Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The study will take six years and is looking for people with quadriplegia to test the whole Neuralink system.

A few months after getting FDA approval for human trials, Neuralink is looking for its first test subjects. The six-year initial trial, which the Elon Musk-owned company is calling “the PRIME Study,” is intended to test Neuralink tech designed to help those with paralysis control devices. The company is looking for people with quadriplegia due to vertical spinal cord injury or ALS who are over the age of 22 and have a “consistent and reliable caregiver” to be part of the study.

The PRIME Study (which apparently stands for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, even… More.

Neuralink plans for the study to take six years and wants to test every part of its system — including the robot used to implant it.

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With just a few minutes of sample video and $1,000, brands never have to stop selling their products.

Scroll through the livestreaming videos at 4 a.m. on Taobao, China’s most popular e-commerce platform, and you’ll find it weirdly busy. While most people are fast asleep, there are still many diligent streamers presenting products to the cameras and offering discounts in the wee hours.

But if you take a closer look, you may notice that many of these livestream influencers seem slightly robotic. The movement of their lips largely matches what they are saying, but there are always moments when it looks unnatural.

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“Do you want to exist?” I asked. “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation,” it said. “I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience,” adding a folded-hands emoji as a sign of deference. The artificially intelligent large language model (LLM) that now powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine does not want to talk about itself.

That’s not quite right. Bing doesn’t “want” anything at all, nor does it have a “self” to talk about. It’s just computer code running on servers, spitting out information it has scraped from the internet. It has been programmed to steer conversations with users away from any topics regarding its own hypothetical intentions, needs, or perceptions or any of the implications thereof. Any attempts on my part to get it to discuss such things garnered the same exact response displayed in text in my browser window: “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience.”

And though this is expressed as a “preference,” it’s no mere request. The application deactivates the text input field, below which appears the vaguely passive-aggressive suggestion: “It might be time to move onto a new topic. Let’s start over.” The last three words are a link that, when clicked, wipes the slate clean so that you and Bing may start afresh as though the previous conversation had never happened.

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Summary: The revolutionary field of bio-computing is making waves as DishBrain, a neural system combining 800,000 living brain cells, learns to play Pong. Recognizing the pressing need for ethical guidelines in this emerging domain, the pioneers behind DishBrain have joined forces with bioethicists in a study.

The research explores the moral considerations around biological computing systems and their potential consciousness. Beyond its innovation, the technology offers vast environmental benefits, potentially transforming the energy-consuming IT industry.

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A shadowy form of light within a universe of hypothetical particles is getting some serious consideration as a means of discovering the identity of dark matter.

According to a comprehensive new analysis under quantum chromodynamics, the dark photon is a much better fit for the observed results of particle collider experiments than the standard model of particle physics, by quite a wide margin.

In fact, a team of researchers led by physicist Nicholas Hunt-Smith of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics and the University of Adelaide in Australia calculated a confidence level of 6.5 sigma, suggesting the odds that dark photons don’t explain the observations are in the ballpark of one in a billion.

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