, safer and sustainable. Perhaps most of all they will need to be more integrated, as the EU-funded project MFDS demonstrates.

The stated aim of the EU’s ‘smart, green and integrated transport’ initiative is to build a European transport system that is ‘resilient, resource-efficient, climate- and environmentally friendly, safe and seamless for the benefit of all citizens, the economy and society.’

In contribution, the EU-funded MFDS project has developed a versatile and affordable ‘Intelligent Transport System’ offering several functions including wrong-way driver detection, traffic congestion detection, vehicle counting by vehicle classification and parking accounting. The core innovation of MFDS is the system’s ability to perform its functions simultaneously, while remaining low-cost to buy and install, as well as running on minimum power. The project’s feasibility study has demonstrated that the system will be of interest to multiple EU markets.

Continue reading “Telematics technology steering toward smarter EU roads” »