Lifeboat Foundation

It was a big year. Researchers found a way to idealize deep neural networks using kernel machines—an important step toward opening these black boxes. There were major developments toward an answer about the nature of infinity. And a mathematician finally managed to model quantum gravity. Read the articles in full at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-year-in-math-and-computer-science-20211223/

Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation.

Sure, my telepresence robot had some issues—but for students like me who can’t make it to campus because of disability or illness, these tools open new doors.

People often need to adapt to unexpected and sudden events, such as a road construction or a road accident while driving, a broken automatic payment or ATM machine, and changes in weather. To effectively deal with these events, they must possess what is known as behavioral flexibility, or the ability to deviate from routine and well-establish behavioral patterns.

To adapt their behavior based on unforeseen events, humans need to encode and retrieve reward-related memories and use them to inform their present or future choices. This process entails the integration of different cognitive abilities that are supported by different regions of the brain.

Past studies found that patients with different neuropsychiatric disorders and those suffering from an addiction tend to have a scarce behavioral flexibility. This often adversely affects their quality of living, as it makes dealing with the uncertainty of daily life particularly challenging.

Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search and rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks.

Cyborg cockroaches that find earthquake survivors. A “robofly” that sniffs out gas leaks. Flying lightning bugs that pollinate farms in space.

These aren’t just buzzy ideas, they’re becoming reality.

Continue reading “Cyborg cockroaches are coming, and they just want to help” »

Norn, the brainchild of a former leading Microsoft developer, feels like a human and is integrated with software previously used for hunting terrorists.

Dr. Ben Goertzel, a self-described Cosmist and Singularitarian, is one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial general intelligence (AGI), natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, and virtual worlds and gaming He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles.

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist focused on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and learning.

Currently the Principal AI Engineer, Cognitive Computing at Intel Labs, having authored the book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence”, his focus is how to build machines that can perceive, think and learn.

Continue reading “AGI-22 | Joscha Bach — It from no Bit: Basic Cosmology from an AI Perspective” »

How likely is it that we live in a simulation? Are virtual worlds real?

In this first episode of the 2nd Series we delve into the fascinating topic of virtual reality simulations and the extraordinary possibility that our universe is itself a simulation. For thousands of years some mystical traditions have maintained that the physical world and our separated ‘selves’ are an illusion, and now, only with the development of our own computer simulations and virtual worlds have scientists and philosophers begun to assess the statistical probabilities that our shared reality could in fact be some kind of representation rather than a physical place.
As we become more open to these possibilities, other difficult questions start to come into focus. How can we create a common language to talk about matter and energy, that bridges the simulated and simulating worlds. Who could have created such a simulation? Could it be an artificial intelligence rather than a biological or conscious being? Do we have ethical obligations to the virtual beings we interact with in our virtual worlds and to what extent are those beings and worlds ‘real’? The list is long and mind bending.

Continue reading “#16 David Chalmers PHD — THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS AND VIRTUAL WORLDS” »

In a free-wheeling conversation with Joe Rogan, Jobs talks about Microsoft, Adobe, and much more.

If there was anything that could make a case for how far Artificial intelligence (AI) has come, it would be the ability to converse with the dead. Podcast.ai is a platform that aims to demonstrate this week after week with its in-depth interviews, which began with no one other than Steve Jobs.

The episode does begin with a big disclaimer that the entire conversation has been generated by AI. The podcast maker also taps into the expertise of play.ht, which, according to its webpage, gives one the option of 907 ultra-realistic voices to choose from.

Continue reading “This podcast brings Steve Jobs back to life, thanks to AI” »