Lifeboat Foundation

A robot has addressed the House of Lords for the first time, telling a committee that artificial intelligence can be a ‘threat and opportunity’ to artists.

The robot, named Ai-Da and devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller, gave evidence to the communications and digital committee as part of an inquiry into the future of the arts, design, fashion and music industries and how AI might affect them.

With rapidly developing AI, growing accessibility to super computers and machine learning on the ride, Ai-Da – named after the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace – was created as a ‘comment and critique’ on rapid technological change.

Teleportation is already real, but it’s probably not exactly how you imagine it. With the Metaverse in play, entering a virtual room is already happening. The Metaverse is a virtual space where people can interact and socialize with each other through technology. Even though we are not yet there with physical teleportation, virtually, we can pin ourselves anywhere we want. Let’s learn about this and other cool inventions that seem like they come straight from the future!

#brightside.

Continue reading “Teleportation Is Here, But It’s Not What You Think” »

Experimental video mashup on the Singularity featuring Ben Goertzel & Hugo de Garis.
Music by Scott Hanson (Tycho) — the actual song is Melanine form the album Dive.

Hugo de Garis
Ben Goertzel

Continue reading “Hugo de Garis & Ben Goerzel on the Singularity” »

For engineers, the question of whether to store information in analog or discrete form is easy to answer. Discrete data storage has clear advantages, not least of which is that it is much more robust against degradation.

Engineers have exploited this property. Provided noise is below some threshold level, digital music can be copied endlessly. By contrast, music stored in analog form, such as on cassette or vinyl LP, can be copied only a few times before noise degrades the recording beyond recognition.

When Michael Schneider’s anxiety and PTSD flare up, he reaches for the ukulele he keeps next to his computer.

“I can’t actually play a song,” says Schneider, who suffered two serious brain injuries during nearly 22 years in the Marines. “But I can play chords to take my stress level down.”

It’s a technique Schneider learned through Creative Forces, an arts therapy initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Continue reading “Art and music therapy seem to help with brain disorders. Scientists want to know why” »

A new AI system can create natural-sounding speech and music after being prompted with a few seconds of audio.

AudioLM, developed by Google researchers, generates audio that fits the style of the prompt, including complex sounds like piano music, or people speaking, in a way that is almost indistinguishable from the original recording. The technique shows promise for speeding up the process of training AI to generate audio, and it could eventually be used to auto-generate music to accompany videos.

Could human civilization eventually spread across the whole Milky Way galaxy? Could we move beyond our small, blue planet to establish colonies in the multitude of star systems out there? These questions are pretty daunting, but their (theoretical) answers were actually put forth decades ago. Roey Tzezana describes the conceptual von Neumann machine. [Directed by Eoin Duffy, narrated by Addison Anderson, music by Wesley Slover].

Today, one of the biggest paradoxes in the universe threatens to unravel modern science: the black hole information paradox. Every object in the universe is composed of particles with unique quantum properties and even if an object is destroyed, its quantum information is never permanently deleted. But what happens to that information when an object enters a black hole? Fabio Pacucci investigates. [Directed by Artrake Studio, narrated by Addison Anderson, music by WORKPLAYWORK / Cem Misirlioglu].

Richard Gott, co author with Neil De Grasse Tyson of “Welcome to The Universe” argues the key to understanding the origin of the universe may be the concept of closed time like curves. These are solutions to Einstein’s theory that may allow time travel into the past. in this film, Richard Gott of Princeton University explains the model he developed with LIxin Li. Gott explores the possibility of a closed time like curve forming in the early universe and how this might lead to the amazing property of the universe being able to create itself. Gott is one of the leading experts in time travel solution to Einstein’s equations and is author of the book “Time Travel In Einstein’s Universe”.
This film is part of a series of films exploring competing models of th early universe with the creators of those models. We have interviewed Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Alan Guth and many other leaders of the field. To see other episodes, click on the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ4zAUPI-qqqj2D8eSk7yoa4hnojoCR4m.

We would like to thank the following who helped us are this movie:
Animations:
Morn 1415
David Yates.
NASA
ESA
M Buser, E Kajari, and WP Schleich.
Storyblocks.
Nina McCurdy, Anthony Aguirre, Joel Primack, Nancy Abrams.
Pixabay.
Ziri Younsi.

Continue reading “Before the Big Bang 6: Can the Universe Create Itself?” »