Lifeboat Foundation

In “Engineering a Traiter,” the year is 2027, and a former military officer named Jay Roberts has just engineered a missile attack in downtown Houston — except he doesn’t know that it’s his fault.

This sombre graphic novel tells the story of Roberts, an army engineer working in Texas who’s been targeted by a militia eager to gain access to building codes in order to orchestrate a terrorist attack. With sophisticated A.I., the militia manipulate everything in Roberts’s life. The news he sees is curated to instil hopelessness and despair, and family members’ social media accounts are hijacked to distance Roberts from loved ones. Frustrated and alone, he eventually confesses security information to a “friend” he’s made online, allowing the militias the access they’ve been hoping for. Once they have what they want, Roberts’ social media is manipulated to make him look like a radicalized terrorist. When the attack occurs, he takes the fall.

The narrative may be science fiction, but it paints a realistic — if not paranoid — vision of the future. That bleakness is exactly what Brian David Johnson wanted when he began penning a series of graphic novels for the Army Cyber Institute at West Point.

Continue reading “These Army Graphic Novels Predict the Future of Cyber Warfare” »

Learning new things would be so much easier if we could just download them into our brains, like in The Matrix. Now, biologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have pulled off something similar – at least on a gastropod level – by effectively transferring a memory from a trained snail into the mind of an untrained one. The experiment could eventually lead to new treatments for restoring memory in Alzheimer’s patients or to reduce traumatic memories.

The researchers studied a species of marine snail known as Aplysia. These are commonly used as animal models for neuroscience because the cellular and molecular processes at work are relatively similar to humans, but they have a far more manageable number of neurons – about 20,000, compared to our 100 billion.

When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid cells that mammals use to navigate. Not only did the resulting AI system have superhuman navigation capabilities, the research could provide insight into how our brains work.

Grid cells were the subject of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside other navigation-related neurons. These cells are arranged in a lattice of hexagons, and the brain effectively overlays this pattern onto its environment. Whenever the animal crosses a point in space represented by one of the corners these hexagons, a neuron fires, allowing the animal to track its movement.

Continue reading “This DeepMind AI Spontaneously Developed Digital Navigation ‘Neurons’ Like Ours” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7DbslbKsQSk

A new culture of work is emerging. One where unlocking the power of the team has never been more important. I see it with our team daily. People coming together, creating together. Making products stronger through collaboration, whether they’re in the same room or separated by thousands of miles.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RMZKrtt8i1M

The United States is facing a housing crisis: Affordable housing is inadequate, while luxury homes abound. Homelessness remains a persistent problem in many areas of the country.

Despite this, popular culture has often focused on housing as an opportunity for upward mobility: the American Dream wrapped within four walls and a roof. The housing industry has contributed to this belief as it has promoted ideals of “living better.” Happiness is marketed as living with both more space and more amenities.

Continue reading “Is bigger really better?” »

DeepMind’s latest breakthrough could change our understanding of both AI and the way mammal’s brains work. A spontaneous development in the company’s neural network could solve neuron-based mystery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNSxkxyVptw

This evidence firmly identifies Set of Avaris as the first monotheistic deity (150 years before Akhnaten). Since monotheists claim there is only one “God”, aren’t they all really worshipping Set under different names and guises? The cruel cult of baby sacrifice throughout the OT clearly resembles the deity worshipped by King Apophis, Set, who becomes sole ruler by murdering his rivals (and banning their prieshoods).

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Pichai’s challenge is to find a way of reconciling Google’s dovish roots with its future. Having spent more than a decade developing the industry’s most formidable arsenal of AI research and abilities, Google is keen to wed those advances to its fast-growing cloud-computing business. Rivals are rushing to cut deals with the government, which spends billions of dollars a year on all things cloud. No government entity spends more on such technology than the military. Medin and Alphabet director Schmidt, who both sit on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, have pushed Google to work with the government on counter-terrorism, cybersecurity, telecommunications and more.

To win in the business of cloud computing, the company tiptoes into the business of war. Some staff fear it’s a first step toward autonomous killing machines.