Lifeboat Foundation

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

Continue reading “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” »

Somewhere along the way people started considering me somewhat of an expert on the topic of basic income and so I’m frequently asked for book recommendations. Because of that, I put together a Listmania list, but Listmania no longer exists so I’ve decided to put together a new more comprehensive list here on Medium which I will make a point of updating as new books are released. If you don’t see a book here and think it should be listed, please let me know so I can add it.

Optionally, if you wish to purchase one of these books, please consider using Amazon Smile which you can do by changing www.amazon.com in the url to smile.amazon.com. This will give a portion of the purchase to charity, and the charity I recommend is GiveDirectly because that will help support their historic 10–15 year long universal basic income experiment in West Africa.

Also, due to popular request, books of fiction that include basic income can be found at the end of this list. And if you’re looking for academic papers to read instead, here’s a great list on basicincome.org.

Continue reading “The BIG Library: Books About Basic Income” »

“The individuals who do these types of attacks are well aware of the pressure points and pain points, economic-wise,” says Dr. John Hale, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Tulsa. “They know what they can extract, how much they can extract.

“They prey upon two things: an organization’s reliance on information systems and two, the common situation, where an organization is a little bit behind on backup procedures and policies to prevent these types of things. It really is easy pickings for the bad guys.”

Crypto ransomware is designed to encrypt data stored on the computer, making the data useless unless the user obtains the key to decrypt it. A message details the ransom, which is typically paid in digital currencies such as bitcoin. Locker ransomware locks the computer or device’s interface — save for the ability to interact with the hacker — and demands money to restore it.

Continue reading “Ransomware: the digital plague infecting the world” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8QMOYnWBq0

Urban Produce High Density Vertical Growing System is a patented technology that was developed taking advanced hydroponic technology and automating it. Urban Produce has the capacity to grow 16 acres of produce on 1/8 of an acre with just one of it’s High Density Vertical Growing Systems. Our mission is to build our patented systems across the U.S. to provide both locally grown sustainable produce to Urban Cities while also stimulating the local economies. We are 21st century growing! www.urbanproduce.com

Steve Forbes sits across Brian Singer, a partner at William Blair, as Blair explains the potential of blockhain encryption to empower individuals. He also explains why credit card companies are beginning to embrace a technology that undermines their high fees.

https://youtu.be/CecpCepnkAU

QC will change many industries and even some fortunes as well. So, no wonders Canada & Australia both deem it as a priority.

Mike Lazaridis, founder of Blackberry Limited and the visionary who led the establishment of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo and Quantum Valley Investments, delivered a keynote address highlighting the Quantum Valley model in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada and the emphasis both federal and provincial governments have placed on the development of quantum technologies.

The Quantum Europe conference comes at a time when large scale investments from tech companies and governments around the world, including in Canada, are being made as part of the “Second Quantum Revolution” – a new global industry fueled by the commercialization of new transformative quantum technologies.

Continue reading “QC will change many industries and even some fortunes as well” »

EU betting big on Quantum Technology.

The European Union (EU) aims to embark on an ambitious common strategy on quantum technologies, European Commissioner for digital economy and society Gunther Oettinger said here Tuesday.

At a conference which brought together some of the world’s leading experts in the field of quantum technology, European scientists and entrepreneurs launched a “Quantum Manifesto” laying out future priorities and activities to create a new “knowledge-based industrial ecosystem” in Europe.

“We aim to launch an ambitious large-scale flagship initiative to unlock the full potential of quantum technologies, accelerate their development, and bring commercial products to public and private users,” Oettinger told the conference.

Germany made so much renewable energy last weekend that customers actually made money.

Well you don’t see this every day…

If you’ve ever seen a “recommended item” on eBay or Amazon that was just what you were looking for (or maybe didn’t know you were looking for), it’s likely the suggestion was powered by a recommendation engine. In a recent interview, Co-founder of machine learning startup Delvv, Inc., Raefer Gabriel, said these applications for recommendation engines and collaborative filtering algorithms are just the beginning of a powerful and broad-reaching technology.

Raefer Gabriel, Delvv, Inc.

Gabriel noted that content discovery on services like Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify are most familiar to people because of the way they seem to “speak” to one’s preferences in movies, games, and music. Their relatively narrow focus of entertainment is a common thread that has made them successful as constrained domains. The challenge lies in developing recommendation engines for unbounded domains, like the internet, where there is more or less unlimited information.

“Some of the more unbounded domains, like web content, have struggled a little bit more to make good use of the technology that’s out there. Because there is so much unbounded information, it is hard to represent well, and to match well with other kinds of things people are considering,” Gabriel said. “Most of the collaborative filtering algorithms are built around some kind of matrix factorization technique and they definitely tend to work better if you bound the domain.”

Continue reading “Recommendation Engines Yielding Stronger Predictions into Our Wants and Needs” »