Lifeboat Foundation

BREAKING NEWS: Microfibres from clothes and furniture are contaminating the #GreatBarrierReef, researchers from @AustralianMarineScience and the University of Copenhagen have discovered.

The team—Lene Jensen, Cherie Motti, Anders Garm, Hemerson Tonin and Frederieke Kroon—investigated microdebris from inside fish and surface waters on inshore and offshore areas of the reef.

While this general estimate that the global population should peak at under 11 billion is better news than some earlier higher estimates that it would reach as high as 15 billion by the end of the century, the researchers behind the study suggest the vast majority of population growth coming over the course of this century will occur in the world’s poorest countries.

Denver police made zero psychedelic mushroom arrests in the first month of the decriminalization initiative being on the books.

New experiments look to the interplay between neutrons and magnetic fields to observe our universal reflection.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field of computer programming that is already changing the way we interact online and in real life, but the term ‘intelligence’ has been poorly defined. Rather than focusing on smarts, researchers should be looking at the implications and viability of artificial consciousness as that’s the real driver behind intelligent decisions.

Consciousness rather than intelligence should be the true measure of AI. At the moment, despite all our efforts, there’s none.

Significant advances have been made in the field of AI over the past decade, in particular with machine learning, but artificial intelligence itself remains elusive. Instead, what we have is artificial serfs—computers with the ability to trawl through billions of interactions and arrive at conclusions, exposing trends and providing recommendations, but they’re blind to any real intelligence. What’s needed is artificial awareness.

Elon Musk has called AI the “biggest existential threat” facing humanity and likened it to “summoning a demon,”^[1] while Stephen Hawking thought it would be the “worst event” in the history of civilization and could “end with humans being replaced.”^[2] Although this sounds alarmist, like something from a science fiction movie, both concerns are founded on a well-established scientific premise found in biology—the principle of competitive exclusion.^[3]

Continue reading “Is artificial consciousness the solution to AI?” »

Lasers can get trapped in a waterfall.

EcSeq is a bioinformatics solution provider with solid expertise in the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data.