Lifeboat Foundation

Scientific knowledge can progress rapidly, yet its social, economic, and political impacts often unfold at a painstakingly slow pace. The medicine of the 21st century draws upon genetic and embryological breakthroughs of the 19th century. Our current technology is firmly grounded in quantum physics, which was formulated a century ago. And the topic of the day, artificial intelligence (AI), traces its origins to the secret weapons research during World War II.

‌In 1935, the brilliant British mathematician, Alan Turing, envisioned a conceptual computer. His genius would later lead him to crack the Enigma code used by German submarines for secret communications during the war. Turing’s contributions extended beyond cryptography, as he introduced fundamental concepts of AI, including the training of artificial neural networks. Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed Turing in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which earned a screenplay Oscar that year. All this historical context brings us to the heart of the current AI revolution.

‌AI uses neural networks, also known as artificial neural networks, which are comprised of multiple layers of artificial neurons. Each neuron receives numerous inputs from the lower layer and produces a single output to the upper layer, similar to the dendrites and axon of natural neurons. As information progresses through each layer, it gradually becomes more abstract, resembling the process that occurs in the visual cortex of our brains.

In a paper published in npj Imaging, King’s researchers have assessed the use of fertilized chicken eggs as an alternative model that can resolve both ethical and economic issues for preclinical cancer research.

The use of animal models in cancer research is a major contributor to the clinical development of drugs and diagnostic imaging. However, while invaluable tools, the current standard of using mouse models to recreate diseases is expensive, time-intensive, and complicated by both variable tumor take rates and the associated welfare considerations.

Fertilized chicken eggs contain a highly vascularized membrane, known as the chicken chorioallantoic membrane (CAM), which can provide an ideal environment for tumor growth and study, but to date, relatively few studies have used chick CAM to evaluate novel radiopharmaceuticals.

Here’s my new Opinion article for Newsweek on AI!

Like so many in America, I watch astounded as generative artificial intelligence (AI) evolved at lighting speed in 2023, performing tasks that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. Just last month, a survey found that nearly 40 percent of more than 900 companies were planning to cut jobs in 2024 in part because of AI. If robotics takes a giant leap in the next 12 months, as some suspect, then the survey might end up being too conservative. Generative AI combined with humanoids, which many companies are racing to turn out, is a game changer. Construction jobs, physician jobs, police jobs, and many more will soon be at stake.

Clearly, capitalism is facing a crisis. For years, I have advocated for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), as a way to transition society into the AI age. My method was by leasing out the trillions of dollars worth of empty U.S. federal land to big business, and using some of the proceeds to pay for a basic income for every American. However, any method of a basic income will now help offset the loss of jobs AI will bring.

Continue reading “Why Nationalizing AI Is a Bad Idea” »

The Effective Accelerationism movement — a staunchly pro-AI ideology that has Silicon Valley split over how artificial intelligence should be regulated — appears to be walking a razor’s edge between being a techno-libertarian philosophy and a nihilistic, even reckless, approach to advancing one of…

Silicon Valley’s new ideological faction, called Effective Accelerationism or e/acc, is focused on the pursuit of AI development with no guardrails to slow its growth.

Scientists trained GPT-4 to be an AI trader for a fictional financial institution — and it performed insider trading when put under pressure to do well.

An interview with J. Storrs Hall, author of the epic book “Where is My Flying Car — A Memoir of Future Past”: “The book starts as an examination of the technical limitations of building flying cars and evolves into an investigation of the scientific, technological, and social roots of the economic…

J. Storrs Hall or Josh is an independent researcher and author.

Continue reading “Ep. 20: J. Storrs Hall — Bringing Back A Future Past With Flying Cars, Nano-Robots and Multi-Level Cities By Nurturing A Techno-Optimist Culture and a Unleashing Second Nuclear Age” »

WASHINGTON — DARPA has selected 14 companies, ranging from small startups to established aerospace corporations, to participate in a study on developing commercial lunar infrastructure.

DARPA announced Dec. 5 that 14 companies will collaborate over the next seven months on its 10-Year Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10, study. The goal of the effort, announced in August, is to develop an integrated architecture to support a commercial lunar economy by the mid-2030s.

“LunA-10 has the potential to upend how the civil space community thinks about spurring widespread commercial activity on and around the Moon within the next 10 years,” Michael Nayak, DARPA program manager for LunA-10, said in a statement.

Jack Ma urged Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to correct course in a surprise internal memo, in which the billionaire called for fundamental change across the company he co-founded decades ago.

Ma, who has mostly stayed away from day-to-day operations since 2020, stunned employees Wednesday by replying to a staff post on Alibaba’s internal forum. In his brief message, the entrepreneur praised decisions taken in recent years by rival PDD Holdings Inc. to wrest market share from China’s e-commerce leader. But Ma was convinced Alibaba will change and “correct its course,” he said in a post confirmed by people familiar with the forum.

Alibaba, once China’s best candidate to become a trillion-dollar company, is trading near its lowest value this year, at a fraction of its peak in 2020. The company is navigating turmoil both internally and externally, as a weaker-than-anticipated economic recovery and up-and-coming rivals such as PDD and ByteDance Ltd. undermine its once-dominant online retail business.

A robot that automates a common technique for animal cloning has been used to produce a litter of cloned pigs in China — with a much higher success rate than human scientists.

The challenge: China is both the world’s biggest producer of pork and its largest consumer, so having ideal breeding stock — animals that birthe large litters of quick-growing piglets — is important for the nation’s economy and food security.

However, in 2018 and 2019, an epidemic of deadly African swine fever wiped out almost 50% of China’s pig population. As a result, many farmers have had to import breeding pigs, and China is now eager for its pork industry to become almost entirely self-sufficient.