Lifeboat Foundation

As the smartphone market matures, startups are racing to predict what’s next, and venture-capital firms are spraying money into fields like virtual reality, smart watches and even implants in the brain. Here are some of the startups attracting investment.

Venture-capital investors are spraying money into fields like virtual reality, driverless cars and even implants in the brain.

The Singularity is near(er)! At least, that’s what the famous inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil argues. If you’ve ever had an interest in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, or the future in general, you’ve more than likely heard of Kurzweil. Whether it’s through documentaries, his various written works, or the vast number of interviews he’s been involved in these last few decades, he’s always provided a cautiously optimistic analysis of the world of tomorrow.

His latest interview, which was conducted during last year’s RAAD Festival, was no different.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil: ‘AI is Still on Course to Outpace Human Intelligence’” »

Brief mention of AI implications…

As a mathematical concept, the idea of zero is relatively new in human society—and indisputably revolutionary. It’s allowed humans to develop algebra, calculus and Cartesian coordinates ; questions about its properties continue to incite mathematical debate today. So it may sound unlikely that bees — complex and community-based insects to be sure, but insects nonetheless — seem to have mastered their own numerical concept of nothingness.

Despite their sesame-seed-sized brains, honey bees have proven themselves the prodigies of the insect world. Researcher has found that they can count up to about four, distinguish abstract patterns, and communicate locations with other bees. Now, Australian scientists have found what may be their most impressive cognitive ability yet: “zero processing,” or the ability to conceptualize nothingness as a numerical value that can be compared with more tangible quantities like one and two.

Continue reading “Bees May Understand Zero, a Concept That Took Humans Millennia to Grasp” »

Scientists have developed tiny elastic robots that can change shape depending on their surroundings and can swim through fluids, an advance which may help deliver drugs to diseased tissue one day.

The smart, biocompatible microrobots that are highly flexible are made of hydrogel nanocomposites that contain magnetic nanoparticles allowing them to be controlled via an electromagnetic field.

As a result, these devices are able to swim through fluids and modify their shape when needed. They can also pass through narrow blood vessels and intricate systems without compromising on speed or manoeuvrability, said the group of scientists led by Selman Sakar at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Bradley Nelson at ETH Zurich.

Continue reading “These tiny swimming robots may deliver drugs in blood vessels” »

Billionaire Masayoshi Son–not Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg–has the most audacious vision for an AI-powered utopia where machines control how we live. And he’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars to realize it. Are you ready to live in Masa World?

[Illustration: Señor Salme]

Biofeedback will also be able to help with problems that feel intractable, by conditioning students to make time to think outside the box. Studies show the best way is to deal with a seemingly intractable problem is to consider it intensely for a period of time and then to relax to an almost meditative state to foster the brain’s creative side.

We have trialled technology that can help users manage this approach in Finland, using an app called Study Train that has been designed by Finnish education experts. The app combines the Pomodoro time-management technique with customised learning rhythms based on an individual’s brain waves, telling students to focus when learning efficiency is high and to rest meditatively to promote lateral thinking and creativity when efficiency is low. It is now being used by students in China, Malaysia and Taiwan as well as in Finland and next year will be rolled out further.

We have long known that the brain has good and bad times for retaining information and solving problems. By combining EEG data and machine learning we can now we confident when those different states occur and use that information to improve students’ learning. 2019 will be the year when study becomes turbocharged.

It’s for your health, we promise.

Researchers have designed a flexible robot designed for drug delivery that’s small enough to flow through the bloodstream.

Using a modular construction kit of tailor-made cell systems, the researchers hope to simulate various properties of biological systems in the future. The idea is that cells react to their environment and learn to act independently.

The first applications are already on the horizon: In the long term, artificial cell assemblies can be deployed as mini-factories to produce specific biomolecules, or as tiny micro-robot sensors that process information and adapt to their environments.