Lifeboat Foundation

The Economist is hiring. Just a heads up.

An opportunity to join our graphics team.

LEV becoming mainstream medicine.

When a group of researchers asked an AI to design a robot that could walk, it created a “small, squishy and misshapen” thing that walks by spasming when filled with air.

The researchers — affiliated with Northwestern University, MIT, and the University of Vermont — published their findings in an article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 3.

“We told the AI that we wanted a robot that could walk across land. Then we simply pressed a button and presto!” Sam Kriegman, an assistant professor at Northwestern University and the lead researcher behind the study, wrote in a separate blog post.

We are arguably at “the knee” of the curve. More breakthroughs have happened in the first 9 months of 2023 than all previous years from the turn of the century (2001 — 2022).

Will AGI kill us all? Will we join with it? Is it even close? Is it just “cool stuff”? Will we have bootstrapping self-improving AI?

Continue reading “Exponential AI Growth — Are we close? — Transhuman Podcast #3” »

Artificial Intelligence.

The 5th industrial revolution: the dawn of the cognitive age.

How technology is driving a revolution of thought.

Our solar system officially houses eight planets, but some scientists say there could be a ninth. And that’s not just Pluto aficionados – evidence suggests a huge undiscovered world lurks on the dark fringes out there. Now, a new study has found the outer solar system oddities could be explained by modified theories of gravity, an alternative idea to dark matter.

In the 19th century, astronomers measuring the orbit of Uranus noticed some inconsistencies between observations and predictions, and concluded that it was being influenced by the gravity of a large unseen body. Sure enough, the planet Neptune was soon discovered as a result.

In 2016 astronomers made a similar prediction: based on the bizarre orbital patterns of six icy objects in the Kuiper belt, an unknown planet with the mass of about 10 Earths could be tugging on them from the shadows. Further evidence from other objects and even the Sun’s tilt seemed to strengthen the case.

A research team led by Prof. Yossi Paltiel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with groups from HUJI, Weizmann, and IST Austria recently conducted a study unveiling the significant influence of nuclear spin on biological activities. This discovery challenges long-held assumptions and opens up exciting possibilities for advancements in biotechnology and quantum biology.

Scientists have long believed that nuclear spin had no impact on biological processes. However, recent research has shown that certain isotopes behave differently due to their nuclear spin. The team focused on stable oxygen isotopes (16O, 17O, 18O) and found that nuclear spin significantly affects oxygen dynamics in chiral environments, particularly in its transport.

“It’s never really the goal of anybody to write papers — it’s to do science,” says Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He predicts that generative AI tools could even fundamentally transform the nature of the scientific paper.

But the spectre of inaccuracies and falsehoods threatens this vision. LLMs are merely engines for generating stylistically plausible output that fits the patterns of their inputs, rather than for producing accurate information. Publishers worry that a rise in their use might lead to greater numbers of poor-quality or error-strewn manuscripts — and possibly a flood of AI-assisted fakes.

“Anything disruptive like this can be quite worrying,” says Laura Feetham, who oversees peer review for IOP Publishing in Bristol, UK, which publishes physical-sciences journals.

To most people, complex technologies separate modern humans from their ancestors who lived in the Stone Age, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. In today’s fast changing world, older technologies, even those from a few years ago, are often described dismissively as “Stone Age.”

Such terms serve to disconnect us from our ancient relatives, who were much more sophisticated than we sometimes think they were.

A team led by archaeologist Larry Barham at the University of Liverpool recently published robust and well dated evidence for the earliest known use of wood technology. The wooden structure, along with artifacts, date to 476,000 years ago and have been excavated from waterlogged deposits at Kalambo Falls, Zambia.