Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Rome is drawing up an offer to try to convince Intel to invest billions of euros in an advanced chipmaking plant in Italy, as Germany emerges as frontrunner to land an even bigger megafactory planned by the U.S. company, three sources said.

The plants would be part of a drive by the U.S. group to build cutting-edge manufacturing capacity in Europe to help avoid future supply shortages of the kind currently crippling the automotive industry in particular.

Rome is already in talks with Intel about the potential investment, which according to preliminary estimates would be worth more than 4 billion euro ($4.7 billion), the sources who are involved in the discussions said.

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Machines are getting better and better at doing jobs that traditionally could only be done by humans. Largely this is thanks to advances in machine learning that have given us machines that are capable of using data to make decisions. As they are trained on more data — in simulated or real-world situations, they are able to do this with increasing proficiency. This is what we’ve come to refer to as artificial intelligence (AI) — the closest we’ve so far come to creating machines that are capable of learning, thinking, and deciding.

So is this unprecedented situation going to result in widespread human redundancy, with the associated damage and disruption to society that this would seem to entail? There are certainly some who think so. On the other hand, some believe it will lead to a new paradigm in human work and productivity, where machines take care of all the dirty, boring, and dangerous jobs, leaving us free to spend time on more rewarding creative, fun or social pursuits.

Full Story:

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A British-built robot that uses cameras and a robotic arm to create abstract art has been released after Egyptian authorities detained it at customs.

Ai-Da, named for the mathematician Ada Lovelace, was seized by border agents last week who feared her robotics may have been hiding covert spy tools.

Officials held the robot for 10 days, imperilling plans to show her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza on Thursday.

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the military alliance of 30 countries that border the North Atlantic Ocean, this week announced that it would adopt its first AI strategy and launch a “future-proofing” fund with the goal of investing around $1 billion. Military.com reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will join other NATO members in Brussels, Belgium, the alliance’s headquarters, to formally approve the plans over two days of talks.

Speaking at a news conference, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the effort was in response to “authoritarian regimes racing to develop new technologies.” NATO’s AI strategy will cover areas including data analysis, imagery, cyberdefense, he added.

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The spacecraft could launch with just 8.5 days’ notice.

China just launched what is planned to be its longest crewed mission to date, but the next spacecraft in the series is ready to blast off should the Shenzhou 13 astronauts need rescuing.

Shenzhou 13 lifted off on Oct. 15 with commander Zhai Zhigang and colleagues Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu arriving at the orbiting Tianhe module of the Tiangong space station 6.5 hours later. Back on the ground at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, Shenzhou 14 and its Long March 2F launch vehicle are already on standby.

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Starship will be ready for its orbital launch next month, pending regulatory approval — Elon Musk.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket is still being built in southeast Texas, with significant work being made on crucial parts like the launch tower construction and the installation of the vacuum-rated Raptor engines that will power the spacecraft once it reaches space.

Elon Musk claims that it might be ready for its maiden orbital flight attempt next month if it receives the necessary regulatory approvals.

To make the effort, SpaceX will need clearance from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as it has for all of its previous test flights of Starship from its development facility outside of Brownsville, Texas.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down experiments at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory early last year, Shambhu Ghimire’s research group was forced to find another way to study an intriguing research target: quantum materials known as topological insulators, or TIs, which conduct electric current on their surfaces but not through their interiors.

Denitsa Baykusheva, a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow, had joined his group at the Stanford PULSE Institute two years earlier with the goal of finding a way to generate high harmonic generation, or HHG, in these materials as a tool for probing their behavior. In HHG, shining through a material shifts to higher energies and higher frequencies, called harmonics, much like pressing on a guitar string produces higher notes. If this could be done in TIs, which are promising building blocks for technologies like spintronics, quantum sensing and quantum computing, it would give scientists a new tool for investigating these and other quantum materials.

With the experiment shut down midway, she and her colleagues turned to theory and computer simulations to come up with a new recipe for generating HHG in topological insulators. The results suggested that circularly polarized light, which spirals along the direction of the laser beam, would produce clear, unique signals from both the conductive surfaces and the interior of the TI they were studying, bismuth selenide—and would in fact enhance the signal coming from the surfaces.

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Light offers an irreplaceable way to interact with our universe. It can travel across galactic distances and collide with our atmosphere, creating a shower of particles that tell a story of past astronomical events. Here on earth, controlling light lets us send data from one side of the planet to the other.

Given its broad utility, it’s no surprise that light plays a critical role in enabling 21st century quantum information applications. For example, scientists use to precisely control atoms, turning them into ultra-sensitive measures of time, acceleration, and even gravity. Currently, such early quantum technology is limited by size—state-of-the-art systems would not fit on a dining room table, let alone a chip. For practical use, scientists and engineers need to miniaturize , which requires re-thinking certain components for harnessing light.

Now IQUIST member Gaurav Bahl and his research group have designed a simple, compact photonic circuit that uses to rein in light. The new study, published in the October 21 issue of the journal Nature Photonics, demonstrates a powerful way to isolate, or control the directionality of light. The team’s measurements show that their approach to isolation currently outperforms all previous on-chip alternatives and is optimized for compatibility with atom-based sensors.

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