Lifeboat Foundation

We could be living in the most important century in history. Here’s how Artificial Intelligence might uphold a historical trend of super-exponential economic growth, ushering us into a period of sudden transformation, ending in a stable galaxy-scale civilization or doom. All within the next few decades.

This video is based on Holden Karnofsky’s “most important century” blog post series: https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/

Continue reading “Everything might change forever this century (or we’ll go extinct)” »

AUSTIN, Texas — Just as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning emerge as the fastest-growing in-demand skill sets in the global workforce, The University of Texas at Austin is establishing a new online master’s program in AI with the potential to bring thousands of new students into the field.

Delivered by the Department of Computer Science and Machine Learning Laboratory, the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) will be the first large-scale degree program of its kind and the only master’s degree program in AI from a top-ranked institution to be priced close to $10,000. The master’s degree covers about two years’ worth of course content, to be taken at the learner’s own pace, and will be delivered in partnership with online education platform, edX.

AI master’s programs from peer institutions carry costs five to 10 times as high as UT Austin’s and serve only dozens of students – not the hundreds or thousands the Texas team projects it will reach annually within five years. Similarly priced online master’s programs from the university, in computer science and data science, enroll 2,500 students within less than five years of their launch. Like those programs, the fully online MSAI program is both flexible and accessible.

They were also able to make a cute little LEGO man out of MPTM that liquefies itself and moves through the bars of a cage. Though the robot appears to self-coalesce into its original shape on the other side, Majidi clarified that it was manually recast by the team and then put back into the shot.

“It’s almost T-1000-like in the sense that you have that figurine and it melts into a blob, and it gets sucked through those jail bars,” Majidi said, adding that the villainous assassin android served as an inspiration for the robot.

My keynote on how dictatorships constitute the biggest threat to the progress of humanity on the planetary scale.

An overview of the possibilities of life on Mars and recent science that suggests that it may have gone extinct by its own doing.

An exploration of time scales and time passage and its relation to the Fermi Paradox as a straightforwards solution.

Continue reading “Did Life on Mars Self-Destruct?” »

An exploration of the idea of asymptotic or homeostatic civilizations that degrade over time, thus solving the Fermi Paradox.

My Patreon Page:

Continue reading “Fermi Paradox: Degrading Civilizations” »

AS technology advances rapidly, we’re getting closer to cracking space mysteries that once baffled scientists.

Some experts think we could solve mysteries like dark matter in the next decade.

We’ve rounded up some of the biggest space mysteries that scientists are hoping to solve in our life times.

More than one-third of UK health experts are not aware of Charles Bonnet syndrome — CBS — a condition which can cause vivid, and sometimes frightening, hallucinations.

A poll of 1,100 health experts — including GPs, doctors and optometrists — found 37 per cent were not aware of CBS.

The condition is not caused by mental health problems or dementia. It is purely due to a loss of sight — 60 per cent or more — which reduces or stops the regular messages from the eye to the brain.

The human brain is a complex system exhibiting multi-scale spatiotemporal organization. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my lab’s work on large-scale functional network organization across different timescales. First, I will present a biophysically plausible model of second-level fluctuation in the brain’s functional connectivity patterns. I will then discuss how minute-level task-state changes can predict behavioral traits. This is followed by exploring how brain dynamics can vary over the course of a day. Finally, I will discuss our work on estimating individual-level network markers that are stable across weeks and months.

This video is part of the SNAC seminar series organized by Mac Shine, Joe Lizier, and Ben Fulcher (The University of Sydney).