Lifeboat Foundation

A consortium of groups has come together with the painstaking task of charting the longevity industry, such as its companies, journalists, thought leaders, investors, and recent developments. The Longevity Industry in UK Landscape Overview 2018 report covers a great amount of ground and is well worth a read for people who are interested in this rapidly evolving scientific field.

This particular edition, which spans an impressive 1000+ pages, is focused on the United Kingdom; there will be additional reports covering Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, and California, and there will also be a more general global industry report in its second edition.

Interest in longevity has been increasing for some years, and we are at last seeing a true industry starting to bloom as more and more companies, researchers, and investors step into the ring. Companies such as Unity Biotechnology taking senescent cell-clearing therapies to human trials, deep learning approaches being applied to aging by companies such as Insilco Medicine, and Ichor Therapeutics’ development of age-related macular degeneration therapies have served to ignite the fires of enthusiasm and have brought ever-increasing funding and interest into this field.

This thesis has been rolling around like a marble in the bowl of a lot of people’s brains for a while now, and many of those marbles were handed out by Martin Ford, in his 2015 book, “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.” In the book, and in an essay in “Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work” (Cornell), Ford acknowledges that all other earlier robot-invasion panics were unfounded. In the nineteenth century, people who worked on farms lost their jobs when agricultural processes were mechanized, but they eventually earned more money working in factories. In the twentieth century, automation of industrial production led to warnings about “unprecedented economic and social disorder.” Instead, displaced factory workers moved into service jobs. Machines eliminate jobs; rising productivity creates new jobs.

Probably, but don’t count yourself out.

The power of machine translation to help you improve your writing at work.

A start-up called Lightmatter is working on a chip for artificial intelligence that will draw on optical technology that has previously been used to quickly send information around data centers.

Drexler and the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute proposing that artificial intelligence is mainly emerging as cloud-based AI services and a 210-page paper analyzes how AI is developing today.

AI development is developing automation of many tasks and automation of AI research and development will enable acceleration of AI improvement.

Accelerated AI improvement would mean the emergence of asymptotically comprehensive, superintelligent-level AI services that—crucially—can include the service of developing new services, both narrow and broad, guided by concrete human goals and informed by strong models of human (dis)approval. The concept of comprehensive AI services (CAIS) provides a model of flexible, general intelligence in which agents are a class of service-providing products, rather than a natural or necessary engine of progress in themselves.

Continue reading “Superintelligence as a Service is Coming and It Can Be Safe AGI” »

Modern theories of semantics posit that the meaning of words can be decomposed into a unique combination of semantic features (e.g., “dog” would include “barks”). Here, we demonstrate using functional MRI (fMRI) that the brain combines bits of information into meaningful object representations. Participants receive clues of individual objects in form of three isolated semantic features, given as verbal descriptions. We use machine-learning-based neural decoding to learn a mapping between individual semantic features and BOLD activation patterns. The recorded brain patterns are best decoded using a combination of not only the three semantic features that were in fact presented as clues, but a far richer set of semantic features typically linked to the target object. We conclude that our experimental protocol allowed us to demonstrate that fragmented information is combined into a complete semantic representation of an object and to identify brain regions associated with object meaning.

A JAPANESE robot has been created to preach the teachings of Buddha in colloquial language at the Kodaiji Temple in the ancient city of Kyoto.

Without humans to cause accidents, 90% of risk is removed. Insurers are scrambling to prepare.

128 votes and so far on Reddit.