Lifeboat Foundation

AI may be “slightly conscious”

The Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of OpenAI, one of the leading research labs for artificial intelligence, has suggested that the latest generation of neural networks are large enough to be “slightly conscious”.

Ilya Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. This includes beta testing of GPT-3 prior to its release. In a 2020 paper, he and his team concluded that the language model, featuring 175 billion parameters, “can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans.”

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Continue reading “Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality?” »

A revolutionary pacemaker that re-establishes the heart’s naturally irregular beat is set to be trialed in New Zealand heart patients this year, following successful animal trials.

“Currently, all pacemakers pace the heart metronomically, which means a very steady, even pace. But when you record heart rate in a healthy individual, you see it is constantly on the move,” says Professor Julian Paton, a lead researcher and director of Manaaki Manawa, the Centre for Heart Research at the University of Auckland.

Continue reading “Bionic Pacemaker Reverses Heart Failure” »

A team of researchers from Japan’s RIKEN Guardian Robot Project has created an android child called Nikola capable of successfully displaying six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.

While the android child is definitely not at the Ex Machina level, the project, led by Wataru Sato from RIKEN, is significant since it’s the first time the quality of these six android-expressed emotions has been examined and validated.

Continue reading “Scientists develop an ‘android child’ that can convey six facial expressions” »

Strategies built by data definitely work.

The overall strength of a professional sports team is measured with one straightforward metric: wins. However, winning one game, let alone a championship, is extremely difficult in professional sports leagues. As the popularity of sports has grown worldwide over the last century, so has the level of competition in professional sports leagues and what it takes to win. Athletes today are bigger, faster, stronger, and more skilled than their counterparts from previous generations. Professional sports organizations need to look for any advantage to help put their teams in the best position to win. More and more pro sports organizations have turned to data science in search of competitive advantages in recent years. One sports team that has consistently used data science as part of its recipe for success is the English football club Liverpool FC. Although all professional football teams feature an analytics department, Liverpool is unique in its approach.

Continue reading “Can data science make your team win? Some teams prove so” »

A Martian biosphere may not be hiding only in the deep subsurface.

But let’s not forget habitable niches in salts, ices, and caves!

Why waste a perfectly good (but obsolete) fighter?

It sure looks like China is converting Cold War fighters into flying drones. Dozens of Shenyang J-16 fighter planes, spotted in satellite photos, are still present at China’s military airfields, despite the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) retiring the type in 2010. China could use the planes in a conflict, either masquerading them as modern jets, or using the drones to carry out combat missions of their own.

Continue reading “It Sure Looks Like China Is Turning Old Fighter Jets Into Drones” »