Lifeboat Foundation

When the Technological Singularity arrives, you can’t even imagine what the future will hold afterwards. Just ask author Vernor Vinge.

A five-time Hugo Award-winning author (among various other awards and accolades), Vernor Vinge has been writing and speculating about AI and intelligence amplification for over half a century. As part of his storied career, an interesting anecdote concerns a rejection letter he received from legendary science fiction editor and publisher John W. Campbell, Jr.

Early in his career, Vinge had proposed a story about a human being with amplified intelligence and (as Vinge relates in his short story collection) Campbell wrote him back with the comment, “Sorry — you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.” Jump forward a few decades, and Vinge delivered a paper to NASA entitled The Coming Technological Singularity in which he foresaw a moment when artificial intelligence will develop exponentially until it reached a point that surpasses humanity’s ability to comprehend. It is intelligence so far superior that we can’t even imagine what it would be like. And then what?

Continue reading “Author Vernor Vinge: Proposing a singular view of technology’s future” »

Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it’s rudely failed to deliver—jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful one might be the robot companion, à la Rosie from The Jetsons, a machine that watches over the home.

It seemed like 2018 was going to be the year when robots made a big leap in that direction. Two machines in particular surfaced to much fanfare: Kuri, an adorable R2D2 analog that can follow you around and take pictures of your dinner parties, and Jibo, a desktop robot with a screen for a face that works a bit like Alexa, only it can dance.

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Continue reading “Sci-Fi Promised Us Home Robots. So Where Are They?” »

With the rise of A.I., and studies that repeatedly suggest that workers’ productivity actually increases during shorter work days, the work week is poised to undergo a major transformation in the coming years.

The billionaire entrepreneur predicts the rise of technology will soon force society to rethink the modern work week.

Will AI transform — or replace — the Humanities?

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the Humanities by transforming how we analyze texts.

Unilever, the multinational consumer goods manufacturer, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help with recruiting and onboarding of new employees. The algorithms help to sift through CVs and even conduct and analyze video interviews.

NASA’s newly arrived Mars lander has been spotted by one its orbiting cousins.

The space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its supersharp High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) to photograph the InSight lander, as well as the hardware that helped the stationary robot ace its Nov. 26 touchdown on the equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia.

“It looks like the heat shield (upper right) has its dark outside facing down, since it is so bright (saturated, probably a specular reflection),” HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona, wrote in an image description today (Dec. 13). [Mars InSight in Photos: NASA’s Mission to Probe Core of the Red Planet].

Cancer research is an area of medical science that, rightfully, gets considerable attention. There are nearly 14.5 million Americans with a history of cancer and with more than 13 million estimated new cancer cases each year. It’s no wonder even artificial intelligence (AI) has gotten into the field. Researchers from the University of Michigan are not getting left behind, with a groundbreaking method that has the potential to eliminate tumors.

This new technology uses nano-sized discs, about 10 nm to be exact, to teach the body to kill cancer cells. “We are basically educating the immune system with these nanodiscs so that immune cells can attack cancer cells in a personalized manner,” said James Moon from the University of Michigan.

Each of these ‘nanodiscs’ is full of neoantigens (tumor-specific mutations) that teach the immune system’s T-cells to recognize each neoantigen and kill them. These work hand-in-hand with immune checkpoint inhibitors that boost the responses of T-cells — forming an anti-cancer system in the body that wipes out tumors and potentially keeps them from reemerging.

Continue reading “Researchers Develop Nanodiscs That Can Wipe Out Tumors” »

GEO Satellites business globally make roughly 80% of the overall Space market business with $270B revenues claimed in 2017. How a Space Industry of such kind level of business can disappear is not an argument for many years to come but how a transformation of the Satellite configuration can impact the Space Industry this represents a real topic.

I already discussed in my previous article of how the advancement of A.I. bringing to autonomous missions for satellites, 3D printing permitting on-orbit Manufacturing and Robotic Assembly are not far away technologies, with the mature advancements achieved in on-Ground applications, to be applied to Space Satellites. Already today recently born Startups are working on Satellites on-board software/hardware permitting more autonomous tasks with decision making capability without being piloted from remote on-Ground Stations, significantly reducing operative costs.

Arriving to build fully autonomous Satellites is just a matter of time, with remotely controlled operations to be applied only for safety contingencies. The foreseen growth in the number of small satellites by order of magnitudes push the market this way.

Continue reading “The end of GEO Satellites as we know today” »

I believe it is likely that we will have 10,000 qubit quantum computers within 5 to 10 years. There is rapidly advancing work by IonQ with trapped ion quantum computers and a range of superconducting quantum computer systems by Google, IBM, Intel, Rigetti and 2000–5000 qubit quantum annealing computers by D-Wave Systems.

10,000 qubit quantum computers should have computing capabilities far beyond any conventional computer for certain classes of problems. They will be beyond not just any regular computer today but any non-quantum computer ever for those kinds of problems.

Those quantum computers will help improve artificial intelligence systems. How certain is this development? What will it mean for humans and our world?