Lifeboat Foundation

Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future.

The inclusion of technology in the leader’s most important address in an official imprimatur that underscores the continued push by China’s top leaders to identify new pillars for an economy struggling to maintain its rapid growth amid overcapacity and rising debt.

China’s State Council laid out goals in July to build a domestic artificial intelligence industry worth nearly US$150 billion in the next few years, and to make the country a “innovation centre for AI” by 2030. Xi’s speech gave the official imprimatur to the plan.

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 18 October, 2017, 6:56pm.

Continue reading “China aims to outspend the world in artificial intelligence, and Xi Jinping just green lit the plan” »

Google designed its AutoML project to be an artificial intelligence that could help humans create other AI systems. Now AutoML can do that, and it’s creating more powerful, efficient systems than human engineers can.

It will happen eventually. The argument against it will be that AI lacks the human touch, by that they mean the crooks in the government who make a living on corruption, graft, outright theft, and are in the process of collapsing the United States with nepotism. The main fear of the crime bosses (politcos) is that you cant bribe, threaten, or blackmail an AI.

By glen sawyer, national director, iot digital transformation, SAP

Put Skynet from The Terminator movies to the back of your mind for a minute, and stay with me on this one.

Continue reading “Could Governments Run By Artificial Intelligence Be A Good Thing?” »

After more than a year of testing on crowded San Francisco streets, Cruise thinks it’s ready to operate the first robotic car fleet in Manhattan. GM also appears to be ramping up competition with Waymo for leadership in the technology.

Company will use algorithm similar to new Go champ to find proteins.

After two years of development, these giant robots from the U.S. and Japan went head-to-head. Who would you put your money on? http://cnnmon.ie/2kYBEdN

The vehicles, set to begin testing in 2020, will use deep learning to learn motorists’ preferences, emotions, and habits.

Remember AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grandmaster at Go? Well, the program just got a major upgrade, and it can now teach itself how to dominate the game without any human intervention. But get this: In a tournament that pitted AI against AI, this juiced-up version, called AlphaGo Zero, defeated the regular AlphaGo by a whopping 100 games to 0, signifying a major advance in the field. Hear that? It’s the technological singularity inching ever closer.

A new paper published in Nature today describes how the artificially intelligent system that defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016 got its digital ass kicked by a new-and-improved version of itself. And it didn’t just lose by a little—it couldn’t even muster a single win after playing a hundred games. Incredibly, it took AlphaGo Zero (AGZ) just three days to train itself from scratch and acquire literally thousands of years of human Go knowledge simply by playing itself. The only input it had was what it does to the positions of the black and white pieces on the board. In addition to devising completely new strategies, the new system is also considerably leaner and meaner than the original AlphaGo.

Now, every once in a while the field of AI experiences a “holy shit” moment, and this would appear to be one of those moments. Looking back, other “holy shit” moments include Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, IBM’s Watson defeating two of the world’s best Jeopardy! champions in 2011, the aforementioned defeat of Lee Sedol in 2016, and most recently, the defeat of four professional no-limit Texas hold’em poker players at the hands of Libratus, an AI developed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.

Continue reading “Stunning AI Breakthrough Takes Us One Step Closer to the Singularity” »