Lifeboat Foundation

You hear a lot these days about the potential for impending doom as AI becomes ever smarter.

Indeed, big names are calling for caution: the futurist optimism of protagonists like Ray Kurzweil is outweighed by the concern expressed by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. And Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s scary thought experiments around what AI might lead to could well sustain a new strain of Nordic noir. There are, indeed, reasons to be concerned.

The fictional Hal’s refusal to open the pod bay doors in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seems a lot less like fiction than it did when the movie came out almost 50 years ago. Today, we have real reason to be concerned about the potential for autonomous drones making decisions about who to take out, or self-driving cars making a choice between hitting a roadside tree and hitting a child.

Continue reading “The era of AI-human hybrid intelligence” »

EPFL scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between.

The driver ahead suddenly stops, and you find yourself stomping on your breaks before you even realize what is going on. We would call this a reflex, but the underlying reality is much more complex, forming a debate that goes back centuries: Is consciousness a constant, uninterrupted stream or a series of discrete bits — like the 24 frames-per-second of a movie reel? Scientists from EPFL and the universities of Ulm and Zurich, now put forward a new model of how the brain processes unconscious information, suggesting that consciousness arises only in intervals up to 400 milliseconds, with no consciousness in between. The work is published in PLOS Biology.

Continuous or discrete?

Continue reading “How the brain produces consciousness in ‘time slices’” »

The human brain was initially used for basic survival tasks, such as staying safe and hunting and gathering. Yet, 200,000 years later, the same human brain is able to learn abstract concepts, like momentum, energy and gravity, which have only been formally defined in the last few centuries.

New research from Carnegie Mellon University has now uncovered how the brain is able to acquire brand new types of ideas. Published in Psychological Science, scientists Robert Mason and Marcel Just used neural-decoding techniques developed at CMU to identify specific physics concepts that advanced students recalled when prompted. The brain activation patterns while thinking about the physics concepts indicated that all of the students’ brains used the ancient brain systems the same way, and the patterns revealed how the new knowledge was formed — by repurposing existing neural systems.

The findings could be used to improve science instruction.

Hmm… That would explain Alzheimer disease — It’d be like some sort of unabashedly evil version of a smart phone data caps!

Or not.

Continue reading “Is the Universe a Simulation? Scientists Debate” »

Events and trainings hosted and sponsored by the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

My own prediction is that we will see singularity with humans 1st via BMI/ BI technology and other bio-computing technology before we see a machine brain operating a the level of a healthy fully funtional human brain.

Since War of the Worlds hit the silver screen, never has the notion that machine intelligence will overtake human intelligence is more real. In this two-part series, the author examines the growing trend towards cognitive machines.

Luv it; AI (more than any other technology) as well as Gene editing needs diversity in order to have relevance in the world.

We need Black intellligence.

Many folks talk about the whole AI revolution; and indeed it does change some things and opens the door the for opportunities. However, has it truly changed the under lying technology? No; AI is still reliant on existing digital technology. The real tech revolution will come in the form of Quantum tech over the next 7 to 8 years; and it will change everything in our lives and industry. Quantum will change everything that we know about technology including devices, medical technologies, communications including the net, security, e-currency, etc. https://lnkd.in/bJnS37r

If you were born in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably remember the Jetsons family. The Jetsons are to the future what the Flintstones are to the past. That futuristic lifestyle vision goes back several decades; self-driving vehicles, robotic home helpers and so on. What looked like a cartoon series built on prolific imagination seems somewhat more real today. Newly developed technologies are becoming available and connecting everything to the internet. This is the-internet-of-things era.

These ‘things’ are not new. They are just standard devices – lights, garage doors, kitchen appliances, household appliances – equipped with a little intelligence. Intelligence that is possible thanks to three emerging technologies: sensors to collect information from surroundings; the ability to control something; and communication capability allowing devices to talk to each other.

Continue reading “Second digital revolution” »

The best kind of science fiction comes to life (well, to a box, technically).