Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 212

I used Adobe products for years, and even went to Adobe Seminars in Austin Texas.

Oh, you thought the possibilities of generative AI were already terrifying enough? Well, we’ve got some bad news for you. Adobe has just released a video showcasing its Adobe Firefly video model, and it comes with a whole host of unnerving generative AI tricks.

“Adobe is using the power of generative AI to deliver the most advanced and precise editing tools ever in Premiere Pro,” says the cheerful over-the-top narration, before showcasing how AI will soon be used to generate objects that weren’t there before, delete unwanted objects, extend scenes and create generated backdrops.

The video stresses that “content credentials” will “always make transparent whether AI was used”, but obviously that only goes so far as the Adobe programme itself. With streamers and movies already coming under fire for sneaking AI into their final products, it seems inevitable that advancing technology like this is only going to make it harder and harder to tell what’s real on our screens.

Continue reading “Adobe’s new generative AI tools for video are absolutely terrifying” | >

West Japan Railways (West JR), one of six companies that make up Japan Railways Group, has unveiled a giant “humanoid robot” to work on heavy machinery on its lines.

The as yet unnamed tool is described as “multifunctional railway heavy machinery for railway equipment maintenance” and is based off a prototype used by West JR to prove the concept of the odd-looking machine.

Read more | >

Lovely essay by Sara Walker on how tech is biology. She closely mirrors my own thinking on this. “The technologies we are and that we produce are part of the same ancient strand of information propagating through and structuring matter on our planet.”

Our best estimates place the origin of life on this planet at approximately 3.8 billion years ago. Biological beings alive today are part of a lineage of information that can be traced backward in time through genomes to the earliest life. But evolution produced information that is not just genomic. Evolution produced everything around us, including things not traditionally considered “life.” Human technology would not exist without humans, so it is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life.

Technology, like biology, does not exist in the absence of evolution. Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.

It is important to separate what is meant by “life” here as distinct from “alive.” By “life,” I mean all objects that can only be produced in our universe through a process of evolution and selection. Being “alive,” by contrast, is the active implementation of the dynamics of evolution and selection. Some objects — like a dead cat — are representative of “life” (because they only emerge in the universe through evolution) but not themselves “alive.”

Continue reading “AI Is Life” | >

Makers of humanoid robots should guarantee that their products “do not threaten human security” and “effectively safeguard human dignity”, according to a new set of guidelines published in Shanghai during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on Saturday.

They should also take measures that include setting up risk warning procedures and emergency response systems, as well as give users training on the ethical and lawful use of these machines, according to the guidelines.

Read more | >

Kuaishou introduces a web version of its impressive AI video generator, Kling AI, based on an “improved model” with new features.

Chinese tech company Kuaishou has unveiled KLING, a new video generation model. Based on the demos, it could rival OpenAI’s Sora.

Kuaishou says KLING can make videos up to two minutes long at 1080p resolution and 30 frames per second. It can also model complex motion sequences that are physically accurate.

One video shows a two-minute train ride made with the prompt “Train ride with different landscapes seen through the window.” OpenAI announced its video model Sora in mid-February, with relatively consistent videos up to one minute long.

Continue reading “Impressive AI video generator KLING now available as web version” | >

A new feature story out on book Transhuman Citizen:

A former presidential candidate who believes a dramatic increase in science funding can help humans achieve biological immortality has told Newsweek he is considering a third White House run in 2028.

Zoltan Istvan ran as an independent candidate during the 2016 presidential election when he attracted widespread media attention for driving a bus modified to look like a coffin from San Francisco to Washington D.C., to illustrate his believe that death can be overcome.

In 2019 he challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination using the campaign motto “Upgrading America,” in what he admitted was primarily a stunt to increase conservative interest in his ideas.

Continue reading “Meet the presidential hopeful who wants to end death” | >

1/ Cloudflare analyzed the most active AI web crawlers on the Internet based on their query volume.

An analysis by Cloudflare shows that Bytespider, Amazonbot, and ClaudeBot are among the most active AI crawlers on the web.

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Over the past year, Cloudflare has analyzed which AI crawlers with known user agent strings have the highest request volume. Bytedance’s Bytespider crawler tops the list of most active AI web crawlers, followed by Amazonbot, ClaudeBot, and OpenAI’s GPTBot.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s GPTBot gets blocked the most, but it’s not the hungriest AI crawler on the web” | >