Lifeboat Foundation

Hugo de Garis on AI, the story leading up to where we are now, and the possibilities for AI in the not too distant future. We have seen AI sprint past us in many cognitive domains, and in the coming decades we will likely see AI creep up on human level intelligence in other domains — once this becomes apparent, AI will become a central political issue — and nations will try to out-compete each other in dangerous AI arms-race.
As AI encroaches further into areas of economic usefulness where humans traditionally dominated, how might avoid uselessness and stay relevant? Merge with the machines say’s Hugo.

Many thanks to Forms for the use of the track “Close” — check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFY0JbwrPlE | Bandcamp: https://soundcloud.com/forms308743226

Continue reading “Hugo de Garis — AI, Species Dominance and Our Cybernetic Future” »

About five minutes after the 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit near Mexico’s southwest coast Monday, typically calm water deep in a Death Valley National Park cave started sloshing against the surrounding limestone rock.

The reverberations from the earthquake more than 1,500 miles away created what experts have called a “desert tsunami,” which on Monday made waves erupt up to 4 feet high in the cave known as Devils Hole, a pool of water about 10 feet wide, 70 feet long and more than 500 feet deep, in Amargosa Valley, Nevada.

The water in the partially filled cave has become an “unusual indicator of seismic activity” across the world, with earthquakes across the globe—as far as Japan, Indonesia and Chile—causing the water to splash up Devils Hole, according to the National Park Service website.

Methods for learning from noisy data, using phonetic embeddings to improve entity resolution, and quantization-aware training are a few of the highlights.

Thank you for your interest in the Neuronline Community Leaders Program. Applications will be accepted until September 26, 2022 with offers made to accepted candidates by mid-October. Before completing the application, please spend 5–10 minutes exploring the Neuronline Community (community.sfn.org), the discussion portion of Neuronline.

For more information, review the Neuronline Community Leaders Program overview. Email [email protected] with any questions.

Researchers have disclosed a new severe Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vulnerability that could be exploited by users to access the virtual disks of other Oracle customers.

“Each virtual disk in Oracle’s cloud has a unique identifier called OCID,” Shir Tamari, head of research at Wiz, said in a series of tweets. “This identifier is not considered secret, and organizations do not treat it as such.”

“Given the OCID of a victim’s disk that is not currently attached to an active server or configured as shareable, an attacker could ‘attach’ to it and obtain read/write over it,” Tamari added.

For decades the field of cryobiology was largely ignored and underfunded. However, in recent years, several advances were made and will enable the creation of massively transformative industries. One of these advances in rapid reheating and is pioneered by the Dayong Gao group. Here is the story.

Time. We can’t get enough of it. We are desperate to make it flow faster or slower, and yet we are reminded again and again to…

A new atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory.

An international study team has found that a mysterious microscopic creature assumed to be the ancestor of humans actually belongs to a different family tree.

The Saccorhytus is a spikey, wrinkly sack with a huge mouth surrounded by spines and holes that were interpreted as pores for gills – a primitive feature of the deuterostome group, from which our own deep ancestors emerged.

But a thorough examination of fossils from China that date back 500 million years has shown that the holes surrounding the mouth are actually the bases of spines that split during the process of fossil preservation, finally revealing the evolutionary affinity of the microfossil Saccorhytus.