Lifeboat Foundation

How is Artificial Intelligence actually thinking? Even their creators often don’t really fully understand. But if AI becomes more and more important you should at least have an idea of how algorithms get to results. And they think totally different to how human beings do, says Sara M. Watson, tech critic and writer at the Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong. How can literature and journalism help to find a new perspective on AI?

“The biggest problem AI has is that even the engineers can’t really explain certain outcomes or certain decisions that go through an artificially intelligent system.”

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence and Smart Journalism” »

Article out by Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine that discusses #transhumanism and #libertarianism:

Kai Weiss, a researcher at the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria, swiftly denounced the piece. “Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution,” he wrote.

Clearly there is some disagreement.

Continue reading “Transhumanism and Libertarianism Are Entirely Compatible” »

Announcement of CRISPR technology, which allows precise editing of the human genome, has been heralded as the future of individualized medicine, and a decried as a slippery slope to engineering individual human qualities. Of course, humans already know how to manipulate animal genomes through selective breeding, but there has been no appetite to try on humans what is the norm for dogs. That’s a good thing, says Dawkins. The results could well be dangerous. Does technology as a whole represent a threat to human welfare if it continues to evolve at its current rate? Not so fast, warns Dawkins. Comparing biological evolution to technological progress is an analogy at best. His newest book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.

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Continue reading “The Dangers of CRISPR, Designer Babies, and Artificial Genetic Mutation” »

Our Andromeda interstellar probe article has been featured in MlT Technology Review :

Business Impact.

Femto-spacecraft could travel to alpha centauri.

Continue reading “Here’s how to get to Alpha Centauri: propel a tiny spacecraft on the tip of a powerful laser beam” »

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on Friday at a meeting of students in Yaroslavl, Russia about the development of artificial intelligence (AI). In a rather ominous sounding warning, the leader stated that “the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.”

Many of those working in the field see AI as a tool for making humanity better, while others foresee it as a harbinger of doom for the human species. Not many high profile people — especially the leader of the largest nation on Earth — have come forward to blatantly express the potential of AI to be a tool of immense power for a nation to wield.

President Putin went on to say that “it would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position,” implying that Russia’s breakthroughs would ideally be shared with other nations.

Continue reading “Vladimir Putin: Country That Leads in AI Development ‘Will be the Ruler of the World’” »

A Stanford team has launched a new challenge on the Eterna computer game. Players will design a CRISPR-controlling molecule, and with it open the possibility of new research and therapies.

A team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine has launched a new challenge for the online computer game Eterna in which players are being asked to design an RNA molecule capable of acting as an on/off switch for the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9.

Continue reading “Online game challenges players to design on/off switch for CRISPR” »

Talking at the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania on Sunday, Nigerian neuroscientist Oshiorenoya Agabi said his Koniku Kore device is able to breath in and smell air (stock image).

Chinese electronics giant Huawei on Saturday unveiled its first mobile personal assistant with artificial intelligence in Berlin, in hopes it will rival the dominance of Samsung’s Bixby and Apple’s Siri.

“Smartphones are smart but they are not intelligent enough,” Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, said at this year’s IFA electronics fair.

The mobile assistant, called Kirin 970, will systematically respond to three questions—” the most important combination,” Yu said: Where is the user? Who are they and what are they doing?