Lifeboat Foundation

But whenever companies experiment with a new technology that has the potential to transform entire business models, like electricity, it can take decades before changes yield real-world results, Mr. Brynjolfsson said, speaking on Wednesday at The Wall Street Journal Pro AI Executive Forum. The Digital Economy Lab is part of Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI.

Companies leading the charge in adopting AI tools and platforms are taking time to target spending in the right digital capabilities and talent, he said.

“We’re having a few superstars doing really well,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said. “But the whole reason it takes so long in the first place is that it’s not easy.” He expects to see a “productivity J-curve” as companies figure out how best to deploy AI in their daily operations.

“The Office of Racial Equity at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission will handle the program and artists from ”historically marginalized communities” are encouraged to apply.

Other basic income programs under development in San Francisco include funds for emergency medical technicians and Black and Pacific Islander expectant mothers, FOX 2 reported.

You could call it art for art’s sake — plus $1000 a month.

Continue reading “San Francisco to pay ‘essential’ artists $1,000 per month basic income in pilot program amid pandemic” »

The lives of infomorphs (or ‘cyberhumans’) who have no permanent bodies but possess near-perfect information-handling abilities, will be dramatically different from ours. Infomorphs will achieve the ultimate morphological freedom. Any infomorph will be able to have multiple cybernetic bodies which can be assembled and dissembled at will by nanobots in the physical world if deemed necessary, otherwise most time will be spent in the multitude of virtual bodies in virtual enviro… See More.

“I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the Universe.” — Buckminster Fuller

The term ‘Infomorph’ was first introduced in “The Silicon Man” by Charles Platt in 1991 and later popularized by Alexander Chislenko in his paper “Networking in the Mind Age”: “The growing reliance of system connections on functional, rather than physical, proximity of their elements will dramatically transform the notions of personhood and identity and create a new community of distributed ‘infomorphs’ — advanced informational entities — that will bring the ongoing process of liberation of functional structures from material dependence to its logical conclusions. The infomorph society will be built on new organizational principles and will represent a blend of a superliquid economy, cyberspace anarchy and advanced consciousness.”

Continue reading “First Look Over the Event Horizon of Singularity: Your Future Life as a Cyberhuman” »

The mayor of Oakland, California, on Tuesday announced a privately funded program that will give low-income families of color in the city $500 per month with no rules on how they can spend it.

The program is the latest experiment with a “guaranteed income,” the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”

Alan DeRossett.

Continue reading “Oakland to give low-income residents $500 a month, no strings attached” »

ENERGY!!! — Jose Luis Cordeiro, Engineer, Economist, Futurist, Transhumanist, Author, “The Death Of Death”

Dr. José Luis Cordeiro is an engineer, economist, futurist, transhumanist and author.

Continue reading “Dr. José Luis Cordeiro — Engineer, Economist, Futurist, Transhumanist, Author — ENERGY!!!” »

Coventry, a city in the United Kingdom, will play host to the world’s first airport for electric flying cars and delivery drones. Urban Air Port will build the Air One transport hub next to the city’s Ricoh Arena and will open later this year. It’ll be used to transport cargo and hopefully even people later across cities.

The city was specifically chosen by the company for its relatively central location and also because it’s a historically prominent location for both the aerospace and automobile industries. The project received a £1.2 million grant after winning the Government’s Future Flight Challenge, and the city is now in an urban air mobility partnership that’s backed by the UK Government.

“Cars need roads. Trains need rails. Planes need airports. eVTOLs will need Urban Air Ports. Over 100 years ago, the world’s first commercial flight took off, creating the modern connected world. Urban Air Port will improve connectivity across our cities, boost productivity and help the UK take the lead in a whole new clean global economy. Flying cars used to be a futuristic flight of fancy. Air-One will bring clean urban air transport to the masses and unleash a new airborne world of zero-emission mobility,” said Ricky Sandhu, Urban Air Port’s founder and executive chairman.

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

NASA’s Hubble Telescope Captures a Rare Metal Asteroid Worth 70000 Times the Global Economy.

The metallic rarity is valued at $10000, 000000, 000000, 000.

“The furin cleavage site consists of four amino acids PRRA, which are encoded by 12 inserted nucleotides in the S gene. A characteristic feature of this site is an arginine doublet. This insertion could have occurred by random insertion mutation, recombination or by laboratory insertion. The researchers say the possibility of random insertion is too low to explain the origin of this motif. Surprisingly, the CGGCGG codons encoding the two arginines of the doublet in SARS-CoV-2 are not found in any of the furin sites in other viral proteins expressed by a wide range of viruses. Even within the SARS-CoV-2, where arginine is encoded by six codons, only a minority of arginine residues are encoded by the CGG codon. Again, only two of the 42 arginines in the SARS-CoV-2 spike are encoded by this codon — and these are in the PRRA motif. For recombination to occur, there must be a donor, from another furin site and probably from another virus. In the absence of a known virus containing this arginine doublet encoded by the CGGCGG codons, the researchers discount the recombination theory as the mechanism underlying the emergence of PRRA in SARS-CoV-2.”

The ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has largely defied attempts to contain its spread by non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). With the massive loss of life and economic damage, the only way out, in the absence of specific antiviral therapeutics, has been the development of vaccines to achieve population immunity.

A new study on the Preprints server discusses the origin of the furin cleavage site on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is responsible for the virus’s relatively high infectivity compared to relatives in the betacoronavirus subgenus.

Continue reading “The origin of SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site remains a mystery” »