Lifeboat Foundation

*Intelligence Beyond the Brain: morphogenesis as an example of the scaling of basal cognition*

*Description:*
Each of us takes the remarkable journey from physics to mind: we start life as a quiescent oocyte (collection of chemical reactions) and slowly change and acquire an advanced, centralized mind. How does unified complex cognition emerge from the collective intelligence of cells? In this talk, I will use morphogenesis to illustrate how evolution scales cognition across problem spaces. Embryos and regenerating organs produce very complex, robust anatomical structures and stop growth and remodeling when those structures are complete. One of the most remarkable things about morphogenesis is that it is not simply a feed-forward emergent process, but one that has massive plasticity: even when disrupted by manipulations such as damage or changing the sizes of cells, the system often manages to achieve its morphogenetic goal. How do cell collectives know what to build and when to stop? Constructing and repairing anatomies in novel circumstances is a remarkable example of the collective intelligence of a biological swarm. I propose that a multi-scale competency architecture is how evolution exploits physics to achieve robust machines that solve novel problems. I will describe what is known about developmental bioelectricity — a precursor to neurobiology which is used for cognitive binding in biological collectives, that scales their intelligence and the size of the goals they can pursue. I will also discuss the cognitive light cone model, and conclude with examples of synthetic living machines — a new biorobotics platform that uses some of these ideas to build novel primitive intelligences. I will end by speculating about ethics, engineering, and life in a future that integrates deeply across biological and synthetic agents.

Artificial intelligence models are being used to try to predict the future of artificial intelligence research. Thankfully, none of them say we are due an AI apocalypse.

AI image generator Dall-E2 is about to find a new host. Microsoft will integrate the AI-based image generator with Microsoft Designer, a video-making tool to be available within the Microsoft Office suite. Till recently, Dall-E2 which is looked down upon as an app meant for only playing around with text prompts will be a part of Microsoft’s AI graphic design app. Designers and video makers who find it difficult to search for unique images can now leverage Microsoft’s Designer app to compose videos with imagery of their choice. Microsoft’s venture is seen as a step toward competing with design major Canva, which boasts more than 100 million active users. During the Ignite Conference held recently, Microsoft announced that it would integrate Dall-E 2 into the yet-to-be-released Designer app as well as existing Bing and Edge.

I’ve been blown away by #stablediffusion and AI art. In another video I’ve used #deforum and also had a look at #discodiffusion. This time I wanted to use Automatic1111. As a music producer and creator, I originally felt threatened by the technology but what I’ve come to realise is this. If you use it like a director/ producer you’ll be able to make things beyond that of the average AI art fan.

I challenged myself to produce a track and video in under 12 hours and created this, using a combination of over a decades worth of creative insights and a new piece of AI tech (Stable Diffusion), I’m absolutely blown away by the results.

Continue reading “Artificial Progression | Alias Here | AI Anime Music Video | Made In Under 12 Hours” »

Introducing: The Synthetic Party, a new political party in Denmark that hopes to soon have a parliament seat. Oh, and by the way, its head honcho, Leader Lars, is actually an AI chatbot, and all of its policies are AI-derived. Cool?

Asker Staunæs, the creator of the party and an artist-researcher at the nonprofit art and tech organization MindFuture, told Motherboard that Leader Lars is specifically trained on policies formed by post-1970 Danish fringe parties — and thus, he says, the party is designed to collectively represent the roughly 20 percent of present-day Danish voters whose parties remain unrepresented in parliament.

“We’re representing the data of all fringe parties, so it’s all of the parties who are trying to get elected into parliament but don’t have a seat,” Staunæs told the site. “So it’s a person who has formed a political vision of their own that they would like to realize, but they usually don’t have the money or resources to do so.”

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Dell Technologies is a leading provider of IT storage hardware solutions to promote data backup and recovery and accelerate the journey to cloud computing. Dell EMC PowerStore achieves new levels of operational simplicity and agility, utilizing a container based architecture, advanced storage technologies, and intelligent automation to unlock the power of your data. Based on a scale-out architecture and hardware-accelerated advanced data reduction, PowerStore is designed to deliverenhanced resource utilization and performance that keeps pace with application and system growth.

How will we interact with computers in a few years? Probably very differently than we do today. One developer gives a taste by linking three AI systems for a digital design assistant.

For his AI-based design assistant, Twitter user Progen links three AI systems: the open-source image AI Stable Diffusion for image generation, OpenAI’s Whisper, also open source, for translating spoken words into English, and GPT-3 for dialogs with the assistant.

Continue reading “Developer combines Stable Diffusion, Whisper and GPT-3 for a futuristic design assistant” »