Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Bloomberg recently broke the news that Google is “turning its lucrative Web search over to AI machines.” Google revealed to the reporter that for the past few months, a very large fraction of the millions of search queries Google responds to every second have been “interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain.”

The company that has tried hard to automate its mission to organize the world’s information was happy to report that its machines have again triumphed over humans. When Google search engineers “were asked to eyeball some pages and guess which they thought Google’s search engine technology would rank on top,” RankBrain had an 80% success rate compared to “the humans [who] guessed correctly 70 percent of the time.”

There you have it. Google’s AI machine RankBrain, after only a few months on the job, already outranks the best brains in the industry, the elite engineers that Google typically hires.

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It‘s older, but interesting!

The year is 2050 and super-intelligent robots have emerged as the masters of Earth. Unfortunately, you have no idea of that fact because we are immersed in a computer simulation set decades ago. Everything you see and touch has now been created and programmed by machines that use mankind for their own benefit. This radical theory, demonstrated in numerous books and science fiction films, has been, and is currently regarded by science as possible; Moreover, scientists are taking this theory to a cosmic level and even believe that if only one extraterrestrial civilization in the universe go the technological level to “emulate” an entire “multiverse,” then even our probes and space telescopes, which are out there exploring the universe, belong to that “creepy simulation.”

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, author and host of the Closer to Truth program, recently explored this theory in an episode where he interviewed several scholars, including Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, who argues that the scenario presented in the movie The Matrix might be true, but “instead of brains connected to a virtual simulator, own brains would also be part of the multiverse simulation.”

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The Pentagon has quietly put out a call for vendors to bid on a contract to develop, execute and manage its new cyber weaponry and defense program. The scope of this nearly half-billion-dollar “help wanted” work order includes counterhacking, as well as developing and deploying lethal cyberattacks — sanctioned hacking expected to cause real-life destruction and loss of human life.

In June 2016, work begins under the Cyberspace Operations Support Services contract (pdf) under CYBERCOM (United States Cyber Command). The $460 million project recently came to light and details the Pentagon’s plan to hand over its IT defense and the planning, development, execution, management, integration with the NSA, and various support functions of the U.S. military’s cyberattacks to one vendor.

While not heavily publicized, it’s a surprisingly public move for the Pentagon to advertise that it’s going full-on into a space that has historically been kept behind closed doors. Only this past June, the Department of Defense Law of War Manual (pdf) was published for the first time ever and included Cyber Operations under its own section — and, controversially, a section indicating that cyber-weapons with lethal outcomes are sanctioned by Pentagon doctrine.

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Where do we come from? There are many right answers to this question, and the one you get often depends on who you ask.

For example, an astrophysicist might say that the chemical components of our bodies were first forged in the nuclear fires of stars.

On the other hand, an evolutionary biologist might look at the similarities between our DNA and that of other primates’ and conclude we evolved from apes.

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Memories are priceless, and the plight of dementia patients highlights how important they are to forming what makes us, well us. Now a new study has provided hope we may one day be able to restore lost memories.

Clearing the mist

A paper from researchers at MIT has demonstrated the reactivation of memories in amnesia patients with optogenetics — in which cell activity is controlled by bursts of light.

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Planet dwellers like us naturally look first to other moons and planets for colonization. Yet, asteroids have enough resources to build space habs for trillions, with the same living space per person as for Earth.

The idea is to use the materials from the asteroids and NEOs to make new habitats. This gives far more living space than the amount you get if you hollow asteroids out, and live inside them.

The Moon and Mars are our only choices for surface colonization in the near future. Neither is a second Earth; both have many issues at present, especially, the almost total lack of atmosphere. Technically, Mars does have an atmosphere, true, enough for winds and dust storms, but it is so thin it would count as a laboratory vacuum on Earth.

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