Lifeboat Foundation

But what would it actually mean to transfer your mind from “meat space” to cyberspace, and how could it be done? The basic idea rests on several assumptions, says Angela Thornton, a researcher at the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training at University of Nottingham, who is also partnered with the Carboncopies Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on “whole brain emulation” and the creation of substrate-independent minds. “It assumes that we could replicate our brain [with] a certain level of understanding of how it works,” she says. “Not necessarily knowing all the detail, but enough to be able to emulate it.” Then, she adds, we have to make the assumption that the “mind” (i.e. the abstract part of us that thinks, remembers, imagines and senses) naturally emerges from the structures of the physical brain.

This is a lot to take on, which is partly why current brain emulation research is still stuck at the level of worms and, in more advanced studies, mice. Whether you agree with them or not, though, the arguments to take experiments further – toward larger mammals and, finally, humans – are quite obvious. For one, we could theoretically ‘live’ forever as a disembodied consciousness (or at least until the machines that hosted our virtual minds were destroyed), and continue interacting with our loved ones after they’ve passed as well. It’s possible that this could also go some way to solving the alleged population crisis, while limiting the impact of our physical bodies on the planet’s finite resources.

Continue reading “Digital immortality: would you upload your mind to a computer?” »

Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. Anchored in the concept of “HTML Energy,” a term coined by artists Laurel Schwulst and Elliott Cost, the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics. It focuses on the tactile process of coding in HTML, exploring how the language invites self-expression and empowers individuals to claim their share of the web. Taking shape in small Discord channels and digital magazines, among other spaces, the HTML Energy movement is about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences.

Today, the majority of the internet is optimized for social engagement, e-commerce, and streaming. Most internet traffic is concentrated in a small number of sites, all of which are owned by the same handful of companies. From lengthy ads to aggressive cookie settings, minor obstacles and nuisances are baked in. Users are constantly reminded that their access to the internet is conditional on the monetary interests of a few. The situation with X (formerly known as Twitter) perfectly encapsulates this state of internet ownership: it only took one executive to spark a mass exodus from the platform and to fragment its long-lived communities.

However, despite the monopolistic landscape of Big Tech, one fundamental reality continues to justify the internet’s democratic reputation: anyone can publish a website for free with HTML. With an abundance of real estate, the web technically has space for everyone. It’s just a matter of traffic.

A team of international scientists have developed an ultra-high speed signal processor that can analyze 400,000 real time video images concurrently, according to a paper published in Communications Engineering.

The team, led by Swinburne University of Technology’s Professor David Moss, have developed a processor that operates more than 10,000 times faster than typical electronic processors that operate in Gigabyte/s, at a record 17 Terabits/s (trillion bits per second).

The technology has profound implications for the safety and efficiency of driverless cars, medical imaging and could help find habitable planets beyond our solar system.

A system called Coscientist scours the Internet for instructions, then designs and executes experiments to synthesize molecules.

Google, the internet giant now a subsidiary of Alphabet, announced on Tuesday that it will limit the kinds of queries related to elections that its chatbot Bard and search generative experience can answer ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

The company said that the new restrictions will be implemented by early 2024. The company recently made a landmark change to its location data privacy which has made it difficult for law enforcement agencies to access private location data of people near the crime scene and issue geofence warrants.

According to Reuters, the U.S. is not the only country that will witness crucial elections in 2024. India, the world’s largest democracy, and South Africa, among others, will also hold national elections in the same year.

Kuiper internet satellites will form a mesh network using optical links.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An orange tabby cat named Taters stars in the first video transmitted by laser from deep space, stealing the show as he chases a red laser light.

The 15-second video was beamed to Earth from NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away. It took less than two minutes for the ultra high-definition video to reach Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, sent at the test system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.

The video was loaded into Psyche’s laser communication experiment before the spacecraft blasted off to a rare metal asteroid in October. The mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, decided to feature an employee’s 3-year-old playful kitty.

Watch live coverage as SpaceX launches a Falcon 9 rocket with 23 second-generation Starlink internet satellites. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is scheduled for tonight at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 UTC). The first-stage booster, making its third flight, will land on the drone ship ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’ about eight and a half minutes into the flight.\

Our live coverage from Cape Canaveral, with commentary by Will Robinson-Smith, will begin about an hour before launch.\

Continue reading “Watch live: SpaceX launches Starlink satellite from Cape Canaveral on Falcon 9 rocket” »

DARPA has tapped Raytheon to design and develop a wireless, airborne relay system to “deliver energy into contested environments,” as part of its Energy Web Dominance program, in which DARPA wants to be able to power anything from nearly anywhere.

Under a two-year, US$10 million DARPA contract, Raytheon will create a Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) system, using a series of high altitude unmanned aircraft equipped with laser-based power receiving and transmitting capabilities. Energy will be beamed up to high altitude, then relayed across however many jumps are necessary to reach the target area.

That target might be on the ground, or it might itself be another autonomous aerial platform, in which case it could stay airborne as long as necessary, its batteries being constantly charged from afar.