Lifeboat Foundation

Neuralink’s first patient says he’s given his brain-chip implant a name seven months after it was surgically implanted.

Noland Arbaugh, who is quadriplegic and became the first person to get the computer-controlling implant developed by Elon Musk’s brain-interface company, said Wednesday that he had named the device “Eve” and was working with it to improve himself in different ways.

What does the future hold? What will become of this planet and its inhabitants in the centuries to come?
We are living in a historical period that sometimes feels like the prelude to something truly remarkable or terribly dire about to unfold.
This captivating video seeks to decipher the signs and attempt to construct plausible scenarios from the nearly nothing we hold in our hands today.
As always, it will be scientific discoveries leading the dance of change, while philosophers, writers, politicians, and all the others will have the seemingly trivial task of containing, describing, and guiding.
Before embarking on our journey through time, let me state the obvious: No one knows the future!
Numerous micro and macro factors could alter this trajectory—world wars, pandemics, unimaginable social shifts, or climate disasters.
Nevertheless, we’re setting off. And we’re doing so by discussing the remaining decades of the century we’re experiencing right now.

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DISCUSSIONS \& SOCIAL MEDIA

Continue reading “From Today To The Year 3000: Let’s Dive Into The Future!” »

The brain-machine interface race is on. While Elon Musk’s Neuralink has garnered most of the headlines in this field, a new small and thin chip out of Switzerland makes it look downright clunky by comparison. It also works impressively well.

The chip has been developed by researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and represents a leap forward in the sizzling space of brain-machine-interfaces (BMIs) – devices that are able to read activity in the brain and translate it into real-world output such as text on a screen. That’s because this particular device – known as a miniaturized brain-machine interface (MiBMI) – is extremely small, consisting of two thin chips measuring just 8 mm² total. By comparison, Elon Musk’s Neuralink device clocks in at comparatively gargantuan size of about 23 × 8 mm (about 0.3 x .9 in).

Additionally, the EPFL chipset uses very little power, is reported to be minimally invasive, and consists of a fully integrated system that processes data in real time. That’s different from Neuralink, which requires the insertion of 64 electrodes into the brain and carries out its processing via an app located on a device outside of the brain.

Picking up a box and placing it in a neat pile is not an impressive action in itself for a robot; understanding an enigmatic human command and correctly deciphering and explaining the decision-making process, are definitely innovations. Digit owes parts of its progress to the generative artificial intelligence revolution that also reached the field of robotics and turned expectations from it on its head. “I’ve been asked what’s the biggest thing in 2024 besides language modeling — it’s robotics. Period,” Nvidia’s senior AI scientist Jim Fan wrote in December. “We’re about three years away from a ChatGPT moment for physical AI agents,” he explained.

Ever since Fan made this statement, it seems that everyone is talking about the “ChatGPT moment of robotics”, or the hope of a technological breakthrough that will push the field forward and finally fill our homes with intelligent humanoid robots to help us with household chores, wash the floor, set the table or do the laundry (but not fold it). “What has been happening in recent months is dramatic,” explains Amir Bousani, CEO of R-Go Robotics, which recently entered into a partnership with Nvidia to equip the robot it is developing with its spatial perception capabilities. “The physical world is more difficult than the internet,” notes Dr. Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “but the field of robots that have the ability to behave in general is running much faster today.”

The huge interest in humanoid robots, or humanoids, which Fan is talking about, is evident in the constant announcements in the field: in February, the startup Figure raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and OpenAI for the development of the humanoid. In March, Nvidia’s CEO stood on the stage of the company’s developer conference alongside nine humanoids from different companies and announced that building models for robots is “one of the most exciting problems to solve in artificial intelligence”; in April, Elon Musk promised that he would launch the humanoid robot he is developing — Optimus — next year and predicted that by 2040 there will be a billion humanoids among us. A short time later, the activities of Mentee Robotics, Amnon Shashua’s company that was founded two years ago and also develops the humanoid, went public.

M any prominent people in the tech industry have talked about the increasing convergence between humans and machines in coming decades. For example, Elon Musk has reportedly said he wants humans to merge with AI “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence”

His company Neuralink aims to facilitate this convergence so that humans won’t be “left behind” as technology advances in the future. While people with disabilities would be near-term recipients of these innovations, some believe technologies like this could be used to enhance abilities in everyone.

These aims are inspired by an idea called transhumanism, the belief that we should use science and technology to radically enhance human capabilities and seek to direct our own evolutionary path. Disease, aging and death are all realities transhumanists wish to end, alongside dramatically increasing our cognitive, emotional and physical capacities.

Elon Musk dropped in on the 10th world Water Forum in Bali, Indonesia, and outlined a plan to solve humanity’s growing water scarcity crisis. “The potential for solving any given water issue is very good,” he told the assembled dignitaries.

A University of Portsmouth physicist has explored whether a new law of physics could support the much-debated theory that we are simply characters in an advanced virtual world.

The simulated universe hypothesis proposes that what humans experience is actually an artificial reality, much like a computer simulation, in which they themselves are constructs.

The theory is popular among a number of well-known figures including Elon Musk, and within a branch of science known as information physics, which suggests physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information.

For the first time in human history, there are now 10,000 functioning satellites above our heads, whipping around the Earth at high speed. It’s a milestone that showcases decades of technical achievement but might also make it harder to sleep at night if you think about it for too long.

The count comes from the latest estimate by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leading watcher of most things orbital. McDowell estimates there are 10,036 active satellites in orbit as of July 18.

Remarkably, this figure has roughly quadrupled over just the past half-decade, thanks almost entirely to Elon Musk, SpaceX and their massive Starlink constellation of broadband routers in low-earth orbit.

Tesla is trying something new. The automaker is offering a bundle of 3 years of subscription to Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised, Supercharging, and premium connectivity.

Tesla has been having issues selling its FSD package.

For years, CEO Elon Musk claimed that Tesla would keep increasing prices as the system got better, which he claims would then make Tesla vehicles “appreciation assets”