Lifeboat Foundation

Humans are pretty good at looking at a single two-dimensional image and understanding the full three-dimensional scene that it captures. Artificial intelligence agents are not.

Yet a machine that needs to interact with objects in the world—like a robot designed to harvest crops or assist with surgery—must be able to infer properties about a 3D scene from observations of the 2D images it’s trained on.

While scientists have had success using neural networks to infer representations of 3D scenes from images, these machine learning methods aren’t fast enough to make them feasible for many real-world applications.

Transhumanism, briefly explained, means the modification of human beings through technology and engineering. It employs a variety of methods used to cure ailments, or upgrading humans just for the sake of it. Creating people that are smarter, stronger, healthier, or more productive.

It comes with plenty of social and ethical implications and challenges. How will we face this future? Let’s find out today.

Continue reading “Transhumanism and Humanity’s Desire to Escape Death” »

Five million people are employed in the fast food industry in the U.S. alone, but their tasks are monotonous and easily automated.

Bei einem Experiment in der Antarktis haben Forscher Teilchen beobachtet, die ein Beweis für eine alternative Realität sein könnten.

This season, a handful of other major retailers — Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Ikea and Target — are also chartering their own vessels to bypass the busiest ports and get their goods unloaded sooner.

“The real purpose of these vessels when they were built was not containers. It was really lumber, chemicals, grain, agricultural products. But because of the ingenuity and creativity and lack of space, Amazon and many other smart people have quickly figured out how to convert some of these multipurpose vessels to container,” Ferreira said.

For some of the highest-margin goods, Amazon is avoiding ports altogether by reportedly leasing at least ten long-haul planes that can get smaller amounts of cargo directly from China to the U.S. much faster. One of the converted Boeing 777 planes can carry 220,000 pounds of cargo. According to capacity estimates from Ocean Audit, the small 1,000-container freighters being chartered by Amazon and others can hold 180 times that, with the biggest cargo ships carrying more than 3,600 times what the planes can hold.

Scientists have found a way to interpret jellyfish’s thoughts regardless of not having any neurons, study finds.

They were able to observe how well the cells in a tiny type of see-through jellyfish operate collectively, to produce complicated independent motions, such as capturing and consuming food source. This is all thanks to ingenious molecular manipulation.

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Papers referenced int the video:
Joint distribution of lipoprotein cholesterol classes. The Framingham study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6573877/

Continue reading “How Many Calories Are Optimal For Health?” »

Circa 2017

An electronic tongue is a device made of sensors responding to some taste (soluble) of foods through the transduction of a signal or a pattern of signals thanks to a pattern-recognition software system.

The robot navigates using sensors and removes weeds mechanically without the need for chemicals. The LiDAR (light detection and ranging) scanners installed in the weed killer continuously emit laser pulses as the vehicle moves, which are then reflected by objects in the surrounding area. This produces a 3D point cloud of the environment, which helps mobile weed killers to find their way and determine the position of plants or trees. “AMU-Bot is not yet able to classify all plants; however, it can recognize crops such as trees and shrubs in the rows of the tree nursery cultivations,” said the team leader Kevin Bregler.

The weeds in the spaces between the plants or trees are also reliably eliminated. To do this, the manipulator moves into the gaps between the crops. The weeds do not need to be collected separately and are left on the ground to dry out. Thanks to its caterpillar drive, the self-driving weed killer moves along the ground with ease and is extremely stable. Even holes in the ground created when saplings are removed do not pose a problem for AMU-Bot. The AMU-Bot platform is economical, robust, easy to use, and at the same time highly efficient.

The project is funded by the German Federal Office of Agriculture and Food. The AMU-Bot platform relies on the ingenious interaction of three sophisticated modules: caterpillar vehicle, navigation system, and manipulator. Bosch is responsible for the navigation and the sensor system, while KommTek developed the caterpillar drive. The Fraunhofer IPA designed the height-adjustable manipulator, including rotary harrows, and was responsible for overall coordination.

OAKLAND/LOS ANGELES, Calif., Dec 2 – Andy Chanley, the afternoon drive host at Southern California’s public radio station 88.5 KCSN, has been a radio DJ for over 32 years. And now, thanks to artificial intelligence technology, his voice will live on simultaneously in many places.

“I may be a robot, but I still love to rock,” says the robot DJ named ANDY, derived from Artificial Neural Disk-JockeY, in Chanley’s voice, during a demonstration for Reuters where the voice was hard to distinguish from a human DJ.

Our phones, speakers and rice cookers have been talking to us for years, but their voices have been robotic. Seattle-based AI startup WellSaid Labs says it has finessed the technology to create over 50 real human voice avatars like ANDY so far, where the producer just needs to type in text to create the narration.