Lifeboat Foundation

Is artificial superintelligence (ASI) imminent? Adam Ford will assess the evidence and ethical importance of artificial intelligence; its opportunities and risks. Drawing on the history of progress in AI and how today it surpasses peak human capability in some domains, he will present forecasts about further progress.

“Progress in AI will likely be explosive; even more significant than both the agricultural and industrial revolutions” — Adam will explore the notion of intelligence and what aspects are missing in AI now and how ‘understanding’ arises in biological intelligence and how it could be realised in AI over the next decade or two. He will conclude with takes on ideal AI outcomes and some recommendations for increasing the likelihood of achieving them.

BIO: Adam Ford (Masters of IT at RMIT) is an IEET Affiliate Scholar, a futurologist and works as a data/information architect, a data analyst and data engineer. He co-organised a variety of conferences in Australia, USA and China. Adam also convenes the global effort of ‘Future Day’ seeking to ritualize focus on the future to a specific day. He is a grass roots journalist, having interviewed many experts on the future, and is currently working on a documentary project focusing on preparing for the future of artificial intelligence.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have reported a potentially significant advance with the development of microdrones, equipped with wings powered by artificial muscles in the form of elastomer-based actuators.

The development, claims MIT, could pave the way for futuristic applications, for example, swarms of the insect-sized robots that pollinate fields of crops or search for survivors buried in collapsed buildings.

Continue reading “Elastomer-powered bug-bots could pave way for futuristic applications” »

Catherine Labadia, an archaeologist at the State Historic Preservation Office, was on vacation when the first text came in from fellow archaeologist David Leslie. The picture on her phone was of a channel flake, a stone remnant associated with the creation of spear points used by Paleoindians, the first humans known to enter the region more than 10,000 years ago. “I responded, ‘Is this what I think it is?’” “It most definitely is,” texted back Leslie, who was on site at the Avon excavation with Storrs-based Archaeological and Historical Services (AHS). “It was all mind-blowing emojis after that,” Labadia says.

But that first picture was just the beginning. By the time the excavation on Old Farms Road was completed after a whirlwind three months in the winter of 2019, the AHS team had uncovered 15,000 Paleoindian artifacts and 27 cultural features. Prior to this dig, according to Leslie, only 10–15 cultural features — non-movable items such as hearths and posts that can provide behavioral and environmental insights — had been found in all of New England.

The site is significant for more than the quantity and types of artifacts and features found. Early analyses are already changing the way archaeologists think of the Paleoindian period, an epoch spanning from about 13,000 to 10,000 years ago of which little is known due to relatively scant archaeological evidence. The forests of that time, for instance, were likely made up of more diverse species of trees than previously thought. And that opens up new interpretations for what Paleoindians ate. Remains found at the excavation also suggest — for the first time — that Paleoindians and mastodons might have overlapped in the region.

It also shows you care for content in the bag.

In this age of technology, where everything connects to the cloud or needs an app, it takes a simple bit of engineering to stand out. A seatbelt for bags while you drive around like there’s no tomorrow, as reported by Gizmodo, clearly fits into this category.

Continue reading “Meet BAGO: A Seatbelt for Bags Can Help You Concentrate on the Road” »

Restauranteurs are using robotic kitchens to cut real estate costs, opening up room in their budgets for higher quality ingredients.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.

The researchers’ paper was recently presented at the IEEE RoboCom 2022 conference, held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC 2022, a top tier conference in the field of networking and distributed computing. At IEEE RoboCom 2022, it received the Best Paper Award.

“Swarm-robotics is on the path to becoming a key tool for human civilization,” Dr. Sudipta Saha, the lead researcher of the team that carried out the study, told TechXplore. “For instance, in medical science, it will be necessary to use numerous nano-bots to boost immune-therapy, targeted and effective drug transfer, etc.; while in the army it will be necessary for exploring unknown terrains that are hard for humans to enter, enabling agile supervision of borders and similar activities. In construction, it can enable technologies such as large-scale 3D printing and in agriculture it can help to monitor crop health and intervene to improve yields.”

Japanese are increasingly turning to “social robots”, John Deere’s latest self-driving tractor will enable autonomous farming, a new South Australian craft beer has been designed entirely by AI.

Improving people’s lives globally from the world’s largest financial endowment — dr. mads krogsgaard thomsen, CEO, novo nordisk fonden, novo nordisk.

Dr. Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, DVM, DSc., Ph.D., is the CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation (https://novonordiskfonden.dk/), an international foundation with a dual objective: to provide a stable basis for the commercial and research activities conducted by the companies within the Novo Group (of which Novo Nordisk A/S is the largest holdings) and to support scientific, humanitarian and social purposes. In 2020, the Novo Nordisk Foundation had a net worth of US$73.1 billion, making it the largest financial endowment in the world. Novo Nordisk Foundation owns Novo Holdings A/S, a holding company and majority shareholder of Novo Nordisk, as well as Novozymes, a global biotechnology company focused on the research, development and production of industrial enzymes, microorganisms, and biopharmaceutical ingredients. The foundation is also a major shareholder in more than 75 other companies.

Continue reading “Dr. Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, CEO, Novo Nordisk Foundation — Improving People’s Lives Globally” »

This article was contributed by Valerias Bangert, strategy and innovation consultant, founder of three media outlets, and published author.

AI job automation: The debate

The debate around whether AI will automate jobs away is heating up. AI critics claim that these statistical models lack the creativity and intuition of human workers and that they are thus doomed to specific, repetitive tasks. However, this pessimism fundamentally underestimates the power of AI. While AI job automation has already replaced around 400,000 factory jobs in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, with another 2 million on the way, AI today is automating the economy in a much more subtle way.