Lifeboat Foundation

Western intelligence agencies fear Beijing could within decades dominate all of the key emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics.

China’s economic and military rise over the past 40 years is considered to be one of the most significant geopolitical events of recent times, alongside the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union which ended the Cold War.

MI6, depicted by novelists as the employer of some of the most memorable fictional spies from John le Carré’s George Smiley to Ian Fleming’s James Bond, operates overseas and is tasked with defending Britain and its interests.

Exceptional channel exploring thought-provoking topics in an almost psychedelic way.

⚠️ (3D Video, look around with your cursor!)

Continue reading “If we open reality.exe?” »

We love the sort of outlandish concept cars that treat themselves as high art, and regret that COVID-19 and the general death of the big auto show is increasingly denying us this pleasure. But here is a spectacular example of the genre to lift the late holiday weekend malaise: meet the WayRay Holograktor.

The current talk addresses a crucial problem on how compositionality can be naturally developed in cognitive agents by having iterative sensory-motor interactions with the environment.

The talk highlights a dynamic neural network model, so-called the multiple timescales recurrent neural network (MTRNN) model, which has been applied to a set of experiments on developmental learning of compositional actions performed by a humanoid robot made by Sony. The experimental results showed that a set of reusable behavior primitives were developed in the lower level network that is characterized by its fast timescale dynamics while sequential combinations of these primitives were learned in the higher level, which is characterized by its slow timescale dynamics.

Continue reading “Jun Tani: The self-Organizing Functional Hierarchy: a neuro-robotics study — Part 1” »

Serious Science — http://serious-science.org.

Neuroscientist Karl Friston on functional specialization of different brain areas, brain hierarchy, and the connectome.

Continue reading “Dynamic Causal Modelling — Karl Friston” »

The two billionaires are locked in a race to send humans to space, with Musk’s SpaceX far in front of Bezos’ Blue Origin venture. But the two differ on what to do when humanity arrives in space: Musk wants to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, while Bezos would rather see humans orbiting Earth in giant space stations.

Musk’s vision receives a lot of publicity, but space consultant Rand Simberg tells Inverse that Bezos’ goal is the “more expansive.”

“Elon is what [science fiction writer Isaac] Asimov would have called a planetary chauvinist,” he says. “He thinks people need to be on planets. He wants to be a multi-planet species. That’s nice, I guess. But Bezos actually has a more expansive vision.”

The Curiosity rover captured a scenic view of Mars’ mountains during its ongoing mission on the Red Planet to find signs of ancient alien life.

Nov 30 (Reuters) — Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) cloud computing unit on Tuesday introduced two new custom computing chips aimed at helping its customers beat the cost of using chips from Intel Corp (INTC.O) and Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O).

With $45.37 billion in sales in 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s biggest cloud computing provider and one of the biggest buyers of data center chips, whose computing power AWS rents out to its customers. Ever since buying a startup called Annapurna Labs in 2015, AWS has worked to develop its own custom chips.

On Tuesday, the company released the third generation of its Graviton chip that is designed to compete with central processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O). The Graviton3 is 25% faster than its predecessor, and Dave Brown, vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at Amazon, told Reuters that the company expects it to provide a better performance per dollar than Intel’s chips.