Lifeboat Foundation

In a new book published this week titled Architects of Intelligence, writer and futurist Martin Ford interviewed 23 of the most prominent men and women who are working in AI today, including DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Google AI Chief Jeff Dean, and Stanford AI director Fei-Fei Li. In an informal survey, Ford asked each of them to guess by which year there will be at least a 50 percent chance of AGI being built.

Short answer: maybe within our lifetimes, but don’t hold out.

Artificial intelligences are about to get a place to call their own — and it’s located somewhere humans are unlikely to want to visit.

According to a story published Monday in the South China Morning Post, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences plan to construct a research base deep in the South China Sea, and they want artificially intelligent robots to run it.

This base could be the “first artificial intelligence colony on Earth,” those involved in the project told the SCMP.

There have been some who have complained about the seeming lack of acceleration or slower than some have expected development of societal technology.

Richard Jones talks about lack of specific progress to diamondoid molecular nanotechnology or the appearance that we might not be on track to a technological singularity.

Continue reading “Breaking Through to Next Levels of Technology” »

The military plans to purchase as many as 100,000 HoloLens augmented reality devices.

Antibiotics have emerged as potentially lifespan-enhancing drugs, according to the results of new research carried out in the UK.

Genetic experiments that eliminate “senescent” cells – older cells, which lose the ability to divide – have already been proven to alleviate age-related dysfunction in model organisms.

Now, scientists have shown for the first time that an FDA-approved antibiotic – Azithromycin – can effectively target and eliminate senescent cells in culture.

Continue reading “Antibiotics eliminate senescent cells associated with ageing” »

Elon Musk has Tweeted some of the details of the breakthrough changes to the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship.

The overall shape of the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship are about the same. However, there are fundamental materials change to airframe, tanks and heatshield.

Continue reading “SpaceX Super Heavy Starship has Breakthrough Design Improvements” »

A few years back, we heard about Mobile Recon Systems’ KittyHawk, a large-ish quadcopter that could carry three GoPro cameras. Well, the Kentucky-based company has now announced the new Dauntless UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), which can lift and transport over 200 lb (90 kg).

The experimental investigation of ultracold quantum matter makes it possible to study quantum mechanical phenomena that are otherwise inaccessible. A team led by the Innsbruck physicist Francesca Ferlaino has now mixed quantum gases of two strongly magnetic elements, erbium and dysprosium, and created a dipolar quantum mixture.

A few years ago, it seemed unfeasible to extend the techniques of atom manipulation and deep cooling in the ultracold regime to many-valence-electron atomic species. The reason is the increasing complexity in the atomic spectrum and the unknown scattering properties. However, a team of researchers, led by Ben Lev at Stanford University and an Austrian team directed by Francesca Ferlaino at the University of Innsbruck demonstrated quantum degeneracy of rare-earth species. Ferlaino’s group focused the research on erbium and developed a powerful, yet surprisingly simple approach to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate.

“We have shown how the complexity of atomic physics can open up new possibilities,” says Ferlaino. Magnetic species are an ideal platform to create dipolar quantum matter, in which particles interact with each other via a long-range and orientation dependent interaction as little quantum magnets.