Lifeboat Foundation

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.

From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when it finally came out in 1976, did not look like a best-seller. But sell it did. It was reviewed in science magazines and psychology journals, Time, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978. New editions continued to come out, as Jaynes went on the lecture circuit. Jaynes died of a stroke in 1997; his book lived on. In 2000, another new edition hit the shelves. It continues to sell today.

As impersonation scams in the United States rise, Card’s ordeal is indicative of a troubling trend. Technology is making it easier and cheaper for bad actors to mimic voices, convincing people, often the elderly, that their loved ones are in distress. In 2022, impostor scams were the second most popular racket in America, with over 36,000 reports of people being swindled by those pretending to be friends and family, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Over 5,100 of those incidents happened over the phone, accounting for over $11 million in losses, FTC officials said.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have added a terrifying new layer, allowing bad actors to replicate a voice with just an audio sample of a few sentences. Powered by AI, a slew of cheap online tools can translate an audio file into a replica of a voice, allowing a swindler to make it “speak” whatever they type.

Experts say federal regulators, law enforcement and the courts are ill-equipped to rein in the burgeoning scam. Most victims have few leads to identify the perpetrator and it’s difficult for the police to trace calls and funds from scammers operating across the world. And there’s little legal precedent for courts to hold the companies that make the tools accountable for their use.

Holmes has requested to stay out of prison while she appeals her conviction for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, for which she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

Chinese geneticist He Jiankui rocked the scientific world with his gene-edited baby experiments back in 2018, a highly controversial use of the technology that ended up sending him to a three-year stint in prison for illegal medical practices.

Now, just under a year after being released, He has some regrets about rushing into the experiments.

“I did it too quickly,” He told the South China Morning Post in a new interview.

After years of delay under government pressure, Apple said Wednesday that it will offer fully encrypted backups of photos, chat histories and most other sensitive user data in its cloud storage system worldwide, putting them out of reach of most hackers, spies and law enforcement.

Maybe a New iPhone is a good idea for a second phone.

The one service Apple offered that could not be encrypted was iCloud. Now that will change.

A robot that can shift between solid and liquid states has been filmed escaping from a miniature jail cell with bars too close together to allow it to leave in solid form. The creators claim they were inspired by sea cucumbers’ capacity to alter their tissue stiffness – but the scene is just a little too similar to Robert Patrick liquifying his way through the mental hospital bars for us to believe them. We even see the famous reabsorption of the little bit left behind.

Hard-bodied robots are common, even if they have yet to reach the capacities of science fiction films. Their soft-bodied counterparts can get into tight spaces, but what they can do there is limited, and they are also difficult to control.

Continue reading “Shape-Shifting Robot Escapes Miniature Prison Cell” »

Back in 2002, the science fiction film Minority Report once again reignited futuristic imaginations about a world and police state gone too far. At the time, the movie inspired plenty of speculation about the future of our society, how computers would interact with us, and how law enforcement would be carried out proactively based on intent. In the movie, they combined technology with the psychic abilities of the “precogs,” to proactively prevent crimes.

The precogs had the ability to predict when crimes were about to be committed ahead of time, enabling law enforcement to act early.

Twenty years later, in a climate of abundant data, almost limitless processing, and at a point in history where law enforcement is frequently discussed, some of these technologies are beginning to look more feasible than ever.

Continue reading “AI Tools: From Minority Report To Mission Possible” »

In this article, let us see how to build a potential darkweb monitoring tool out of ChatGPT

The dark web is a notorious and often misunderstood part of the internet, known for its anonymous communication and the buying and selling of illegal goods and services. It is not indexed by traditional search engines and is only accessible through specialized software, such as the Tor browser.

While the dark web can be a breeding ground for criminal activity, it is also a valuable resource for cyber security firms, law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity and threat intelligence individuals looking to track and monitor illegal activities.

New research suggests that those with psychopathic personality traits are less susceptible to creating false memories of negative events. The findings indicate that individuals high in the psychopathic trait of fearless dominance were less likely to produce false memories when exposed to negative stimuli. Likewise, individuals high in the psychopathic trait of cold-heartedness tended to have fewer true memories of neutral and negative events. These findings may be relevant to law enforcement, mainly when gathering witness or suspect testimony from individuals high in psychopathic traits.

The new study has been published in the British Journal of Psychology.

A significant amount of memory research in the last few decades has focused on memory construction and retrieval. Of particular interest has been the formation of false memories. False memories can have consequences in the justice system, as eyewitness reports are often crucial to investigations and convictions. In addition, individuals with psychopathic personality traits often intersect with law enforcement, making research on how they process memories relevant to determining the reliability of remembered events.