Lifeboat Foundation

AUSTIN — At SXSW 2018, artificial intelligence (AI) was everywhere, even in the sessions that were not specifically about the subject. AI has captured the attention of people well outside the technology space, and the implications of the technology are far-reaching, changing industries, eliminating many human jobs, and changing the nature of work for most of us going forward. I expect that an AI bot could write this article within 10 years — and likely much sooner — simply by ingesting all the information from the sessions I attended, coupled with an ability to research related information on the internet much better than I could.

Interestingly enough, as Ray Kurzweil pointed out in his talk here, the term “artificial intelligence” was coined at a summer workshop at Dartmouth in 1956 attended by computing pioneers such as Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon, at a time when computers still ran on vacuum tubes and computers in the world numbered in the hundreds.

Continue reading “Of Hives, Ethics, Morals, and the Singularity” »

For just $80,000, you can reserve a condo in space.

SpaceX has been streaming its launches illegally.

“Although smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous, many of the companies that make our everyday consumer products still rely on paper trails and manually updated spreadsheets to keep track of their production processes and delivery schedules,” says Leyuan Shi, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That’s what she hopes to change with a research idea she first published almost two decades ago.

During the past 16 years, Shi has visited more than 400 manufacturing companies in the United States, China, Europe, and Japan to personally observe their production processes. “And I have used that insight to develop tools that can make these processes run much more smoothly,” she says.

Another crisis is inevitable, Bill Gates said.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is optimistic about the future of the U.S., but he does believe the country will have another financial crisis.

Disney’s immersive Pandora: The World of Avatar park is getting a new addition: a 10-foot-tall walking mech suit, starting April 22nd.

A team of research scientists recently conducted a series of simulations to see how the Orion Launch Abort System would fair in high speed conditions.

In principle, a wormhole-like scenario is possible, but a wormhole tends to close before objects or other matter could pass through it. As far as we know, it’s unlikely we could construct a wormhole that stays open long enough for us to get to a distant part of the universe.

That’s really the issue: Can you keep a wormhole open?

Continue reading “Blue Sky Science: Are there wormholes that lead to other galaxies?” »

Interested in the long-term investment opportunities that might arise from disruption? Then watch these five disruptive trends in the coming decade, says Morgan Stanley Disruptive Change Researcher Stan DeLaney.