Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: internet – Page 108

Circa 2007 face_with_colon_three

The World Wide Brain—a hybrid human–digital intelligent network, spanning the globe and carrying out information processing different in extent and nature from anything that has come before—is as yet little more than a dream and a little less than a reality. It is coming into being, bit by bit, each year. This process of emergence is, as all Net-aholics know, a wonder to behold, and growing more wondrous all the time. This is an exploration in which human psychology and sociology interact in a fascinating way, with the psychology of an emerging, nonhuman organism. It is an exploration in which mundane technical issues such as groupware and server–server communication software rub up against concepts from transpersonal psychology, such as the Collective Unconscious and the Hierarchy of Being. It is, therefore, an exploration that not only transcends disciplinary boundaries but pushes the boundaries of human thought itself. The increasing integration of human activity with World Wide Brain operations may ultimately occur via body-modifying or body-obsolescing technologies a la Moravec, or it may occur without them, through the advent of more sophisticated noninvasive interfaces. One way or another, it will fuse the global Web.

Read more | >

The Starlink dish can withstand extreme temperatures as low as-22 degrees Fahrenheit.

SpaceX’s Starlink internet service is now available in one of the most remote regions of the world: Antarctica, making the service available on all seven continents.

In a tweet on Wednesday, the National Science Foundation announced the milestone, stating that scientists with the U.S. Antarctic Program were “over the moon” and have been testing out a Starlink dish at the McMurdo Station, a U.S. research facility based on an island right off the coast of Antarctica to supply increased internet bandwidth.

Read more | >

Daniel Dennett explores the first steps towards a unified theory of information, through common threads in the convergence of evolution, learning, and engineering.
Subscribe for regular science talks: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe.
Watch the Q&A now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beKC_7rlTuw.

Buy Daniel Dennett’s book “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” — https://geni.us/pAyVW

The concept of information is fundamental to all areas of science, and ubiquitous in daily life in the Internet Age. However, it is still not well understood despite being recognised for more than 40 years. In this talk, Daniel Dennett explores steps towards a unified theory of information, through common threads in evolution, learning, and engineering.

This event was the first in a series on the theme of ‘Convergence’, exploring the links between neuroscience, philosophy and artificial intelligence. If you’re in London, look out for more events later in the year: http://rigb.org/whats-on.

Continue reading “Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design — With Daniel Dennett” | >

Two big players in computing and research are trying to lay the groundwork for a future quantum internet.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is teaming up with Harvard University to test and develop strategies for networking together quantum technologies. Their partnership was announced today, and is a continuation of AWS’ goals to create a communications channel between the quantum computers that it is also working on in parallel.

During the three-year research alliance, funding from Amazon will support research projects at Harvard that focus on quantum memory, integrated photonics, and quantum materials, and help upgrade infrastructure in Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems.

Read more | >

AN ARTIFICIAL intelligence text-to-image model has forecasted a disturbing end to mankind’s existence.

The popular Craiyon AI, formerly DALL-E mini AI image generator, designed some barren landscapes and scorched plains when prompted to predict the end of humans.

The AI has been trained to create its masterpieces using unfiltered data from the internet.

Read more | >

With the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the centre of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. It supports the theory that black holes can grow rapidly within large, web-like structures which contain plenty of gas to fuel them.

“This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging — in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence,” said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The new observations with ESO’s VLT revealed several galaxies surrounding a supermassive black hole, all lying in a cosmic “spider’s web” of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. “The cosmic web filaments are like spider’s web threads,” explains Mignoli. “The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas—available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole—can flow along the filaments.”

Read more | >

Elon Musk tweeted a fascinating — and frankly unsettling — theory last night about how a brain parasite might be forcing all humans to create advanced AI.

The Tesla CEO was responding to a story from National Geographic about how toxoplasmosis, a common parasite often found in cats, seems to be causing hyenas to be reckless around predators such as lions. In a staggering and perhaps facetious leap of logic, Musk suggested that the parasite is actually what’s causing humans to create advanced artificial intelligence.

“Toxoplasmosis infects rats, then cats, then humans who make cat videos,” Musk tweeted on Friday. “AI trains achieves superhuman intelligence training on Internet cat videos, thus making toxoplasmosis the true arbiter of our destiny.”

Read more | >