Lifeboat Foundation

Note by note, machines are learning to express themselves. But if you think the fusion of artificial intelligence and music is bound to produce soulless, robotic-sounding tunes, Taryn Southern urges you to give our weird future another listen. The singer and internet personality is prepping what she calls the world’s first AI-composed album, I AM AI. Of course, others have dabbled in AI-generated music, and the finished product is not entirely computer-composed (the lyrics and vocal melodies were written by Southern), but the human intervention is minimal. The output isn’t exactly Grammy material, but it’s not far off from something you might hear on a pop playlist on Spotify.

Using AI music creation software by Amper, Southern plugged in various parameters like mood, style, and tempo to auto-compose the underlying chords and instrumentation. The album will even be distributed online through Stem, a platform that allows royalties to be divvied up between various creators. So not only will machines write music in the future, they might even get paid.

Continue reading “This new AI-composed pop song sounds like something from a Spotify playlist” »

Lilium already has a full-scale prototype that has completed its first flight.

A renewed campaign of covert network attacks is more likely to spur Tehran’s nuclear efforts than hinder them.

The Iran nuclear deal is increasingly at risk, with President Trump threatening to overrule his top national security advisers and defy the assessment of international monitors to declare Iran non-compliant with the agreement’s stipulations. The problem for the administration, however, is that no viable alternative is better than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. If Trump rips up the JCPOA, the U.S. would forfeit the stringent limitations placed on Iran’s enrichment activities and the international community would lose the unprecedented transparency it now has on Iran’s nuclear program. Even more daunting, the United States would become isolated in its approach to Iran, opposed by Europe, Russia, China, and much of the rest of the world.

Perhaps a more realistic concern is the prospect that the administration will nominally uphold the deal, while engaging in aggressive covert action against Iran. Increasingly, when traditional military and diplomatic options appear too costly, states turn to cyber warfare. But a stepped-up cyber offensive against Iran is very unlikely to yield desirable results. Not only is it unlikely to be effective in its immediate objectives, but it risks antagonizing Iran into precisely the kinds of behavior the hawks want to forestall.

Continue reading “Cyberwar on Iran Won’t Work. Here’s Why” »

” … Paul Tudor Jones co-founded JUST Capital to fix the ills of corporate capitalism by identifying the most just or “good” companies. Will it work?”

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“It’s true that many jobs have gone overseas, to lower-wage workers.

But at the same time, American manufacturers have actually added nearly a million jobs in the past seven years. Labor statistics show nearly 390,000 such jobs open.”

“British scientists have developed the world’s smallest surgical robot which could transform everyday operations for tens of thousands of patients.”

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Jaime Tartar tells us about how the brain interprets what is stressful, how it determines our behavioral and physiological response to stressors, and how it can be damaged by stress. She will discuss how the body’s reaction to acute stress has protective and adaptive effects in the short run while chronic stress can lead to poor health consequences such as decreased memory performance and depression.

Listen to the first pop song composed entirely by an AI!

As your body ages, increasing amounts of your cells enter a state of cellular senescence. These cells no longer divide or support the tissues of which they are a part, and they emit a cocktail of harmful chemical signals that encourage other nearby cells to also enter the same senescent state.

The presence of senescent cells contributes to decreasing tissue function, increases chronic inflammation, and can even raise the risk of cancer and other age-related diseases.

Senescent cells normally destroy themselves via a programmed process called apoptosis and are removed by the immune system; however, the immune system declines with age, and increasing numbers of these senescent cells escape this disposal process and accumulate.