Lifeboat Foundation

Graphene out garbage?

A recent breakthrough promises to make graphene out of garbage in a flash.

First in a series of Longevity Dialogues. Suggestions for future focus encouraged.

Host Mark Sackler conducts a lively discussion on issues involved with the anticipated implementation and implications of radical life extension. With XPrize innovation board member Sergey Young, and futurist authors David Wood and Jose Cordeiro.

Breakthrough! Scientists have discovered the formation of a new type of black hole in the universe.

It will have a speed of 7500 miles per hour.

An Amazon Prime-like service to deliver weapons? Well, that is what Elon Musk is working on. Yes, rockets that can deliver weapons to US Armed Forces stationed anywhere in the world.

Airborne taxis are coming?

“Flying taxis” will start taking off from an aerodrome north of Paris as soon as next June, operators said, in a trial ahead of a vast tourist influx for the 2024 Olympics.

The experiment will take place at the Pontoise-Cormeilles-en-Vexin aerodrome some 90 minutes northwest of the capital by car, according to a joint announcement by the Ile-de-France region, airports operator Groupe ADP and the RATP public transport agency.

Continue reading “France to test ‘flying taxis’ from next year: operators” »

Vaccines could take years, and preventative drugs could help bridge the gap.

Though many people are pinning their hopes on a COVID-19 vaccine, another option is available: preventive treatment. At a Senate hearing this week, Anthony Fauci noted that a vaccine — which is probably months or years away — isn’t the only way to protect someone from a life-threatening virus.

These treatments could protect people against infection for a few weeks or months, said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. While most ongoing research studies are focused on finding treatments for people who are already sick with COVID-19, some researchers are looking to see if they can stop people who are at high risk from getting sick in the first place.

Continue reading “An HIV-fighting strategy might help against COVID-19” »

Robots of the future will be dexterous, capable of deep nuanced conversations, and fully autonomous. They are going to be indispensable to humans in the future.

Let me know in the comment section what you wish a robot could help you do…?

~ 2020s & The Future Beyond.
#Iconickelx

Continue reading “A Future with Robots” »

Digital transformations have become a global trend in recent years. To be clear, in mainstream understanding, the term means to increase the use of data, which can then help us to build “smarter” machines, predict the future, dig out insights, eliminate human errors and maximize efficiency. However, according to the stats released by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey & Company, only about 30% of digital transformation projects ended up successfully. The result keeps us wondering: What are the key issues to account for such high failure rate? And more importantly, how can we resolve these issues?

The explosive successes of AI in the last decade or so are typically chalked up to lots of data and lots of computing power. But benchmarks also play a crucial role in driving progress—tests that researchers can pit their AI against to see how advanced it is. For example, ImageNet, a public data set of 14 million images, sets a target for image recognition. MNIST did the same for handwriting recognition and GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) for natural-language processing, leading to breakthrough language models like GPT-3.

A fixed target soon gets overtaken. ImageNet is being updated and GLUE has been replaced by SuperGLUE, a set of harder linguistic tasks. Still, sooner or later researchers will report that their AI has reached superhuman levels, outperforming people in this or that challenge. And that’s a problem if we want benchmarks to keep driving progress.

So Facebook is releasing a new kind of test that pits AIs against humans who do their best to trip them up. Called Dynabench, the test will be as hard as people choose to make it.