Lifeboat Foundation

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uzwMQB1Vw0I

Struggling to steer its economy away from oil dependence, Saudi Arabia announced an audacious plan to build a $500 billion super-city that is intended to become a world-class business hub.

Saudi Arabia is moving toward a “new generation of cities,” said Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of the Middle Eastern kingdom, during one of his rare appearances before the press on October 24. The first of its kind, the city, to be named Neom, would be powered by green energy and have no room for “anything traditional,” he said.

Continue reading “‘New Generation of Cities’: Riyadh to Build High-Tech Utopia in the Desert” »

(Revised post)

Arab News, the official outlet of the Royal Saudis, proudly reported of Saudi Arabia being “the first country to grant a robot citizenship”. Below is a more sober account of this publicity stunt.

Continue reading “Saudi Arabia grants citizenship to robot Sophia” »

Science fiction is the siren song of hard science. How many innocent young students have been lured into complex, abstract science, technology, engineering, or mathematics because of a reckless and irresponsible exposure to Arthur Clarke at a tender age? Yet Arthur Clarke has a very famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

It’s the prospect of making that… ahem… magic leap that entices so many people into STEM in the first place. A magic leap that would change the world. How about, for example, having humanoid robots? They could match us in dexterity and speed, perceive the world around them as we do, and be programmed to do, well, more or less anything we can do.

Such a technology would change the world forever.

Continue reading “Amazon Is Quietly Building the Robots of Sci-Fi—Piece” »

Could a quantum computer find the Higgs boson faster than humans?

Foot soldiers for years have watched as wars in the air have been transformed by the introduction of drones. Now ground troops are starting to enjoy some of the same benefits.

Dr. Aubrey De Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and the Chief Science Officer at SENS Research Foundation, a biomedical charity that funds research dedicated to combating aging. His research interests encompass the characterization of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging, and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. In line with his research, De Grey gave a talk at The Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Festival focusing on “Rejuvenating Biotechnology: Why age may soon cease to mean aging”.

In March 2017, the Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum welcomed some of the brightest and most interesting minds from the UAE and around the world to discuss four of the most important moonshot challenges facing our planet. The event was inspired by the world-famous Aspen Ideas Festival that has been taking place in Colorado since 2005, as a place for scientists, artists, politicians, business leaders, historians and educators to discuss some of the most fascinating ideas of our time. The 2017 Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum topics included: “System Shock: Calming the ‘politics of anger’”, “Beyond GDP: Targeting ‘all-in’ human welfare”, “Health: Extending the healthy human lifespan” and “Space: Living Sustainably beyond Earth”.

Continue reading “Dr Aubrey de Grey — Rejuvenating biotech: Why age may soon cease to mean aging” »

How far should we integrate human physiology with technology? What do we do with self-aware androids—like Blade Runner’s replicants—and self-aware supercomputers? Or the merging of our brains with them? If Ray Kurzweil’s famous singularity—a future in which the exponential growth of technology turns into a runaway train—becomes a reality, does religion have something to offer in response?

Yes, not only is A.I. potentially taking all of our jobs, but it’s also changing religion.

Brandon Withrow

DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) in swarms of 250 robots or more to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough capabilities to the field.

To augment enhance OFFSET’s potential contributions to the warfighter, DARPA aims to engage with a wider developer and user audience through rapid technology-development and integration efforts called swarm sprints. Participants in these experiments—“sprinters”—can work with one or both integration teams and each other to create and test their own novel swarm tactics and enabling technologies.

Continue reading “OFFSET Program Calls for Participants in Swarm Sprints” »

This is my shortest article ever. I am speechless. “These Images are Generated by a Deep Learning GAN” is published by Carlos E. Perez in Intuition Machine.