Lifeboat Foundation

When you’re in a daydream, or “alpha,” state, your brainwaves are oscillating at a rate of 8 to 12 Hz.

Steven Kotler explains what happens in your brain at aha moments.

As I’m sure many in the technology industry have thought today, there should have been a way to avoid the Oscars Envelopegate. But, is artificial intelligence the answer to all of our human error problems? A recent Accenture report found that the introduction and further development of AI could boost labor productivity by 40% by 2035. It seems as if banks have already picked up on this, as was seen last year with RBS’ replacement of human employees with automated services. News announced this week also suggests that artificial intelligence will become a central part of anything a technology organisation will do in the future. Will we see the same in the financial technology sector?

The relationship between man and machine is expected to be the naissance of a type of work that could potentially double annual economic growth, according to Accenture. Chief technology officer Paul Daugherty highlighted that “AI is poised to transform business in ways we’ve not seen since the impact of computer technology in the late 20th century.” He went on to explain in the report that artificial intelligence, with the help of cloud computing and analytics, is already starting to change the way that people work.

The weekend saw the UK government announce that they are planning to launch a review into the value of robotics in the country’s aim to become world technology leader. £17.3 million would be invested into university research of AI technologies such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and driverless cars, as reported by The Independent. The article also drew from the Accenture report and said that artificial intelligence could add around £654 billion to the UK economy.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence: Removing The Human From Fintech” »

From AlphaGo’s historic victory against world champion Lee Sedol to DeepStack’s sweeping win against professional poker players, artificial intelligence is clearly on a roll.

Part of the momentum comes from breakthroughs in artificial neural networks, which loosely mimic the multi-layer structure of the human brain. But that’s where the similarity ends. While the brain can hum along on energy only enough to power a light bulb, AlphaGo’s neural network runs on a whopping 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs, with a total power consumption of roughly one million watts—50,000 times more than its biological counterpart.

Extrapolate those numbers, and it’s easy to see that artificial neural networks have a serious problem—even if scientists design powerfully intelligent machines, they may demand too much energy to be practical for everyday use.

Continue reading “New Artificial Synapse Bridges the Gap to Brain-Like Computers” »

Efforts to invent more practical superconductors and better batteries could be the first areas of business to get a quantum speed boost.

Most chat bots are dumb. No one wants to message a soulless stack of if-then statements just to order a pizza when a half-decent app or website interface can do the same job in half the time.

Chat assistants are a different matter. Rather than actively bugging you for information in a back-and-forth no one enjoys having, chat assistants lurk in the background of the conversations you’re already having and glean little details that might help later. It’s the approach Google is taking with their aptly named Assistant.

Niles, a company in Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch, wants to be your company’s chat assistant — an alternative to that internal wiki that every company has and no one uses. It sits in Slack and tries to learn the answers to the questions that your team is tired of hearing for the billionth time.

Continue reading “Niles is a Slack bot that learns your team’s questions and answers them so you don’t have to” »

This robot is unstoppable. And pretty cute, too.

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Will vegetarians start eating meat if this works out?

Lab-grown meat is a not a new concept. We’ve had the meatball, the world’s most expensive beefburger, and possibly shrimp. Now it’s the turn of chicken and duck.

San Francisco-based startup, Memphis Meats, has produced the very first “clean meat” poultry grown from cells in a lab, serving them up in a taste test that included classic southern fried chicken and decidedly fancy duck a l’orange.

Continue reading “World’s First Lab-Grown Chicken Has Been Tasted And Apparently It’s Delicious” »

An audacious deal hatched on Twitter may start a new wave of electricity storage for cities, regions, and nations.