Lifeboat Foundation

“Expand civilization into the solar system, and protect our mother planet”

Most important, the encoded logical qubit performed better than the physical ones on which it depends, at least in some ways. For example, the researchers succeeded in preparing either the logical 0 or the logical 1 state 99.67% of the time—better than the 99.54% for the individual qubits. “This is really the first time that the quality of the [logical] qubit is better than the components that encode it,” says Monroe, who is cofounder of IonQ, a company developing ion-based quantum computers.

However, Egan notes, the encoded qubit did not outshine the individual ions in every way. Instead, he says, the real advance is in demonstrating fault tolerance, which means the error-correcting machinery works in a way that doesn’t introduce more errors than it corrects. “Fault tolerance is really the design principle that prevents errors from spreading,” says Egan, now at IonQ.

Martinis questions that use of the term, however. To claim true fault-tolerant error correction, he says, researchers must do two other things. They must show that the errors in a logical qubit get exponentially smaller as the number of physical qubits increases. And they must show they can measure the ancillary qubits repeatedly to maintain the logical qubit, he says.

Early in 2,021 the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab looked at the psychological consequences of spending long days videoconferencing and in virtual meetings. The popularized term “Zoom fatigue,” is the result of maxing out cognitive load and even reducing effectiveness. For all of that investment in remote work technology, senior managers feel there is very little payoff.

The University of North Carolina surveyed 182 senior managers and 65% of them felt meetings kept them from completing their own work, 71% felt meetings were inefficient and unproductive, and 64% felt meetings undercut deep thinking.

As technology-dependent remote workers proliferate, new solutions are coming to the fore that may make both in-person and virtual meetings more productive.

In January 2,020 at the event where General Motors automated driving division Cruise took the wraps off the Origin robotaxi, a slide briefly appeared in the presentation showing a version of the vehicle for package deliveries. Today during the General Motors investor day, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann provided more details about the company’s business model and revenue opportunities and showed both a delivery module and a wheelchair accessible version.

Cruise has been providing automated deliveries in partnership with Walmart WMT +0.7% in the Phoenix area since late 2020. Throughout much of last year during the worst early phases of the pandemic in the San Francisco area, Cruise vehicles were used to provide more than 50,000 food deliveries to medical personnel and those in need. Those efforts have all utilized the current test fleet of Chevrolet Bolts which are not optimized for goods delivery.

There’s a lot of excitement at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health care. AI has already been used to improve disease treatment and detection, discover promising new drugs, identify links between genes and diseases, and more.

By analyzing large datasets and finding patterns, virtually any new algorithm has the potential to help patients — AI researchers just need access to the right data to train and test those algorithms. Hospitals, understandably, are hesitant to share sensitive patient information with research teams. When they do share data, it’s difficult to verify that researchers are only using the data they need and deleting it after they’re done.

Secure AI Labs (SAIL) is addressing those problems with a technology that lets AI algorithms run on encrypted datasets that never leave the data owner’s system. Health care organizations can control how their datasets are used, while researchers can protect the confidentiality of their models and search queries. Neither party needs to see the data or the model to collaborate.

With almost instant improvement.

A team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco Health has successfully treated a patient with severe depression by targeting the specific brain circuit involved in depressive brain patterns and resetting them thanks to a new proof-of-concept intervention.

Continue reading “A New Brain Implant Relieved Treatment-Resistant Depression, in a World First” »

Imagine a place where you could always stay young, name a city after yourself, or even become the president — sounds like a dream? Well, if not in the real world, such dreams can definitely be fulfilled in the virtual world of a metaverse. The metaverse is believed by some to be the future of the internet, where apart from surfing, people would also be able to enter inside the digital world of the internet, in the form of their avatars.

The advent of AR, blockchain, and VR devices in the last few years has sparked the development of the metaverse. Moreover, the unprecedented growth of highly advanced technologies in the gaming industry, which offer immersive gameplay experiences, not only provides us a glimpse of how the metaverse would look like but also indicates that we are closer than ever to experience a virtual world of our own.

Spoiler: We are still a ‘Type Zero’ civilization.

The Kardashev scale was extended to accommodate type IV and V civilization. Energy output in type V civilization would be tremendous. Possible wormholes, time travel, and teleportation. Breaking the second law of thermodynamics would be the easiest way to progress. Maxwell’s demon thought experiment presents this hypothesis.

Investors are pouring money into artificial intelligence, despite clear setbacks in self-driving cars, social media and even healthcare.