Lifeboat Foundation

If life is common in our Universe, and we have every reason to suspect it is, why do we not see evidence of it everywhere? This is the essence of the Fermi Paradox, a question that has plagued astronomers and cosmologists almost since the birth of modern astronomy.

It is also the reasoning behind the Hart-Tipler Conjecture, one of the many (many!) proposed resolutions, which asserts that if advanced life had emerged in our galaxy sometime in the past, we would see signs of their activity everywhere we looked. Possible indications include self-replicating probes, megastructures, and other Type III-like activity.

Continue reading “Physicists Say Aliens May Be Using Black Holes as Quantum Computers” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WLehkWESDJ8

Architects urgently need to get to grips with the existential threat posed by AI or risk, in ChatGPT’s words, “sleepwalking into oblivion”, writes Neil Leach.

In the near future, architects may become a thing of the past. Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly advancing to a point where it can generate the design of a building completely autonomously. With the potential to create designs faster and with more accuracy than ever before, AI has the potential to revolutionize the architecture industry, leaving traditional architects out of the equation. This could spell the end of the profession as we know it, raising questions of what the future holds for architects in a world of AI-generated buildings.

Continue reading “AI is putting our jobs as architects unquestionably at risk” »

Dr. Craig Kaplan discusses Artificial Intelligence — the past, present, and future. He explains how the history of AI, in particular the evolution of machine learning, holds the key to understanding the future of AI. Dr. Kaplan believes we are on an inexorable path towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which is both an existential threat to humanity AND an unprecedented opportunity to solve climate change, povery, disease and other challenges. He explains the likely paths that will lead to AGI and what all of us can do NOW to increase the chances of a positive future.

Chapters.
0:00 Intro.
0:22 Overiew & summary.
0:45 Antecedents of AI
1:15 1956: Birth of the field / Dartmouth conference.
1:33 1956: The Logic Theorist.
1:58 1986: Backprogation algorithm.
2:26 2016: SuperIntelligent AI / Alpha Go.
2:51 Lessons from the past.
3:59 Today’s “Idiot Savant” AI
4:45 Narrow vs. General AI (AGI)
5:15 Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero.
6:19 Demis Hassabis on Alpha Fold.
6:47 Alpha Fold’s amazing performance.
8:03 OpenAI’s ChatGPT
9:16 OpenAI’s DALL-E2
9:50 The future of AI
10:00 AGI is not a tool.
10:30 AGI: Intelligent entity.
10:48 Humans will not be in control.
11:16 The alignment problem.
11:45 Alignment problem is unsolved!
12:45 Likely paths to AGI
13:00 Augmented Reality path to AGI
13:26 Metaverse / Omniverse path to AGI
14:20 AGI: Threat AND Opportunity.
15:10 Get educated — books.
15:48 Get educated — videos.
16:20 Raise awareness.
16:44 How to influence values of AGI
17:52 No guarantees, we must do what we can.
18:47 AGI will learn our values.
19:30 Wrap up / contact info.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, and Future” »

A more frightening implication of the fermi paradox.

The berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes.^[1][2] The hypothesis is named after the Berserker series of novels (1963−2005) written by Fred Saberhagen.^[1]

The hypothesis has no single known proposer, and instead is thought to have emerged over time in response to the Hart–Tipler conjecture,^[3] or the idea that an absence of detectable Von Neumann probes is contrapositive evidence that no intelligent life exists outside of the Sun’s Solar System. According to the berserker hypothesis, an absence of such probes is not evidence of life’s absence, since interstellar probes could “go berserk” and destroy other civilizations, before self-destructing.

In his 1983 paper “The Great Silence”, astronomer David Brin summarized the frightening implications of the berserker hypothesis: it is entirely compatible with all the facts and logic of the Fermi paradox, but would mean that there exists no intelligent life left to be discovered. In the worst-case scenario, humanity has already alerted others to its existence, and is next in line to be destroyed.^[4].

Two enormous cracks in Earth’s crust opened near the Turkish-Syrian border after two powerful earthquakes shook the region on Monday (Feb. 6), killing over 20,000 people.

Researchers from the U.K. Centre for the Observation & Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes & Tectonics (COMET) found the ruptures by comparing images of the area near the Mediterranean Sea coast taken by the European Earth-observing satellite Sentinel-1 before and after the devastating earthquakes.

The longer of the two ruptures stretches 190 miles (300 kilometers) in the northeastern direction from the northeastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea. The crack was created by the first of the two major tremors that hit the region on Monday, the more powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck at 4:17 a.m. local time (8:17 p.m. EST on Feb. 5). The second crack, 80 miles long (125 km), opened during the second, somewhat milder 7.5-magnitude temblor about nine hours later, COMET said in a tweet on Friday (Feb. 10).

Artificial Superintelligence or short, ASI, also known as digital superintelligence is the advent of a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the smartest and most gifted human minds.

If we as a species manage not to destroy ourselves up until the advent of true artificial general intelligence, the moment of the next phase for our survival in a post AGI world, will be even more paramount.

Continue reading “Artificial Superintelligence, AI in a Box & Machine Consciousness With Nick Bostrom” »

“I think it’s going to be inconclusive, if not impossible to demonstrate conclusively,” one physicist said of the possible interstellar comet.

For the first time, researchers have recorded live and in atomic detail what happens to the material in an asteroid impact. The team of Falko Langenhorst from the University of Jena and Hanns-Peter Liermann from DESY simulated an asteroid impact with the mineral quartz in the lab and pursued it in slow motion in a diamond anvil cell, while monitoring it with DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III.

The observation reveals an intermediate state in quartz that solves a decades-old mystery about the formation of characteristic lamellae in material hit by an asteroid. Quartz is ubiquitous on the Earth’s surface, and is, for example, the major constituent of sand. The analysis helps to better understand traces of past impacts, and may also have significance for entirely different materials. The researchers present their findings in Nature Communications.

Asteroid impacts are catastrophic events that create huge craters and sometimes melt parts of Earth’s bedrock. “Nevertheless, craters are often difficult to detect on Earth, because erosion, weathering and plate tectonics cause them to disappear over millions of years,” Langenhorst explains.

Aunt_Spray/iStock.

“Having focused on genetic advancements in ancient DNA for my entire career and as the first to fully sequence the Dodo’s genome, I am thrilled to collaborate with Colossal and the people of Mauritius on the de-extinction and eventual re-wilding of the Dodo. I particularly look forward to furthering genetic rescue tools focused on birds and avian conservation,” Shapiro added.