Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists can now “decode” people’s thoughts without even touching their heads, The Scientist reported.

Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples’ brains. The new method, described in a report posted 29 Sept. to the preprint database bioRxiv, instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

FMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain, and because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen, this information provides an indirect measure of brain activity.

Chipmaker sees 3D version of the internet with ‘a whole bunch of robots’ as it expands factory-oriented tools.

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Recent years have seen a growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration hardware. IBM has taken note.

In the earliest days of AI, commercial CPU and GPU technologies were enough to handle the technology’s data sizes and computational parameters. But with the emergence of larger datasets and deep learning models, there is now a clear need for purpose-built AI hardware acceleration.

IBM has begun installing an on-premise quantum computer at a health provider’s data center in Ohio.

Cleveland Clinic and IBM said this month that deployment work of the first private sector onsite, IBM-managed quantum computer in the United States.

Researchers in Europe have developed an efficient way to deliver internet speeds at over 1 million gigabits per second through a single chip and laser system.

The experiment achieved a speed of 1.8 petabits per second, or nearly twice the amount of internet traffic the world transmits at the same rate. Amazingly, the feat was pulled off using only a single optical light source.

The research comes from a team at Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Last week, the group published a peer-reviewed paper (Opens in a new window) in Nature Photonics about the technology.

Through, DNA sequencing, researchers find the first known Neanderthal family, including a father and daughter.

Tesla is rumored to be looking to invest in Nuevo Leon, a Mexican state bordering Texas, as CEO Elon Musk meets with the governor.

Earlier this year, people crossing the border between Texas and Nuevo Leon were surprised to see not just the usual marked lanes for cars and trucks but also one marked “Tesla” – pictured above.

We ended up finding out that Tesla had struck a deal with the state of Nuevo Leon to have its own lane at the border crossing in order to reduce wait times for cargo going through the border. Or at least that was the explanation of Ivan Rivas, the economy minister of Nuevo Leon.

This highlights the promise and the peril of achieving HLAI: building machines designed to pass the Turing Test and other, more sophisticated metrics of human-like intelligence.⁸ On the one hand, it is a path to unprecedented wealth, increased leisure, robust intelligence, and even a better understanding of ourselves. On the other hand, if HLAI leads machines to automate rather than augment human labor, it creates the risk of concentrating wealth and power. And with that concentration comes the peril of being trapped in an equilibrium where those without power have no way to improve their outcomes, a situation I call the Turing Trap.

The grand challenge of the coming era will be to reap the unprecedented benefits of AI, including its human-like manifestations, while avoiding the Turing Trap. Succeeding in this task requires an understanding of how technological progress affects productivity and inequality, why the Turing Trap is so tempting to different groups, and a vision of how we can do better.

The moment we recognize someone, a lot happens in our brains all at once. We aren’t aware of any of it.