Lifeboat Foundation

Spoiler alert: this article explains a key plot point, but we don’t give away anything you won’t see in trailers. Thanks to reader Florence, 7, for her questions.

At the beginning of the new Disney Pixar film, Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear gets stranded on a dangerous faraway planet with his commanding officer and crew.

Continue reading “Is time travel real? What Pixar’s movie Lightyear shows about Einstein’s theory” »

Finding the Higgs boson is the compelling story behind Elusive: How Peter Higgs solved the mystery of mass. But Frank Close’s book lives up to its title as both the man and his particle ultimately slip through the net.

Deep Longevity has published a paper in Aging-US outlining a machine learning approach to human psychology in collaboration with Nancy Etcoff, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, an authority on happiness and beauty.

The authors created two digital models of human psychology based on data from the Midlife in the United States study.

Continue reading “Harvard Developed AI Identifies the Shortest Path to Human Happiness” »

The CCP

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We often worry about the possibility of a civilization developing methods of brainwashing to indoctrinate its population and turning into a totalitarian dictatorship. We will examine both existing and possible future methods and technologies for mind control, such as neuro-hacking and genetic programming, as well as the possible defenses against such brainwashing or conditioning and implications it has for civilization.

Continue reading “Brainwashing & Mind Control” »

A look at how emerging concepts in science & technology could disrupt our most our understandings of identity, consciousness, and free will. This is the 5th episode of the Existential Crisis series which looks at concepts like Transhumanism, Life Extension, the Simulation Hypothesis, the Doomsday Argument, and the Anthropic Principle.

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Continue reading “Consciousness and Identity” »

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We continue our discussion of the Boltzmann Brain — a hypothetical randomly assembled mind rather than an evolved one — by looking at the Anthropic Principle and the Fine-Tuned Universe Theory, alternative ways of viewing the probability of our existence than the classic Copernican Principle.
Make sure to catch Part 1 of the discussion at Up an Atom:

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Continue reading “Boltzmann Brains & the Anthropic Principle” »

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Machines may help bring about a Post-Scarcity Utopia, assuming they don’t take over instead, and we dream of a future that is a Post-Scarcity Utopia, but its dark reflection is the Post-Discontent society, one where through deception or brainwashing people do not even known how they are being deprived or oppressed.

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Continue reading “Machine Overlords & Post-Discontent Societies” »

A team of engineers at the University of Arizona has an ambitious concept for a motorless sailplane that may soar above the Martian surface. They want to go higher.

For the first time, the immersive AR experience surpasses the physical by offering the contextuality that consumers need. They can see the end outcome of the purchase decision before even making the decision — the experience of seeing the couch in the context of their space is transformed — giving them more confidence in their decision.

AR and its effects on consumer psychology

AR is not taking a share of the digital pie as we know it today, but instead increasing the overall size of the pie. There are 100 million consumers shopping with AR online and in stores today. This powerful technology fundamentally changes consumer psychology in three distinct ways: changing the ecommerce model from a push to a pull experience, giving consumers new confidence in their purchases; driving conversion by giving consumers visual context before buying; and giving consumers a new way of experiencing in-person shopping.