Lifeboat Foundation

One of the most respected—and quietest—teams in the race for autonomy reveals its approach to a problem that’s much harder than everybody hoped.

It’s the year 2038. The word “flavor” has fallen into disuse. Sugar is the new cigarettes, and we have managed to replace salt with healthy plants. We live in a society in which we eat fruit grown using genetics. We drink synthetic wine, scramble eggs that do not come from chickens, grill meat that was not taken from animals, and roast fish that never saw the sea… Here’s a futurist outlook at the next two decades of food developments, from robot farmers to 3D-printed meals to AI monitoring of your daily calorie intake.

Knowing what a cancer will do next could help doctors treat patients or prolong their lives with pre-emptive treatments.

Countries should quickly agree a treaty banning the use of so-called killer robots “before it is too late”, activists said Monday as talks on the issue resumed at the UN.

They say time is running out before weapons are deployed that use lethal force without a human making the final kill-order and have criticised the UN body hosting the talks—the Convention of Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)—for moving too slowly.

“Killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction,” Rasha Abdul Rahim, Amnesty International’s advisor on artificial intelligence and human rights, said in a statement.

Continue reading “Activists urge killer robot ban ‘before it is too late’” »

In this Viewpoint, Geoffrey Hinton of Google’s Brain Team discusses the basics of neural networks: their underlying data structures, how they can be trained and combined to process complex health data sets, and future prospects for harnessing their unsupervised learning to clinical challenges.

Humanity is terrible at planning for the distant future. If we build advanced artificial intelligence, it might save us from ourselves.

This robot spider could one day be used in medical procedures.

As an immediate application, Neural Lace could potentially help patients suffering from brain injuries and certain illnesses. However, the utimate goal and mission of Neuralink are to successfully merge the human brain with machine, fusing human intelligence with Artificial Intelligence. As a result, this is expected to bring humanity up to a higher level of cognitive reasoning.

Neural Lace: How it works

Continue reading “Neuralink: How The Human Brain Will Download Directly From a Computer” »

We write often here about the security vulnerabilities of Android devices that are due, at least in part, to how much of a delay there can be in the latest software updates making the rounds. Which can leave some handsets dangerously vulnerable if the device manufacturer is slow on the uptake.

Which means we’re constantly writing posts like this one: Researchers from Nightwatch Cybersecurity this week put out an advisory about an Android vulnerability that purportedly exposes information about a user’s device to all applications running on the device. There’s a fix for it, but not if you’re running a too-old version of Android.

According to the advisory, the information includes “the Wi-Fi network name, BSSID, local IP addresses, DNS server information and the MAC address. Some of this information (MAC address) is no longer available via APIs on Android 6 and higher, and extra permissions are normally required to access the rest of this information. However, by listening to these broadcasts, any application on the device can capture this information thus bypassing any permission checks and existing mitigations.”