Lifeboat Foundation

At Google I/O today Google Cloud announced Vertex AI, a new managed machine learning platform that is meant to make it easier for developers to deploy and maintain their AI models. It’s a bit of an odd announcement at I/O, which tends to focus on mobile and web developers and doesn’t traditionally feature a lot of Google Cloud news, but the fact that Google decided to announce Vertex today goes to show how important it thinks this new service is for a wide range of developers.

The launch of Vertex is the result of quite a bit of introspection by the Google Cloud team. “Machine learning in the enterprise is in crisis, in my view,” Craig Wiley, the director of product management for Google Cloud’s AI Platform, told me. “As someone who has worked in that space for a number of years, if you look at the Harvard Business Review or analyst reviews, or what have you — every single one of them comes out saying that the vast majority of companies are either investing or are interested in investing in machine learning and are not getting value from it. That has to change. It has to change.”

Can this be true?

An unmanned aircraft was brought down by a powerful electromagnetic pulse in what could be the first reported test of an advanced new weapon in China.

A paper published in the Chinese journal Electronic Information Warfare Technology did not give details of the timing and location of the experiment, which are classified but it may be the country’s first openly reported field test of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon.

Continue reading “Did Chinese scientists just bring down an unmanned plane with an electromagnetic pulse weapon?” »

Almost a third of working Americans are in some form of medical debt, with nearly a quarter of those with an outstanding balance owing $10,000 or more. Many Americans feel anxious about health care costs and are depleting their own savings to pay the bills, or avoiding going to the doctor due to the cost, and in some cases, as in the case of William Osman, embarking on bizarre projects to highlight the issue.

The YouTuber and engineer, who is known for his bizarre projects that combine engineering and entertainment, posted a video last week outlining how a recent hospital visit requiring X-rays resulted in a staggering $69,210.32 bill.

Continue reading “Engineer Builds His Own X-Ray After Hospital Charges Him $69K” »

“I think it’s changed everything, and I think it’s changed everything fundamentally,” James Livingston, a history professor at Rutgers University and the author of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea, told Vox.

We’ll (probably) always have work, but could the job as the centerpiece of American life be on the way out?

To understand the question, you have to know how the country got to where it is today. The story starts, to some degree, with a failure. Much of American labor law — as well as the social safety net, such as it is — stems from union organizing and progressive action at the federal level in the 1930s, culminating in the New Deal. At that time, many unions were pushing for a national system of pensions not dependent on jobs, as well as national health care, Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, told Vox. They did win Social Security, but with many people left out, such as agricultural and domestic workers, it wasn’t a full nationwide retirement system. And when it came to universal health care, they lost entirely.

Planet Nine, according to scientists, has an orbit that lies more than 300 AU from the sun and is tilted.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey has high hopes for digital asset and aspiring currency bitcoin.

“My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace,” Dorsey said during a “The B Word” webinar on Wednesday.

“We have all these monopolies off balance and the individual doesn’t have power and the amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real and it takes away attention from the bigger problems,” Dorsey added. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and ARK Invest founder, CEO and CIO Cathie Wood were also speakers on the panel.

While it is always proper to treat the idea of “inevitability” or the promise of utopia with skepticism, it would also be irresponsible to ignore what is fast becoming an undeniable trend. From all outward appearances, technological change is an anthropogenic trend subject to acceleration, and the speed at which changes are coming is reaching a critical point.

Reality check

Continue reading “How Technological Singularity Could End Death and Make Humans Immortal” »

A new hydrogel could help improve the treatment of damaged cartilage in knees and other joints. The unique properties of the gel, which provides a scaffold for cartilage cells to grow on, allow it to be implanted via keyhole surgery.

“We will start human trials soon,” says Qiuning Lin at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Oh, the ways armed forces around the world are working to blast uncrewed aerial vehicles they don’t like. Now the US Army is at that again, putting the finishing touches on a laser weapon that can not only destroy the innards of drones as they fly, but also drop incoming artillery as well.

The Army says it will be mounting the first four field versions of the DE M-SHORAD system on armored vehicles sometime next year, and has added the program to its expanding range of weapons against uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) being developed.