Lifeboat Foundation

Popular films like “Her” and series such as “Black Mirror” depict a future of intimate relationships in a high-tech world: Man falls in love with operating system, woman loves person she meets in virtual reality. The rise of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) may play a huge role in the future of our interpersonal relationships. Hardware, such as robots we could touch and feel, are one example of what this AI could look like; another would be software, or algorithms that take on a persona like Alexa or Siri and can seemingly interact with us.

Beyond overused sci-fi clichés, there’s great potential for AI to increase the authenticity and value of real human relationships. Below are some impressions of how AI might enhance the quality of friendship, romantic and professional relationships.

Dating

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but AI can be programmed to translate, helping circumvent missteps in love. Algorithms as key matchmakers in the future of dating might provide the support and information people need beyond the first date. For example, an AI personal assistant may give insights on how to approach someone for a second date, based on information culled from the first meeting, the internet and various digital databases. Soon, one’s tweets, likes and Facebook circle of friends could be used to build our dating profile and then a fool-proof guide to dating the other person.

Continue reading “How AI Might Help Us Decode Our World” »

Quantum computers encode information in delicate superposition states of quantum bits, or ‘qubits’.

Abstract: In standard nonrelativistic quantum mechanics the expectation of the energy is a conserved quantity. It is possible to extend the dynamical law associated with the evolution of a quantum state consistently to include a nonlinear stochastic component, while respecting the conservation law. According to the dynamics thus obtained, referred to as the energy-based stochastic Schrodinger equation, an arbitrary initial state collapses spontaneously to one of the energy eigenstates, thus describing the phenomenon of quantum state reduction. In this article, two such models are investigated: one that achieves state reduction in infinite time, and the other in finite time. The properties of the associated energy expectation process and the energy variance process are worked out in detail. By use of a novel application of a nonlinear filtering method, closed-form solutions—algebraic in character and involving no integration—are obtained for both these models. In each case, the solution is expressed in terms of a random variable representing the terminal energy of the system, and an independent noise process. With these solutions at hand it is possible to simulate explicitly the dynamics of the quantum states of complicated physical systems.

From: Dorje C. Brody [view email]

[v1] Mon, 29 Aug 2005 13:22:36 UTC (43 KB)

Physicists have worked out how to cloak a region of space from the quantum world, thereby shielding it from reality itself.

My name is Sarah Lim and I am the US Transhumanist Party’s Singaporean ambassador. I have been repeatedly trying to reach you over the course of the last few months, but I understand that you are a very busy man who’s doing a lot of great things and propelling the Singularity forward.

Like you and Andres Gomez Emilsson, I’m in the very small minority of transhumanists with an avid interest in non-local consciousness and psi research.

I’ve watched your video, “Wild-Ass Sh*t: Consciousness and Psi from a Euryphysics Perspective” four times in a row, to date. I’ve read up extensively on the PEAR Lab experiments, and I’m a friend of Jim Matlock’s as well. I’ve also read and re-read “Physicists Rediscover Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields … and my Morphic Pilot Wave …” five times, to date.

Continue reading “An Open Letter to Ben Goertzel” »

And more Earth-like planets could be found hiding in nearby star systems.

An international team of astronomers says it’s discovered a rogue exoplanet three times the size of Earth — in an orbit that was thought to be impossible, meaning more Earth-like planets could be found hiding in nearby star systems.

No exoplanets with gas atmospheres were previously thought be able to orbit this close to a star — a region known as the “Neptunian Desert” — as the gas would evaporate and leave just a rocky core. Until, that is, this team located NGTS-4b, which they’re calling a “forbidden planet.”

Continue reading “Astronomers Find Distant ‘Forbidden Planet’ In ‘Neptunian Desert’” »

I was live on Good Morning Britain this morning talking transhumanism and life extension. It’s one of the UK’s most popular news shows. The Mirror did a write-up of the story and there’s a 2-min video embed of the interview in the article to watch:

American journalist Zoltan Istvan said that humans will be able to download many versions of themselves onto the internet.

The Australian fungus could help miners find the next generation of underground gold deposits.

https://youtu.be/hXnXh4TwclA

My guest today is Chris Paine, director of the AI documentary film “Do You Trust This Computer?” and previously the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. The new film is a powerful examination of artificial intelligence centered around insights from the most high-profile thinkers on the subject, including Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Ray Kurzweil, Andrew Ng, Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan and many more. Chris set out to ask these leaders in the field “what scares smart people about AI”, and they did not hold back.