Lifeboat Foundation

In the mid-1900s, art historian Maurits Michel van Dantzig developed a system to identify artists by their brush or pen strokes, which he called Pictology. Dantzig found shape, length, direction, and pressure all contributed to a kind of stroke signature, unique to each artist.

New research with contributions from The Hague suggests that Pictology might be the key to helping machines understand art, allowing systems to quickly verify whether brushstrokes were from an original painter or a forger.

After analyzing 80,000 brushstrokes from 297 digitized sketches and drawings, an AI system was able to spot forged drawings in the style of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Egon Schiele with 100% accuracy. The “fakes” were commissioned recreations of specific drawings, which the algorithms had not been shown previously.

Continue reading “This AI algorithm probably means the end of high-end art forgeries” »

An Interview with Jennifer Gidley

by Tracey Follows, Founder/Director of the Female Futures Bureau

Jennifer Gidley is a former President of the World Futures Studies Federation (2009−2017), a UNESCO and UN partner and global peak body for futures studies scholarship, she led a network of hundreds of world leading futures scholars and researchers from around the globe. An adjunct Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS in Sydney, futurist, author, psychologist and educator, Jennifer is a prolific author of dozens of academic papers, serves on several academic boards, and most recently authored Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Springer, 2016) & The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017).

Tracey: I spoke to Jennifer about her perspective on Female Futures.

Continue reading “Raising the Profile of Women Futurists” »

Daniel Ellsberg gained notoriety in the early 1970s for leaking the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War, and then for outspokenly protesting the war and the government’s secrecy which sustained it. Yet few, then or now, are aware that he spent much of the previous decade immersed in highly classified studies of the U.S. nuclear-war machine: how it works, who can launch an attack, and how much devastation it can wreak if someone ever pushed the button.

His new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, is his long-gestating memoir of those times and the years since, and it is one of the best books ever written on the subject—certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole’s mad logic and came out the other side.

Dr. Strangelove “was a documentary,” writes the man behind the Pentagon Papers.

Continue reading “Daniel Ellsberg’s Memoir About Life as a Nuclear War Planner Would Be Terrifying Even if Trump Weren’t President” »

The book The Human Race to the Future, by Daniel Berleant (published by the Lifeboat Foundation) has just been released in its 4^th and newest edition. As a special promotion the book, jammed with over 300 pages of information, will be priced through December at just $1.23 (1−2−3) for the e-book version on Amazon.

Lots of futurists are in it. A 5-min section on my #transhumanism work, including the Transhumanist Bill of Rights (image of me below writing the first version on steps of US Supreme Court), is in the doc. My section starts about 45:30, and there are some YouTube versions out there too now (google the title Cyborgs Entre Nosotros) if there are issues to watch outside Spain: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/la-noche-tematica/noche-t…s/4341838/

Given there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the futurology subreddit, we thought it was a great time to have a look at the progress the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA where you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Given that there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the Futurology subreddit, we think it’s a great time to have a look at the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA, in which you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Today, there are many drugs and therapies that we take for granted. However, we should not forget that what is common and easily accessible today didn’t just magically appear out of thin air; rather, at some point, it used to be an unclear subject of study on which “more research was needed”, and even earlier, it was just a conjecture in some researcher’s head.

Continue reading “SENS: Progress in the Fight Against Age-related Diseases” »

Dr. Hébert will be in Berlin to provide an update on his fascinating work. The use of stem cells to repair the brain is relatively straightforward for Parkinson’s disease, in which cell depletion is localized to one small region, but in Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, the cell loss is widely distributed, whereas cells can only be injected into one spot. The solution that Dr. Hébert explores is to make those cells migrate before dividing and differentiating.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/dr-jean-hebert-to-speak-at-undoing-aging-2018

Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 tries to rectify the situation. Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at the general public, the book offers a political and philosophical map of the promises and perils of the AI revolution. Instead of pushing any one agenda or prediction, Tegmark seeks to cover as much ground as possible, reviewing a wide variety of scenarios concerning the impact of AI on the job market, warfare and political systems.

Yuval Noah Harari responds to an account of the artificial intelligence era and argues we are profoundly ill-prepared to deal with future technology.