Lifeboat Foundation

Aubrey: 50% chance to LEV in 12–15 years, and a variety of topics from Rey Kurzweil to A.I. to Singularity, and so on.

In this podcast, Aubrey de Grey discusses his work as President and CSO at Lev Foundation and co-founder at Sense Research Foundation in the field of longevity. He explains how the Foundation’s focus is to combine rejuvenation and damage repair interventions to have greater efficacy in postponing aging and saving lives. De Grey believes that within 12 to 15 years, they have a 50% chance of achieving longevity escape velocity, which is postponing aging and rejuvenating the body faster than time passes. De Grey acknowledges the limitations of traditional approaches like exercise and diet in postponing aging and feels that future breakthroughs will come from high-tech approaches like skin and cell therapies. He discusses the potential of AI and machine learning in drug discovery and the possibility of using it to accelerate scientific experimentation to optimize decisions about which experiments to do next. De Gray cautions that the quality of conclusions from AI depends on the quality and quantity of input data and that the path towards defeating aging would require a symbiotic partnership between humans and AI. Finally, he discusses his excitement about the possibilities of hardware and devices like Apple Watch and Levels in tracking blood sugar levels and their potential to prolong life.

Wireless power would be worth the hype if it were widespread — modern life is burdened by a tangle of power cables and an endless hunt for plugs. But despite its potential, wireless power technology is still limited by range.

But Ericsson and PowerLight Technologies have made one dramatic form of wireless power, called optical beaming, work in a proof-of-concept experiment. Their demonstration showed that laser delivery of power to a portable 5G base station could be just around the corner.

The promise of wireless power: Wireless power is straight out of a sci-fi film: electrical power transmitted from place to place through a vacuum or the air. There is no need for wires, poles, outlets, or those pesky USB cubes, which are always lost when you need them most.

As big tech companies are in a fierce race with each other to build generative AI tools, they are being cautious about giving their secrets away. In a move to prevent any of its data from ending up with competitors, Apple has restricted internal use of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft-owned GitHub’s Copilot, a new report says.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is worried about its confidential data ending up with developers who trained the models on user data. Notably, OpenAI launched the official ChatGPT app on iOS Thursday. Separately, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman tweeted that the chatbot has been on the list of restricted software at Apple for months.

I believe ChatGPT has been banned/on the list of restricted software at Apple for months. Obviously the release of ChatGPT on iOS today again makes this relevant.

Apple, like a number of companies right now, may be grappling with what role the newest advances in AI are playing, and should play, in its business. But one thing Apple is confident about is the fact that it wants to bring more generative AI talent into its business.

The Cupertino company has posted at least a dozen job ads on its career page seeking experts in generative AI. Specifically, it’s looking for machine learning specialists “passionate about building extraordinary autonomous systems” in the field. The job ads (some of which seem to cover the same role, or are calling for multiple applicants) first started appearing April 27, with the most recent of them getting published earlier this week.

The job postings are coming amid some mixed signals from the company around generative AI. During its Q2 earnings call earlier this month, CEO Tim Cook dodged giving specific answers to questions about what the company is doing in the area — but also didn’t dismiss it. While generative AI was “very interesting,” he said, Apple would be “deliberate and thoughtful” in its approach. Then yesterday, the WSJ reported that the company had started restricting use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other external generative AI tools for some employees over concerns of proprietary data leaking out through the platforms.

Self-driving vehicle companies Waymo and Cruise are on the cusp of securing final approval to charge fares for fully autonomous robotaxi rides throughout the city of San Francisco at all hours of the day or night.

Amid the city’s mounting resistance to the presence of AVs, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) published two draft resolutions late last week that would grant Cruise and Waymo the ability to extend the hours of operation and service areas of their now-limited robotaxi services.

The drafts are dated for a hearing June 29, and there’s still room for public comments, which are due May 31. Based on the CPUC’s drafted language, many of the protests raised by the city of San Francisco have already been rejected.

As politicians and companies agree on the need to regulate AI, experts warn of regulatory capture — of letting corporations write lax rules that lead to public harm.

When politicians and corporations agree, suspicion is natural.

The 3D-printing process, carried out by PERI 3D construction, will finalize by end of july 2023.

Perhaps the most intriguing evidence of consciousness in early infancy comes from a study conducted by Julia Moser at the University of Tübingen. Moser and her colleagues used second-order (“global”) auditory oddballs to probe for consciousness. Consider a sequence of tones that are clustered together into four groups of four tones, where each tone is either high pitched or low pitched. In the global oddball paradigm, the final tone in the first three groups differs from the preceding three tones (for example, if they are low then it will be high), but the final member of the last group will be identical to the preceding three tones (for example, they might all be low tones). In this scenario, the final tone is not an oddball (that is, outlier) relative to the preceding three tones, but it is an oddball relative to the entire sequence, for anyone who hears the three earlier groups of tones will expect the final member of this group to be an oddball.

Earlier research has suggested that the brain produces a distinctive response to second-order oddballs, which can be roughly thought of as a neural marker of surprise. Further, there is some evidence that this response is produced only when an individual is conscious. Using fetal magnetoencephalography (MEG), Moser and her team discovered that a version of this response could be found not only in newborns but also in 35-week-old fetuses. Again, this result does not provide proof of perceptual awareness in early infancy (let alone in utero), but it is yet another illustration of how neuroscience is beginning to pull back the curtain on infant experience.

Free-flying mosquitoes gravitate toward pads that emit carbon dioxide, which is found in human breath.