Lifeboat Foundation

Connecting human brains to computers could provide the biggest single upgrade to human intelligence since our species evolved. Brain-computer interfaces are coming. But are we ready?

There’s always a lot of talk about how AI will steal all our jobs and how machines will bring about the collapse of employment as we know it. It’s certainly hard to blame people for worrying with all the negative press around the issue.

But the reality is that AI is completely dependent on humans, and it appears as if it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. In fact, as AI grows as an industry and machine learning becomes more widely used, this will actually create a whole host of new jobs for people.

Let’s take a look at some of the roles humans currently play in the AI industry and the kind of jobs that will continue to be important in the future.

Continue reading “Introducing The Humans Behind Artificial Intelligence” »

Weird waves that whisper through the ionosphere have also been discovered inside the plasma of nuclear fusion reactors. They could help stop runaway electrons.

The technical skills of programmer John Carmack helped create the 3D world of Doom, the first-person shooter that took over the world 25 years ago. But it was level designers like John Romero and American McGee that made the game fun to play. Level designers that, today, might find their jobs threatened by the ever-growing capabilities of artificial intelligence.

One of the many reasons Doom became so incredibly popular was that id Software made tools available that let anyone create their own levels for the game, resulting in thousands of free ways to add to its replay value. First-person 3D games and their level design have advanced by leaps and bounds since the original Doom’s release, but the sheer volume of user-created content made it the ideal game for training an AI to create its own levels.

Continue reading “An AI Created New Doom Levels That Are as Fun as the Game’s Original Ones” »

Stem cells in the brain can divide and mature into neurons participating in various brain functions, including memory. In a paper scientists have discovered that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid is a key signal for neural stem cell renewal.

The ancient Greek aphorism panta rhei means “everything flows”, a phrase used by philosophers to describe the constant flux and interplay between the past and renewal. A recent paper lends this relationship a whole new meaning: a team of researchers headed by Professor Magdalena Götz and their collaborators from the LMU (Professor Benedikt Grothe, Chair of Neurobiology) and the Henrich-Heine University Düsseldorf have discovered that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid is a key signal for neural stem cell renewal.

“Neural stem cells in the brain can divide and mature into neurons and this process plays important roles in various regions of the brain – including olfactory sense and memory,” explains Magdalena Götz, Head of LMU Department of Physiological Genomics and Director of the Institute for Stem Cell Research at Helmholtz Zentrum München. “These cells are located in what is known as the neurogenic stem cell niche one of which is located at the walls of the lateral ventricles, where they are in contact with circulating cerebrospinal fluid.”

Without saying anything this device will let you talk to your computer — https://www.weforum.org/…/computer-system-transcribes-words…

MIT researchers have developed a computer interface that can transcribe words that the user concentrates on verbalizing but does not actually speak aloud.

The system consists of a wearable device and an associated computing system. Electrodes in the device pick up neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalizations — saying words “in your head” — but are undetectable to the human eye. The signals are fed to a machine-learning system that has been trained to correlate particular signals with particular words.

Continue reading “This device lets you talk to your computer — without saying a word” »

Astronomers found a strange dwarf world that provides even more evidence that a giant planet is lurking at the edge of our solar system.

Getty Images Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library.

There might be a large planet lurking somewhere at the very edge of our solar system, and astronomers are hunting for it. While they have yet to find direct evidence of the planet, a recent discovery provides yet more indirect evidence that the planet does, in fact, exist. Astronomers found a small solar system body with a strange orbit that they say can only be explained by another, bigger planet hiding out there somewhere.

Continue reading “A Newly Discovered Solar System Object Hints at Hidden Planet Nine” »

Yes, I know of a soon to be made public solar company that will totally alter the renewable market. Decentralized microgrids are coming!

The rise in renewable energy will scramble the sector at this rate.

Coral reefs are the fish nurseries and so without them there will be no fish!

Japan’s biggest coral reef has not recovered from bleaching due to rising sea temperatures, with only one percent of the reef in a healthy condition, according to a government study.

The overall volume of coral in Sekisei Lagoon in southwestern Japan near Okinawa had already plunged by 80 percent since the late 1980s due to rising water temperatures and damage caused by coral-eating starfish.

Continue reading “Only 1 pct of Japan’s biggest coral reef healthy: survey” »