Lifeboat Foundation

Echoes could help autonomous cars—or spies.

By comparison, the next biggest market, Japan, will be responsible for 11% of all shipments over that same period and the U.S. for 7%. Developing-world markets Mexico, India, Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil will collectively buy just 5% of industrial robots.

China is setting the pace in automation to create the factory of the future.

GSK forms CRISPR alliance with UC Berkeley and UCSF to create functional genomics insitute. The main one, technologywise, is this about using CRISPR as a gene function screen. One can do a gazillion experiments at once, fleshing out connections, sketching the biology, finding drug targets. http://bit.do/eU942

S AN FRANCISCO — The drug maker GlaxoSmithKline announced Thursday that it would team up with some of the nation’s most prominent CRISPR researchers to use the gene-editing technology in a search for new medicines, establishing a new lab in San Francisco and spending up to $67 million over five years.

Jennifer Doudna, the University of California, Berkeley, researcher who co-invented the CRISPR enzyme technology, will help lead the effort, along with Jonathan Weissman, a UC San Francisco researcher who has been using CRISPR to understand the function of individual human genes and how they work together. Both are Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.

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A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat.

Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private.

The peer-to-peer mobile payments service faced criticism last year after Hang Do Thi Duc, a former Mozilla fellow, downloaded 207 million transactions. The scraping effort was possible because Venmo payments between users are public by default. The scrapable data inspired several new projects — including a bot that tweeted out every time someone bought drugs.

Cheezburger.com — Crafted from the finest Internets.

Gone are the days when a store’s security cameras only mattered to shoplifters.

Now, with the rising prevalence of surveillance systems constantly monitored by artificial intelligence, ubiquitous security systems can watch, learn about, and discriminate against shoppers more than ever before.

That’s the gist of a new ACLU report titled “The Dawn of Robot Surveillance,” about how emerging AI technology enables security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people — opening new possibilities in which power is abused or underserved communities are overpoliced.

Researchers combine deep learning and symbolic reasoning for a more flexible way of teaching computers to program.

Luminous Computing has developed an optical microchip that runs AI models much faster than other semiconductors while using less power.

Nichol Bradford, MBA, is the CEO & Founder of the Willow Group and the Executive Director and co-founder of the Transformative Technology Lab, Conference, and TT200 List. Prior to becoming a leader in Transformative Technology, Bradford was a senior executive in video games with responsibility for strategy, operations and marketing for major brands that include: Activision Blizzard, Disney, and Vivendi Games — including operating World of Warcraft China. Nichol is a graduate of Singularity University GSP15, has an MBA from Wharton School of Business in Strategy. She is author of a novel, The Sisterhood.

Here she describes developments in the emerging industry of transformative technology. She points out that, in the next 25 years, enormous numbers of jobs will be displaced by automation. This challenge, and others, make it essential that people large numbers of people actualize more of their innate potential. Technology can assist in this process — particularly when it is scalable and can be afforded by the millions. She emphasizes a variety of technological advances while emphasizing the importance of ethics, privacy, and data sovereignty.

Continue reading “Technology and Human Potential with Nichol Bradford” »