Lifeboat Foundation

One of the most significant AI milestones in history was quietly ushered into being this summer. We speak of the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), probably the most sought-after goal in the entire field of computer science. With the introduction of the Impala architecture, DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero, would seem to finally have AGI firmly in its sights.

Let’s define AGI, since it’s been used by different people to mean different things. AGI is a single intelligence or algorithm that can learn multiple tasks and exhibits positive transfer when doing so, sometimes called meta-learning. During meta-learning, the acquisition of one skill enables the learner to pick up another new skill faster because it applies some of its previous “know-how” to the new task. In other words, one learns how to learn — and can generalize that to acquiring new skills, the way humans do. This has been the holy grail of AI for a long time.

Continue reading “Artificial General Intelligence Is Here, and Impala Is Its Name” »

“In his brilliant book, Kai-Fu Lee applies his superpowers to predicting the disruptive shifts that will define the AI-powered future and proposes a revolutionary social contract that forges a new synergy between AI and the human heart.” – Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO Salesforce.

“AI is surpassing human intelligence in more and more domains, transforming the planet. Kai-Fu Lee has been at the epicentre of the AI revolution for thirty years and has now written the definitive guide.” – Erik Brynjolfsson, professor, MIT, bestselling co-author of The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd

“Kai-Fu Lee is at the forefront of the coming AI revolution, helping us transcend the limitations of thought, reach, and vision. This seminal book on AI is a must read for anyone serious about understanding the future of our species.” – Peter Diamandis, Executive Founder, Singularity University; bestselling author of Abundance and BOLD.

Continue reading “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” »

I think we have finally entered the rapid exponential runaway phase of the technological Singularity. As we’ve already seen in the last year year-and-a-half, we are in an era of unprecedented chaos and innovation. The invention of multifidus AI is, of course, the driver of the singularity and as we move forward people like Musk will become ever more importance to the future of our species.

Having a president like Donald Trump can I think, be taken as just another symptom of this period of time. It might not seem like Donald Trump has anything to do with the singularity. He, PERSONALLY, doesn’t, really. But the methods of his madness are the salient data point here. His use of Twitter VERY quickly changed the way millions of people communicate. It changed how they view the world, and their place within it. They have fallen to theiir knees in hypocritically and ENTIRELY UNFORGIVEABLE SUBMISSION to the SICKLY malevolent STUPIDITY that is embodied in the orange, spoiled meat named Donald J Trump. The Right has finally drunk the Kool-Aid that they’ve been serving everyone else for years and found it to be most unpleasantly bitter. They have been bitten by the hand that feeds them.

Just as competition between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems defined much of the twentieth century, so the struggle between liberal democracy and digital authoritarianism is set to define the twenty-first.

The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

There is also a third way in which AI promises to reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy, the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed international competition between social systems.

Continue reading “How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order” »

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The deadlines set for “singularity” are also seen by some as an attempt to scare and coerce governments into implementing the movement’s social and technological “agenda”. However, when the names of major tech corporations of the world like Google, Nokia and Tesla are associated with the transhumanist ideology, it is difficult to dismiss the premise and prospects of this new revolutionary socio-technological movement.

For several centuries, political movements have emanated from nationalist or religious convictions, socio-political and economic theories or even environmental concerns. However, issues of science and technology have rarely driven mainstream socio-political discourse as scientists have hardly ever indulged in propounding societal constructs for the future.

However, a technology-oriented intellectual movement may soon become the focus of political debate as 21st century science stands at the brink of reshaping human identity itself.

Continue reading “Transhumanism: Politics of hybridizing humans with robots” »

What does it mean to be human in world of increasingly powerful technology? This is a question video games have grappled with, most recently in the “Deus Ex” franchise and the upcoming E3 show-stealing “Cyberpunk 2077.”

Daedalic’s “State of Mind” approaches the topic in a different, more philosophical way. Guns and body mods aren’t the order of the day. Rather, “State of Mind” is a narrative adventure that considers how far the human race will go to trade dystopia for utopia.

Creative lead Martin Ganteföhr is an avid follower of transhumanist theory, and how humanity will evolve over the coming decades as scientists pursue the singularity. Transhumanism explores the intersection of people and technology, with the ultimate goal giving all people access to technology that leads to an egalitarian utopia.

Continue reading “Elon Musk and ‘State of Mind’s’ Transhumanism Philosophy” »

Not everyone is convinced. Critics point out that one of the points of exponential growth is that it cannot carry on forever. After a 50-year run, Moore’s Law is stuttering. Singularitarians retort that the laws of physics define a limit to how much computation you can cram into a given amount of matter, and that humans are nowhere near that limit. Even if Moore’s Law slows, that merely postpones the great day rather than preventing it. Others say the Singularity is just reli…gion in new clothes, reheated millenarianism with transistors and Wi-Fi instead of beards and thunderbolts. (One early proponent of Singularitarian and transhumanist ideas was Nikolai Federov, a Russian philosopher born in 1829 who was interested in resurrecting the dead through scientific means rather than divine ones.) And those virtual-reality utopias do look an awful lot like heaven. Perhaps the best way to summarise the Singularity comes from the title of a book published in 2012: the Rapture of the Nerds.

And will it lead to the extermination of all humans?

Continue reading “What is the Singularity?” »