Lifeboat Foundation

Locke, though, wasn’t delivering a sermon.

The Texas pastor was moderating a panel at the first-ever Christian Transhumanist Conference, hosted last month by the Christian Transhumanist Association at Lipscomb University, a Church of Christ-affiliated school in Nashville.

A career’s worth of intelligence work for the U.S. Government has taught me one key lesson: national security is a lot like playing a game of chess. You have to anticipate your opponent’s every move in order to remain one step ahead.

Disclosing your strategy will be used against you. But if you recognize certain opportunities, you can win the match.

When I headed the government’s highly sensitive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), I worked with a team to assess whether a particular chess piece — in this case in the form of an unfamiliar aerial technology — was a threat to our side of the chess board.

Continue reading “Why Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Are A National Security Risk And Also An Opportunity For Progress” »

We are not alone in our concerns related to the current paywalling of science. Earlier this year, researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York decided that this problem deserves the attention of decision makers and the general public, and they started producing a documentary in order to reveal the flaws of the existing system of scientific publications and to propose solutions. This documentary is Paywall: The Business of Scholarship.

The producer of the documentary, journalist and filmmaker Jason Schmitt, contacted university representatives, university and public libraries, open access publishing houses, and researchers around the globe to ask them if they have ever hit paywalls and how paywalls affected their professional activities.

Students benefit from classes by the leading experts in each subset of AI research. Students learn about techniques like computational reinforcement learning by one of the inventors of the technique (Richard Sutton). The list of over 28 AI experts allows students to develop a deeper intuition about AI techniques from often the people who are at the forefront or have invented a particular AI technique.

Aside from the world-class instruction, AI companies sponsor dinners and rooftop socials meant to facilitate future collaborations among research labs.

The CIFAR deep learning and reinforcement learning school has been training the world’s top AI researchers since 2005. Here we take an insider’s look at the school.

Continue reading “An Insider’s Look Into The Summer School Training The World’s Top AI Researchers” »

Current inequities in access to Denver’s parks that are found among the city’s minorities and low-income residents are the legacy of exclusionary local and state zoning codes, and funding policies that favored investment in wealthy neighborhoods, a new study found.

Although these disparities have declined over time, these improvements were driven primarily by gentrification, with ethnic minorities’ relocating into suburban areas with greater park acreage as whites returned to the urban core, rather than city officials’ efforts to promote equity, said lead author Alessandro Rigolon, a professor of recreation, sport and tourism at the University of Illinois.

To determine why Denver parks don’t adequately serve all city residents, Rigolon and co-author Jeremy Nemeth of the University of Colorado conducted a comprehensive case study of the city’s practices for establishing and funding its urban parks from 1902, when both the city and county of Denver were founded, through 2015. Their study appears in the Journal of Education Planning and Research.

Continue reading “Denver’s inequities in park access traced to segregation, funding policies” »

(Reuters) — Detroit authorities on Wednesday ordered drinking water shut off at all city public schools after elevated levels of lead and copper were found in water at more than a dozen buildings with antiquated plumbing systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF_dtDDE-lw

Provides some hints what hurdles would be to tackle to do excursions on Mars; also provides a lot of illustrative info about the planet.

An early moment in the new documentary Do You Trust This Computer? is actually a shot from the Terminator franchise. Human skulls and bones rest among dust and ashes as the robotic soldiers of Skynet march through the remains of an apocalyptic war. What happens between humans and robots in the Terminator films, or other sci-fi movies like The Matrix, War Games, and Ex Machina, might feel like the far away future, but Do You Trust This Computer? suggests that that’s not the case. In fact, the doc implies that we’re much closer to sentient robots walking the Earth than we think – only they may not look exactly like we’ve always imagined, and we are woefully unprepared for the consequences of their consciousness.

Directed by Chris Paine, Do You Trust This Computer? (now playing in New York and available on VOD) explores the role of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives. The film features interviews with some of today’s top AI experts, theorists, professors, and scientists, such as Elon Musk, Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan, and futurist Ray Kurtzwiel. While some people — predominantly those on the side of tech and invention companies — think that AI can help better humanity, most of the others interviewed suggest that we’re on the cusp of something potentially world-ending. As such, the doc offers up a vision of the real near-future that is as fascinating as it is terrifying.

So, what exactly do we have to be so afraid of? After all, there’s plenty of potential good that can come from advancements in AI. Self-driving cars could potentially prevent crashes and save millions of lives around the world; robotics in the medical field can find ailments faster; surgical machines can go where human hands cannot. But automation can also lead to major job loss, the film suggests. Much like the industrial revolution put many humans out of work, so too will robotics. Just take Baxter, an industrial robot, who costs the same amount as one minimum wage worker would in a year, but lasts much longer and can do the work of three people, since he doesn’t need to eat, sleep, or take breaks. Everyone from long-haul drivers and taxi drivers to data entry workers to those in white-collar industries like business, journalism, and medicine will be affected.

Continue reading “This New Tech Documentary Says We’re Totally Unprepared For The Upcoming Robot Apocalypse” »