Lifeboat Foundation

DALL-E in the sidebar.

Large language models are drafting screenplays and writing code and cracking jokes. Image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E 2, are winning art prizes and democratizing interior design and producing dangerously convincing fabrications. They feel like magic. Meanwhile, the world’s most advanced robots are still struggling to open different kinds of doors. As in actual, physical doors. Chatbots, in the proper context, can be—and have been—mistaken for actual human beings; the most advanced robots still look more like mechanical arms appended to rolling tables. For now, at least, our dystopian near future looks a lot more like Her than M3GAN.

The counterintuitive notion that it’s harder to build artificial bodies than artificial minds is not a new one. In 1988, the computer scientist Hans Moravec observed that computers already excelled at tasks that humans tended to think of as complicated or difficult (math, chess, IQ tests) but were unable to match “the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” Six years later, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker offered a pithier formulation: “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research,” he wrote, “is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.” This lesson is now known as “Moravec’s paradox.”

Within the larger, “true” universe, ours could have branched off due to a random quantum fluctuation.

It may not offer infinite range, but it’s close. The new Oceanvolt ServoProp saildrive has a regeneration feature that efficiently charges up an electric boat’s batteries while sailing.

Many people think of sailboats as being purely wind powered. While smaller sailboats usually are, most decently sized sailboats have a motor for maneuvering in a marina or when the winds die down.

Saildrive motors are an innovative propulsion system commonly found on modern sailboats, offering a compact and efficient alternative to traditional shaft-driven inboard engines.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, have together with colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, developed a method that increases the signal strength from microbial electrochemical cells by up to twenty times. The secret is a film with an embedded bacterium: Shewanella oneidensis.

Adding bacteria to electrochemical systems is often an environmentally sensitive means to convert chemical energy to electricity. Applications include water purification, bioelectronics, biosensors, and for the harvesting and storage of energy in fuel cells. One problem that miniaturisation of the processes has encountered is that a high signal strength requires large electrodes and a large volume of liquid.

Researchers at Linköping University, together with colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, USA, have now developed a method in which they embed the electroactive bacterium Shewanella oneidensis into PEDOT: PSS, an electrically conducting polymer, on a substrate of carbon felt.

A warm-hued material prized by jewelry makers, amber takes more than 40,000 years to form. See pictures of some of the finest specimens.

The new technology has the capacity to save thousands of lives.

For 4 hours, I tried to come up reasons for why AI might not kill us all, and Eliezer Yudkowsky explained why I was wrong.

We also discuss his call to halt AI, why LLMs make alignment harder, what it would take to save humanity, his millions of words of sci-fi, and much more.

Continue reading “Eliezer Yudkowsky — Why AI Will Kill Us, Aligning LLMs, Nature of Intelligence, SciFi, & Rationality” »

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL) scientists designed and built a telescope that, as of March 14, was out of this world.

The Stellar Occultation Hypertemporal Imaging Payload (SOHIP) is a telescope using LLNL patented optics technology on a gimbal to observe and measure atmospheric gravity waves and turbulence.

The device was sent aboard a SpaceX rocket out of Cape Canaveral in Florida last month to the International Space Station (ISS).