Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

In a wide-ranging interview at the WSJ Tech Live conference that touched on topics like the future of remote work, AI innovation, employee activism and even misinformation on YouTube, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also shared his thoughts on the state of tech innovation in the U.S. and the need for new regulations. Specifically, Pichai argued for the creation of a federal privacy standard in the U.S., similar to the GDPR in Europe. He also suggested it was important for the U.S. to stay ahead in areas like AI, quantum computing and cybersecurity, particularly as China’s tech ecosystem further separates itself from Western markets.

In recent months, China has been undergoing a tech crackdown, which has included a number of new regulations designed to combat tech monopolies, limit customer data collection and create new rules around data security, among other things. Although many major U.S. tech companies, Google included, don’t provide their core services in China, some who did are now exiting — like Microsoft, which just this month announced its plan to pull LinkedIn from the Chinese market.

Pichai said this sort of decoupling of Western tech from China may become more common.

Read more | >

Early in the pandemic, my team spotted something surprising. When people were severely ill with COVID-19 and on a ventilator, the daily rinses of the plastic tubes in their windpipes contained immune cells from the airway. More surprisingly, what was in these airway samples was very different from what was found in the same patient’s blood.

COVID has shown we must study immunity in the whole body — let’s sort the logistics to acquire the right samples.

Read more | >

Fijitsu retrofitted one of it’s clean rooms in a vertical farm. The project was so successful, they discovered they could enter a new market segment and sell the systems themselves. I definately want one.

Like the giant monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2,001 this new head of lettuce is simultaneously a product of this factory’s past and the future. Fujitsu is a space-age R&D innovator with sprawling, specialized factories. But several of its facilities, including this one, went dark when the company tightened its belt and reorganized its product lines after the 2008 global financial crisis. Now in the aftermath, it has retrofitted this facilities to serve tomorrow’s vegetable consumers, who will pay for a better-than-organic product, and who enjoy a bowl of iceberg more if they know it was monitored by thousands of little sensors.

Like the giant monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, this new head of lettuce is simultaneously a product of this factory’s past and the future. Fujitsu is a space-age R&D innovator with sprawling, specialized factories. But several of its facilities, including this one, went dark when the company tightened its belt and reorganized its product lines after the 2008 global financial crisis. Now in the aftermath, it has retrofitted this facilities to serve tomorrow’s vegetable consumers, who will pay for a better-than-organic product, and who enjoy a bowl of iceberg more if they know it was monitored by thousands of little sensors.

A year into the project, Fujitsu is now producing between 2,500 and 3,000 heads of a lettuce a day that sell for three times the normal price: The company is using its hydroponic lettuce farm to showcase its “smart” farming technologies, in the hopes of nurturing a new agribusiness.

Continue reading “Hydroponics made Fujitsu” | >

The longevity industry — startups trying to make people live longer or even forever, basically — tends to attract charlatans and scandal.

But a terrific feature story in New Statesman makes the case that a handful of ventures in the space are finally starting to hone in on some compelling ideas that might eventually provide modest or even radical life extension.

“I’m confident we’ll have an aging drug by the time it’s relevant for me,” 27-year-old Celine Halioua, a PhD dropout who now works at the anti-aging startup Loyal, who predicted that such a drug could become available “within a decade.”

Read more | >

The policy applies even if the violation occurred outside a group.

Facebook is taking new steps to crack down on groups users who break its rules, even when they have done so in other parts of the app.

Under the new policy, Facebook will downrank content posted in groups by users who have broken its rules even if they have done so elsewhere on the company’s platform. The new rule will apply to any group member who has had a post removed for violating one of Facebook’s Community Standards in the previous 90 days. Those who have had multiple posts removed will have “more severe” demotions.

“This measure will help reduce the ability of members who break our rules from reaching others in their communities, and builds on the existing restrictions placed upon members who violate Community Standards,” Facebook wrote in a statement. The company notes that it already has policies that from people who repeatedly break rules within.

Continue reading “Facebook will punish rule breakers” | >

The reason AI exists is to make our lives simpler, actions faster, knowledge more usable and decision-making more assured. In these regards, AI has done a fine job and continues to do so in both personal and professional contexts. Despite this, you would come across countless concerns about the ‘ethical issues’ posed by the technology. Pay closer attention, and you will realize that most of these issues stem from human negligence or ignorance.

It goes without saying that the relationship between AI and human rights can only be as good as we humans enable it to be. AI-powered systems act on the basis of how competently they have been built and trained. So, executing those two tasks ethically can make sure that AI tools and applications will never violate any human right.

Read more | >

In an interview with Reuters, Jaime Pereira, CEO of Aerocamaras, said “it’s the first time an animal is being rescued with a drone and the first time it has to be captured. If that’s the last option that the dogs have? Then we’re going after them.” Pereira also mentioned a possible nightmare scenario caused by the limitations of drone battery technology, and the tricky nature of the operation, which relies partly on the cooperation of the stranded canines: “What we don’t want is to run out of battery when flying over the lava,” he said. In order to carry out the mission as safely as possible, the drone operator is currently carrying out test flights to practice before sending its drones to the location near the live volcano.

Though this is likely the first time a dog has been carried to safety by a drone, operators in China guided a herd of wayward elephants home with the aid of drones. In that case, however, the drones were only used to keep track of the animals. The technology is also being trialed for first responder operations in the case of natural disasters and emergencies. Here’s hoping the novel method for extracting the otherwise inaccessible animals to safety goes off without a hitch.

Read more | >

Even swarms of self-replicating robots.

If alien civilizations exist, they may have opened a Pandora’s box.

It may sound far-fetched, but self-replicating probes from an alien civilization could become a serious nuisance to budding societies like ours. While this is pure speculation, we have an ace in the hole: China’s new massive radio telescope might be capable of detecting swarms of alien probes, also called von Neumann probes, at relatively vast distances from our sun, according to a recent study shared on a preprint server.

Read more | >