Lifeboat Foundation

“If we don’t study the mistakes of the future, we’re doomed to repeat them the first time :(” — Ken M, comedian.

[Editor’s Note: Today’s blog post is an excerpt from Mr. Robert J. Hranek’s short story entitled “Angry Engineer,” submitted to the 2019 Mad Scientist Science Fiction Writing Contest. The underlying premise of this contest was that, following months of strained relations and covert hostility with its neighbor Otso, Donovia launched offensive combat operations against Otso on 17 March 2030. Donovia is a wealthy nation that is a near-peer strategic competitor of the United States. The U.S. is a close ally of Otso and is compelled to intervene due to treaty obligations and historical ties. Among the many future innovations addressed in his short story, Mr. Hranek includes a “pre-mortem” in the form of two dozen lessons learned, identifying potential “mistakes of the future” regarding the Battle for Otso, so that we’re not “doomed to repeat them the first time!” Enjoy!]

The U.S. responded to Donovia’s invasion of Otso by initiating combat operations against the aggressors on 1 April 2030 — April Fools’ Day. Thousands of combatants died on both sides, mostly on ships; hundreds more were wounded, primarily from the land battle, and an unverifiable number of casualties occurred worldwide due to the sabotage of power grids and other infrastructure. An accurate civilian count was impossible in the chaos of reestablishing power, computer, and financial systems worldwide.

Continue reading “The Otso Incident with Donovia in 2030” »

Concord, the fastest-growing contract management platform company, today announced accelerated market adoption of its cloud-based contract management platform and 2.5x revenue growth over the last 12 months. There are now 260,000 companies on the Concord Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The Concord SaaS platform drives horizontal adoption by providing all key stakeholders collaborative access to the contract drafting, negotiation, signing and renewal processes within a single cloud-based platform.

Concord also announced a new pricing model. Unlike other contract management solutions that charge per seat regardless of usage, Concord pricing reflects the actual functionality needed by different stakeholders. Pricing is now based on Creator, Collaborator and Viewer usage options. For example, legal teams need Creator usage comprising full platform functionality including contract creation, editing and negotiation rights. Procurement, HR and sales teams typically only require Collaborator rights such as contract requests and the ability to select from previously approved form fields. Finance teams often only need Viewer rights to have visibility to track contract status, time to revenue and renewals. DevOps teams simply need API access to connect and integrate with other enterprise tools. By pricing and providing access according to need, the Concord platform is seamless and economical to adopt throughout an organization.

The cross-functional and external stakeholder proliferation capability is unique to Concord and a key factor to Concord’s platform adoption dramatically outpacing that of its competitors. For example, 64 new customers from vertical industries including e-commerce, logistics and healthcare have joined the Concord platform in the past two quarters. The horizontal approach Concord takes to the contracting process creates a powerful network effect which has resulted in 60,000 new users to the platform in the past two quarters.

Continue reading “Concord Posts Record Growth and Introduces New Pricing Model” »

Jose Cordeiro is promoting the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies in Spain and the integration of Latin American immigrants into Spain’s aging society to maintain the country’s productivity. He was at the recent Undoing aging conference in Berlin and gave us an interview about his political goals.

At Undoing Aging 2019, jointly organized by SENS Research Foundation and Forever Healthy Foundation, there was a session focused on the ways to make healthy life extension and medical progress a greater part of the global agenda. Among the speakers there was Jose Cordeiro, the vice chair of Humanity Plus, director of The Millennium Project, fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and board member of the Lifeboat Foundation.

Continue reading “An Interview with Jose Cordeiro” »

SpaceFund is a new type of venture capital firm, providing near-term liquidity through security tokens and informed investing in a diversified portfolio of space companies.

The program is reportedly ending due to “lackluster financial performance.”

Scientists believe that time is continuous, not discrete—roughly speaking, they believe that it does not progress in “chunks,” but rather “flows,” smoothly and continuously. So they often model the dynamics of physical systems as continuous-time “Markov processes,” named after mathematician Andrey Markov. Indeed, scientists have used these processes to investigate a range of real-world processes from folding proteins, to evolving ecosystems, to shifting financial markets, with astonishing success.

However, invariably a scientist can only observe the state of a system at discrete times, separated by some gap, rather than continually. For example, a stock market analyst might repeatedly observe how the state of the market at the beginning of one day is related to the state of the market at the beginning of the next day, building up a conditional probability distribution of what the state of the second day is given the state at the first day.

In a pair of papers, one appearing in this week’s Nature Communications and one appearing recently in the New Journal of Physics, physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that in order for such two–time dynamics over a set of “visible states” to arise from a continuous-time Markov process, that Markov process must actually unfold over a larger space, one that includes hidden states in addition to the visible ones. They further prove that the evolution between such a pair of times must proceed in a finite number of “hidden timesteps”, subdividing the interval between those two times. (Strictly speaking, this proof holds whenever that evolution from the earlier time to the later time is noise-free—see paper for technical details.)

Continue reading “The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world” »

New book calls Google, Facebook, Amazon, and six more tech giants “the new gods of A.I.” who are “short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain”.

A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head.

We like to think that we are in control of the future of “artificial” intelligence. The reality, though, is that we—the everyday people whose data powers AI—aren’t actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can’t see and have no input into—one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple—are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain.

Continue reading “The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity” »

Chinese space has been a very hot topic in recent years. Other than the impressive space exploration missions (Tiangong, Chang’e…), the interest for China is also due to the recent opening up of this industry to private investments, which has led to a leap in the number of space start-ups. These start-ups, supported by venture capital heavy-weights are covering the entire space industrial chain: launchers, satellite platforms, satellite subsystems, satellite services, ground segment, etc.

The number of space start-ups on the other hand, is a debated question. Chen Lan estimated in November 2018 that there were over 100 Chinese space start-ups [1]. FutureAerospace, a Beijing-based think-tank, sets the number at around 60, at the same period [2]. Other space watchers have suggested 80 such as in [3]. However, how this count is made is rarely detailed (how do we define a “NewSpace company”?), and very few lists are available at the time of writing, if any. Up to now, only Disrupt Space, a start-up which plans to build a global space entrepreneurial community, has undertaken the establishment of a list, which sets the count at 35 Chinese space start-ups (see map below).

Fig. 1 – Disrupt Space’s Chinese Space Start-up Mapping in November 2018 [4]

Continue reading “China’s NewSpace: Mapping of its 60+ Start-ups” »