Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 8215

I hadn’t seen anything about this thing in about 5+ years, and it was pretty bad back then. Now they have it singing, although i’d like to just see it talking or trying to hold a conversation. Anyhow, the Mouth of your future humanoid robot:

The Prayer is presented in the show “Neurons, Simulated Intelligence”, at Centre Pompidou, Paris, curated by Frédéric Migayrou and Camille Lenglois from 26 February — 26 April 2020.
The Prayer is an art-installation that tries to explore the supernatural through artificial intelligence with a long-term experimental set up. A robot — installation operates a talking mouth, that is part of a computer system, creating and voicing prayers, that are generated in every very moment by the self-learning system itself, exploring ‘the divine’ the supernatural or ‘the noumenal’ as the mystery of ‘the unknown’, using deep learning.
How would a divine epiphany appear to an artificial intelligence? The focus of the project could maybe shed light on the difference between humans and AI machines in the debate about mind and matter and allows a speculative stance on the future of humans in the age of AI technology and AGI ambitions.
Above an anticipation of AI Singing with AI generated texts, since singing is a major religious practice.

Diemut Strebe, Author of Concept and Final Design.

Continue reading “Diemut Strebe” | >

The mission of healthy life extension, or healthy longevity promotion, raises a broad variety of questions and tasks, relating to science and technology, individual and communal ethics, and public policy, especially health and science policy. Despite the wide variety, the related questions may be classified into three groups. The first group of questions concerns the feasibility of the accomplishment of life extension. Is it theoretically and technologically possible? What are our grounds for optimism? What are the means to ensure that the life extension will be healthy life extension? The second group concerns the desirability of the accomplishment of life extension for the individual and the society, provided it will become some day possible through scientific intervention.

How will then life extension affect the perception of personhood? How will it affect the availability of resources for the population? Yet, the third and final group can be termed normative. What actions should we take? Assuming that life extension is scientifically possible and socially desirable, and that its implications are either demonstrably positive or, in case of a negative forecast, they are amenable – what practical implications should these determinations have for public policy, in particular health policy and research policy, in a democratic society? Should we pursue the goal of life extension? If yes, then how? How can we make it an individual and social priority? Given the rapid population aging and the increasing incidence and burden of age-related diseases, on the pessimistic side, and the rapid development of medical technologies, on the optimistic side, these become vital questions of social responsibility. And indeed, these questions are often asked by almost any person thinking about the possibility of human life extension, its meaning for oneself, for the people in one’s close circle, for the entire global community. Many of these questions are rather standard, and the answers to them are also often quite standard. Below some of those frequently asked questions and frequently given answers are given, with specific reference to the possibility and desirability of healthy human life extension, and the normative actions that can be undertaken, by the individual and the society, to achieve this goal.

Q: Is human life extension possible? Why do you think so?

Read more | >

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he supports direct payments of $1,000 per adult and $500 per child to Americans within three weeks if Congress backs the plan.

“The president is determined that we are going to support” those affected, Mnuchin said in a Fox Business interview Thursday morning.

Cash handouts to all American households are gaining support in Congress as the best way to shore up an economy brought to a near-standstill by the coronavirus response.

Read more | >

:oooo.

A research team from ITMO University, with the help of colleagues from MIPT (Russia) and Politecnico di Torino (Italy), has predicted a novel type of topological quantum state of two photons. Scientists have also applied a new, affordable experimental method for testing this prediction. The method relies on an analogy: Instead of expensive experiments with quantum systems of two or more entangled photons, the researchers have used resonant electric circuits of higher dimensionality described by similar equations. The obtained results can be useful for the engineering of optical chips and quantum computers without the need for expensive experiments. The research was published in Nature Communications.

Light plays a key role in modern information technologies: With its help, information is transmitted over large distances via optical fibers. In the future, scientists anticipate the invention of optical chips and computers that process information with the help of photons—light quanta—instead of electrons, as it is done today. This will decrease energy consumption, while also increasing the capabilities of computers. However, to turn these predictions into reality, fundamental and applied research of light behavior at the micro- and nanoscale is needed.

In the new study, the researchers have theoretically predicted the formation of a new quantum state of photons: Two photons propagating in the array of quantum microresonators (qubits) can form a bound pair and settle down on the edge of the array. A proper experiment demands special nanostructures, as well as special devices to create such quantum state of photons and detect it. Currently, such capabilities are available only to very few research teams worldwide.

Continue reading “The imitation game: Scientists describe and emulate new quantum state of entangled photons” | >