Lifeboat Foundation

A century of sci-fi films that chart our changing attitudes to AI — from Fritz Lang to Finch.

“Old-fashioned” is generally not a term you want to hear applied to science fiction, a genre from which one tends to expect the futuristic and unfamiliar. But old-fashioned is very much how Finch (Apple TV+) feels, and not just because of the reassuring elder-statesman presence of Tom Hanks in the title role: a post-apocalyptic drama built from the scraps of a thousand others before it, it’s about as nostalgically cuddly as a vision of a barren, desolate future can be. Hanks is seemingly the last surviving human on the planet; an inventor, he assembles an AI robot (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) to mind his adorable dog when he’s gone. Awww.

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The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating.

Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve.

Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leapt forward significantly, particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA can now produce “human-like” text.

Deploying autonomous mini-rovers could help us explore places where conventional ones can’t go.

Intel senior vice president Keyvan Esfarjani and Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger at the groundbreaking of two new chip fabrication plants in Chandler, Arizona, on Friday, Sept. 24 2021.

Intel Corporation.

The world’s smallest and most-efficient chips are usually referred to as 5 nanometer, a nomenclature that once referred to the width of transistors on the chip. They power cutting-edge data processing and the latest generation of Apple iPhones. TSMC and Samsung make all of these 5-nanometer chips at fabs in Asia.

Microsoft is entering the race to build a metaverse inside Teams, just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta in a push to build virtual spaces for both consumers and businesses. Microsoft is bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams next year. It’s part of a big effort to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.

With today’s announcement, Microsoft and Meta seem to be on a collision course to compete heavily in the metaverse, particularly for the future of work.

Microsoft Mesh always felt like the future of Microsoft Teams meetings, and now it’s starting to come to life in the first half of 2022. Microsoft is building on efforts like Together Mode and other experiments for making meetings more interactive, after months of people working from home and adjusting to hybrid work.

The article details the discomfort astronauts may feel due to malfunctioning waste management systems. Luckily their critical systems are not compromised. It’s also very difficult for them to make these repairs up in orbit.

Well, I guess adult diapers are the way of the future. 😂

A NASA astronaut stationed aboard the International Space Station acknowledged this week that a design flaw in the toilet built into SpaceX’s Crew Dragon module will force she and her colleagues to use diapers during their upcoming return journey to Earth.

Continue reading “NASA Astronaut: SpaceX Forcing Her to Pee in Diaper Is ‘Suboptimal’” »

Aside from upturning the economics of the automobile industry, Tesla has also begun innovation efforts in how we receive our day-to-day electrical power services.

Indeed, the day you begin to pay Tesla your electricity bills may soon come if they continue their success. Welcome dear, today we will talk about Tesla’s battery farm installations in Australia and how they changed the lives of many Australian citizens.

Tesla’s ‘battery farm’ in South Australia is officially known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Its construction history begins with the local southern Australian government searching for plausible plans for the improvement of their electrical power grid with a battery design in the region.

“We are absolutely losing some science,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells The Register. “How much science we lose depends on how many satellites there end up being. You occasionally lose data. At the moment it’s one in every ten images.”

Telescopes can try waiting for a fleet of satellites to pass before they snap their images, though if astronomers are trying to track moving objects, such as near-Earth asteroids or comets, for example, it can be impossible to avoid the blight.

“As we raise the number of satellites, there starts to be multiple streaks in images you take. That’s no longer irritating, you really are losing science. Ten years from now, there may be so many that we can’t deal with it,” he added.

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Continue reading “Did Time Start at the Big Bang?” »