Lifeboat Foundation

Replacing traditional encryption schemes.

What are the prime factors, or multipliers, for the number 15? Most grade school students know the answer — 3 and 5 — by memory. A larger number, such as 91, may take some pen and paper. An even larger number, say with 232 digits, can (and has) taken scientists two years to factor, using hundreds of classical computers operating in parallel.

Google’s VP Vint Cerf states in the future that “The brain will be digitally altered by software”.

Considered one of the fathers of Internet, renowned in the computer industry, awarded with the highest award of US government, co-creator of TCP/IP internet and current vice president of Google, the Phd Vint Cerf emerges as one of the most authoritative voices in the world to reflect on new technologies around the world.

The computing Scientific who the United States commissioned along with Bob Khan the creation of a network protocol that will interconnect computers in 1973 in the age of cold war who at the age of 20 will work on F-1 engines used as propellant rocket of Saturn V rocket that “visited” the moon, apart from his academic skills, he can be characterized as a very simple person having fine and good sense of humor and very elegant, like someone from an European royalty party, definitely a different personality and image projecting into the collective imagination a professional of his career.

Reflections about internet of things, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, scanning the brain, space internet and even the possibility that humans can communicate with animals were the subjects Cerf answered who recently toured South America sharing time with inhabitants of end of the world.

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Glad to see this article get published because it echoes many of the concerns established around China and Russia governments and their hackers having their infrastructures on Quantum before US, Europe, and Canada. Computer scientists at MIT and the University of Innsbruck say they’ve assembled the first five quantum bits (qubits) of a quantum computer that could someday factor any number, and thereby crack the security of traditional encryption schemes.

Shor’s algorithm performed in a system less than half the size experts expected.

I am not in fact talking about the delightful Deus Ex game, but rather about the actual revolution in society and technology we are witnessing today. Pretty much every day I look at any news source, be it on cable news networks or facebook feeds or whathaveyou, I always see fear mongering. “Implantable chips will let the government track you!” or “Hackers will soon be able to steal your thoughts!” (Seriously, seen both of these and much more and much crazier.) …But I’m here to tell you two things. First, calm the hell down. Nearly every doomsday scenario painted by fear-mongering assholes is either impossible or so utterly unlikely as to be effectively impossible. And second… that you should psych the hell up because its actually extremely exciting and worth getting excited about. But for good reasons, not bad.

Very glad to see this article released. When I look at technology I have to look at their value (short & long term), cost & time to develop, usability and adoption potential, and risks & liability as well as their revenue potential & longevity in the market. In order for robots to have broader adoption by consumers and longevity in the future; development groups will need to design & develop robots that are more personable & multi-functional for consumers and companies. We still have a long ways to go.

What role does a philosopher play in building robots? If you’re Lisa Miracchi, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy in the School of Arts & Sciences, more than you might think.

When scholars began studying human intelligence, Miracchi says two schools of thought emerged: One group said human beings are simply computers, with mental states and actions explained in computational terms. The other camp believed that intelligence and the ability to think makes humans more than just computers.

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Western Digital’s bringing big-time storage to NAS boxes and external drives with new helium-filled 8TB hard drives.

When The Verge began covering “drones” three years ago, we got a lot of grief about using that word: drone. These were just remote control toys, they couldn’t fly themselves! When drones got smart enough to navigate using GPS, and to follow people around, the naysayers pointed out they still couldn’t see anything. It could follow you, sure, but not while avoiding trees. At CES the last two years we finally saw drones that could sense and avoid real-world obstacles. But those were just tech demos, R&D projects which so far haven’t been made commercially available.

That all changes today with the introduction of DJI’s new drone, the Phantom 4. It’s the first consumer unit that can see the world around it and adjust accordingly, the next big step towards a truly autonomous aircraft. Try and drive it into a wall, the Phantom 4 will put on the brakes. If you ask it to fly from your position to a spot across a river, and there is a bridge in between, it will make a judgement call: increase speed to clear the obstacle or, if that isn’t possible, stop and hover in place, awaiting your next command.

The Phantom 4 accomplishes this feat with the help of five cameras: two on the front and two on the bottom, plus the main 4K camera that has always been onboard to capture video. The images captured by these cameras are run through computer vision software which constructs a 3D model of the world around it that the drone can intelligently navigate.

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How Legos, lasers, and reindeer are building the interplanetary internet.

Biography : Scott Aaronson is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally. He also has written about consciousness and personal identity and the relevance of quantum mechanics to these issues.

Michael Cerullo: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Given the recent advances in brain preservation, questions of personal identity are moving from merely academic to extremely practical questions. I want to focus on your ideas related to the relevance of quantum mechanics to consciousness and personal identity which are found in your paper “Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine” ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159 ), your blog “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?” ( http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951 ), and your book “Quantum Computing since Democritus” ( http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/) .

Before we get to your own speculations in this field I want to review some of the prior work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff ( http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/content/hameroff-penrose…-or-theory ). Let me try to summarize some of the criticism of their work (including some of your own critiques of their theory). Penrose and Hameroff abandon conventional wisdom in neuroscience (i.e. that neurons are the essential computational element in the brain) and instead posit that the microtubules (which conventional neuroscience tell us are involved in nucleic and cell division, organization of intracellular structure, and intracellular transport, as well as ciliary and flagellar motility) are an essential part of the computational structure of the brain. Specifically, they claim the microtubules are quantum computers that grant a person the ability to perform non-computable computations (and Penrose claims these kinds of computations are necessary for things like mathematical understanding). The main critiques of their theory are: it relies on future results in quantum gravity that don’t exist; there is no empirical evidence that microtubules are relevant to the function of the brain; work in quantum decoherence also makes it extremely unlikely that the brain is a quatum computer; even if a brain could somehow compute non-computable functions it isn’t clear what this has to do with consciousness. Would you say these are fair criticisms of their theory and are there any other criticisms you see as relevant?

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