Lifeboat Foundation

For now, it looks like our best bet for going interstellar is to rely on robotic spacecraft that are optimized for speed.

For countless generations, the idea of traveling to an extrasolar planet has been the stuff of dreams. In the current era of renewed space exploration, interest in interstellar travel has understandably been rekindled. However, beyond the realm of science fiction, interstellar space travel remains a largely theoretical matter.

Continue reading “Reaching for the Stars: The Case for Interstellar Travel” »

Its SpaceX’s first-ever autonomous Dragon docking.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station today (Dec. 7) to deliver vital supplies for NASA and try something brand-new: park itself without the help of astronauts.

The private spaceflight company used a Falcon 9 rocket to launch CRS-21, the first flight to use the upgraded version of its Dragon cargo spacecraft, to the space station Sunday (Dec. 6) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The vehicle autonomously docked with the orbiting laboratory today at 1:40 p.m. EST (1840 GMT), parking at the zenith, or space-facing, side of the station’s Harmony module.

Imagine an algorithm that reviews thousands of financial transactions every second and flags the fraudulent ones. This is something that has become possible thanks to advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, and it is a very attractive value proposition for banks that are flooded with huge amounts of daily transactions and a growing challenge of fighting financial crime, money laundering, financing of terrorism, and corruption.

The benefits of artificial intelligence, however, are not completely free. Companies that use AI to detect and prevent crime also deal with new challenges, such as algorithmic bias, a problem that happens when an AI algorithm causes systemic disadvantage for a group of a specific gender, ethnicity, or religion. In past years, algorithmic bias that hasn’t been well-controlled has damaged the reputation of the companies using it. It’s incredibly important to always be alert to the existence of such bias.

For instance, in 2019, the algorithm running Apple’s credit card was found to be biased against women, which caused a PR backlash against the company. In 2018, Amazon had to shut down an AI-powered hiring tool that also showed bias against women.

The wars of the future will be fought by swarms of robots. Can we trust them to make the right decisions?

Article from New York times. 😃

In one Southern California city, flying drones with artificial intelligence are aiding investigations while presenting new civil rights questions.

I have the honor of being a guest on the USTP Enlightenment Salon today, many thanks to Gennady and David for the invitation.
I was a Linux sys/net admin.
I was never interested in politics until it became IMPOSSIBLE to avoid. Every action or inaction is now a political statement in some people’s minds. That’s a terrible state of affairs that has been imposed on us. So I put my hacker hat on and went to work to discover why there exists an abject division on truth and morals and how politics became the catalyst for the phenomenon.
I’ll be discussing the roots of my theory: Physix, a mathematical model for thought and behavior. The political derivative is the Q-vote. It’s a novel approach to democracy.
Nell Watson (https://www.nellwatson.com/) will be using a derivative of Physix for machine learning and ethics on https://www.ethicsnet.org/, but I think the most interesting quality of Physix is it’s commercial value. It codifies the decision process: Q-Logic.
Every action or thought can be assigned one of 525 unique patterns on this 5×5 grid. 13,125 if you add voice. Economics, psychology, philosophy, religion, politics and every conceivable imaginary or spacetime event fits. Psychohistory. The matrix has been hacked.

Physix gives AI a finite vocabulary to analyze the infinite chaos of life and imagination. The patterns can be compared to both physical and psychological results, solve for the most preferred.
It’s odd to me that Youtube HASN’T thought of color ratings to highlight videos, Zoom could integrate it with their platform to rate conversations and for meetings. It could be used with any human interaction to rate quality of communication.
The key to real world solutions is that I present this as Open Source Human Nature. Free. Where there is commercial value derived, 10% of the profit/efficiency gained will go to a fund where the money will be spent 100% publicly and tracked (using the same polling system) over time to find the most efficient way to make people happy. I’m looking forward to working with the USTP on the political side, on the AI side Nell Watson is just dipping her toe in the water, I’m looking for a capable AI group to integrate the idea. David Kelley from what I can tell has done all the deep research, my idea is just a different tool to bring it together. I have a programmer, an investor waiting to hear from someone in the field to say they are interested in tackling this.
From all the interactions I’ve had, the USTP is the most progressive, rationally minded group I’ve found. I believe the people involved with this Party would be the best to understand the implications and help me navigate the shark infested waters of politics, NGO’s, Big Tech and Academia.
It’s a new world, AI has a new tool to analyze us and become an ally, this renders the current political paradigm an ancient, sclerotic remnant of brute force mass persuasion for power and money.
It’s time for a paradigm shift of consciousness, aided by AI. The USTP is uniquely suited to bring this to the political forefront.
USTP: Let’s go.

A new machine learning approach offers important insights into catalysis, a fundamental process that makes it possible to reduce the emission of toxic exhaust gases or produce essential materials like fabric.

In a report published in Nature Communications, Hongliang Xin, associate professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, and his team of researchers developed a Bayesian learning model of chemisorption, or Bayeschem for short, aiming to use artificial intelligence to unlock the nature of chemical bonding at catalyst surfaces.

“It all comes down to how catalysts bind with molecules,” said Xin. “The interaction has to be strong enough to break some chemical bonds at reasonably low temperatures, but not too strong that catalysts would be poisoned by reaction intermediates. This rule is known as the Sabatier principle in catalysis.”

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon.

Introduction

Hi, In this article, let us go over how you can create a Python program using Convolutional Neural Networks (Deep Learning) and a mouse/keyboard automation library called pyautogui to move your mouse/cursor with your head pose. We will be using pyautogui as it is the simplest available Python library to programmatically control the various components of your computer. More details on how to use this library mentioned below.

A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have built a psychopathic AI using image captions pulled from Reddit. Oh, and they’