Lifeboat Foundation

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt weighs in on where AI is headed, when to “pull the plug” and how to cope with China.

Mining cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could be done using quantum computers, cutting their electricity use by 90 per cent.

By Alex Wilkins

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes open-source language models like Llama are the future of AI. The company is investing heavily in computing power for its next-generation model and expects AI chatbots to become ubiquitous on websites soon.

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“I think we’ll look back on Llama 3.1 as a turning point in the industry, where open-source AI started to become the industry standard, like Linux,” Zuckerberg said during the latest earnings call.

I have a new essay out via the wonderful site Merion West. The article is based on some of my experimental writings at Oxford. I hope you’ll read and consider it. I’m highly worried life extension science isn’t moving forward fast enough!

“Sadly, biological humans are likely to be mortal for centuries more, unless a dramatic increase of both resources and life extension scientists are marshaled.”

Certain well-known gerontologists and longevity experts around the world believe that sometime in this century—probably in the next 15–50 years—medicine will likely overcome and cure most forms of disease, and even death itself. Billionaires such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s Larry Page, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison have jumped on board, pledging billions of dollars to “conquering all disease by this century” and mortality altogether.

Continue reading “When We’re Overly Optimistic about the Pace of Life Extension Research” »

An international team of scientists, led by Trinity College Dublin, has devised an innovative imaging method using state-of-the-art microscopes that significantly reduces the time and radiation required. Their work represents a significant breakthrough that will benefit several disciplines, from materials science to medicine, as the method promises to deliver improved imaging for sensitive materials such as biological tissues that are especially vulnerable to damage.

For generations, researchers have been pondering the question of how and where consciousness is formed in the brain. Professor Ekrem Dere from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, proposes a new approach to researching conscious cognitive information processing. He advocates defining phases of conscious cognitive processes on the basis of behavioral observations and learning curves.

“Learning is often not a gradual process, but takes place in leaps and bounds; you could say that humans and animals experience sudden epiphanies every now and then,” he says. “It’s likely that these experiences are preceded by conscious processes.”

Dere outlines his new approach, which might apply to both humans and animals, in an article published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

It sounds like science fiction, but many scientists believe editing the human genome is key to our advancement across the solar system.

Your mind’s eye exists somewhere on a sprawling continuum.

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

The Italian boxer Angela Carini broke down in tears after she abandoned her bout against the Algerian Imane Khelif after 46 seconds in a fight that sparked huge controversy at the Olympics.

Khelif is one of two boxers permitted to fight at the Olympics despite being disqualified from the women’s world championships last year for failing gender eligibility tests.