Lifeboat Foundation

NEW YORK, May 12 (Reuters Breakingviews) — Trying to predict how a nascent and promising technology will affect society is hubris, but history suggests people are going to have some serious leisure time if the development of artificial intelligence continues apace. Whether that makes them happy, and how the spoils will be divided, are harder to predict.

Over the past 50 years, technology has tended to grow faster than the wider economy. From 2006 to 2016, the digital economy grew at an average annual rate of 5.6% according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or almost four times faster than the overall output. That sort of expansion appears to be oddly consistent. Revenue earned by technology companies in Fortune’s list of the 100 biggest U.S. firms has, adjusted for inflation, increased at a similar rate for five decades.

American employee productivity has increased about 2% annually for seven decades. While higher capital intensity and more skilled labor steadily contribute, what varies more is the ability to deploy technology successfully. Sectors able to automate tasks and reduce workers, such as manufacturing, will generally see higher productivity, while others, such as education, may have a harder time. This process also takes time. In 1987, the economist Robert Solow famously said computers were visible everywhere expect in the productivity statistics. A decade later, productivity shot up.

Orbital Assembly Corporation, a California-based company, has announced plans to build the world’s first-ever space hotel with artificial gravity. The hotel, called Voyager Station, is set to be completed by 2025 and will offer guests an out-of-this-world experience like never before.

The Voyager Station will be assembled in low Earth orbit and will be able to accommodate up to 280 guests and 112 crew members at a time. The hotel will feature restaurants, bars, a gym, and other recreational facilities, all of which will be designed to offer an experience similar to that of a luxury cruise ship.

One of the most unique features of the hotel is its artificial gravity system, which will use centrifugal force to simulate the feeling of gravity. This will allow guests to move around the hotel as they would on Earth, which will make their stay much more comfortable and enjoyable.

Cornell University researchers have developed a robot, called ReMotion, that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is—in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany. “With ReMotion, we show that we can enable rapid, dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile, automated robot.”

In a bombastic interview with none other than Tucker freakin’ Carlson, Elon Musk made a bold claim about Google co-founder Larry Page that, we have to admit, isn’t entirely implausible.

During the newly-released Fox News interview, Musk alleged that back when he and the Google co-founder and CEO “used to be close friends” and he’d stay at the techster’s Palo Alto house, they’d get into lengthy discussions about “AI safety” — and that what Page told him led to his own cofounding of OpenAI.

In characteristic confused-puppy fashion, Carlson asked Musk what Page had said about AI.

Year 2016 Although some have have thought regeneration of limbs improbable actually this can become a reality due to amphibians limb regeneration then using crispr we can get deadpool like abilities for all. 😗😁

Also known as Wade Wilson, Deadpool is a sarcastic, eccentric smart-ass, way more of an antihero than your traditional superhero.

Continue reading “The Real and Extraordinary Science of Deadpool’s Superpowers” »

The idea of ‘absolute time’ is an illusion. Physics and subjective experience reveal why.

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The rare metal terbium has been found in an exoplanet.

An exoplanet (or extrasolar planet) is a planet that is located outside our Solar System, orbiting around a star other than the Sun. The first suspected scientific detection of an exoplanet occurred in 1988, with the first confirmation of detection coming in 1992.

Continue reading “Galaxy’s Hottest Exoplanet: Alien Atmosphere Holds Rare Terbium Surprise” »

In a recent study published in the journal Nutrients, researchers explore the association between the gastrointestinal delivery system and carotenoids.

Study: Carotenoids Diet: Digestion, Gut Microbiota Modulation, and Inflammatory Diseases. Image Credit: valiantsin suprunovich.

New communications technologies don’t come with user’s manuals. They are primitive, while old tech is refined. So critics attack. The critic’s job is easier than the practitioner’s: they score with the fearful by comparing the infancy of the new medium with the perfected medium it threatens. But of course, the practitioner wins. In the end, we always assimilate to the new technology.

Here are 11 examples of fear and suspicion of new technology, spanning the history of communications.