Lifeboat Foundation

The waning moon is in the predawn sky, busily passing planets. EarthSky community photos of the moon, Mars and Saturn, here.

As might be expected, the CDC is spooked by these bacteria. If they spread, as infections are want to do, the agency is tasked with stopping them, and that’s no easy task.

On April 3, CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat announced the agency’s latest containment strategy, which recommends an aggressive response to the appearance of even a single case of drug-resistant infection. The germs usually appear in hospital settings, so the CDC says health care workers should be prepared to contain the drug-resistant microbes before they can travel beyond a hospital’s doors.

Continue reading “The CDC is terrified of these germs, so it’s trying to contain them” »

“Do You Trust this Computer?” is a documentary about artificial intelligence and it’s free to stream until tonight.

Chris Paine, the man behind “Who Killed the Electric Car” that looked at General Motors and Tesla, has a new documentary called “Do You Trust This Computer” that looks at how artificial intelligence could threaten the future of humanity. Elon Musk shared the video on Twitter.

The research was commissioned by Liam Byrne, the former Labour cabinet minister, as part of a gathering of MPs, academics, business leaders, trade unions and civil society leaders focused on addressing the problem.

World leaders urged to act as anger over inequality reaches a ‘tipping point’

Michael Savage Policy editor.

Continue reading “Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030” »

Above all, the government needs to understand what AI is and what it will do. Since artificial intelligence is such a complex and fast-moving field, it is especially important for experts to be brought in to brief policymakers and the administration. Without technical acumen, it will be a challenge to act effectively in any area relevant to AI.

Government indifference toward AI could let the US lose ground to rival countries. But what would a good AI plan actually look like?

384 sunsets in 12 days.

Looking for a getaway that offers unmatched views of sunrises and sunsets? Specifically, 384 of them in 12 days?

Try outer space.

Continue reading “It’s Happening: Space Hotel Says It’ll Welcome Guests by 2022” »

Why does everyone assume that the AI revolution will either lead to a fiery apocalypse or a glorious utopia, and not something in between? Of course, part of this is down to the fact that you get more attention by saying “The end is nigh!” or “Utopia is coming!”

But part of it is down to how humans think about change, especially unprecedented change. Millenarianism doesn’t have anything to do with being a “millennial,” being born in the 90s and remembering Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is a way of thinking about the future that involves a deeply ingrained sense of destiny. A definition might be: “Millenarianism is the expectation that the world as it is will be destroyed and replaced with a perfect world, that a redeemer will come to cast down the evil and raise up the righteous.”

Millenarian beliefs, then, intimately link together the ideas of destruction and creation. They involve the idea of a huge, apocalyptic, seismic shift that will destroy the fabric of the old world and create something entirely new. Similar belief systems exist in many of the world’s major religions, and also the unspoken religion of some atheists and agnostics, which is a belief in technology.

Continue reading “What If the AI Revolution Is Neither Utopia nor Apocalypse, but Something in Between?” »

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.