Lifeboat Foundation

Here’s my newest #transhumanism article from Metro; a very personal story:

At aged five, she announced she was in love with the robot and wanted to marry it.

My wife and I set up a mock wedding and filmed it. It was all good fun until my wife asked how I’d feel if my daughter wanted to do this as an adult with a robot she loved.

Continue reading “Should I have let my daughter marry our robot?” »

Trying to see the world through someone else’s eyes is a great way to build empathy and understanding between people. Turns out, this approach — when taken literally — also works with robots. Researchers from the University of Bourgogne, University of Trento, and their colleagues used a head-mounted display to put people “inside” a robot and then studied their “likeability and closeness towards the robot.”

“We have demonstrated that by ‘beaming’ a participant into a robot we can change his or her attitude towards the robot,” says University of Trento psychologist Francesco Pavani.

“By ‘beaming’, we mean that we gave the participants the illusion that they were looking through the robot’s eyes, moving its head as if it were their head, look in the mirror and see themselves as a robot.”

With a focal length equivalent to 1000mm.

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence firm originally founded by Elon Musk and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, just landed a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

Though originally founded to be a non-profit, ethical alternative to the massive companies developing AI tech, OpenAI became a sort of hybrid non-profit and for-profit back in March. The two companies have been collaborating on projects for years, but now with this new investment, Business Insider reports that OpenAI will be developing AI tech specifically for Microsoft’s cloud services.

“This is the age of disruption.”–Sebastian Thrun “Innovations can only be disruptive in relation to something else.”–Clayton M. Christensen Disruption. I…

This innovation drive, including increasing use of automation on farms like Dijkstra’s, has helped propel a country with a land mass smaller than the state of West Virginia to become the world’s second-biggest food exporter after the U.S., with agri-food exports worth more than $100 billion.

And it’s dairy, and fruit and vegetables ― where technologies like milking and harvesting robots are becoming commonplace in the Netherlands ― that account for the biggest share of that export revenue.

“Automation has been part of that success story,” said Erik Nicholson of the United Farm Workers of America. The Netherlands “is seen as a world leader because of the innovation going on there and the output it manages despite its comparatively small size.”

An international research team has studied how photons travel in the plane of the world’s thinnest semiconductor crystal. The results of the physicists’ work open the way to the creation of monoatomic optical transistors — components for quantum computers, potentially capable of making calculations at the speed of light.

Adoptees and others with unknown parentage can use DNA testing to find and connect with their biological families or to learn more about where their ancestors came from.

DNA testing won’t always provide adoptees with a quick answer to finding their biological roots, but with some traditional genealogy research and DNA testing, many have found success! If you’re wondering how to find your birth parents through DNA, this article can help you get started.

Los Angeles company Ampaire is offering its hybrid-electric Electric EEL aircraft to general-aviation pilots starting this week.