Lifeboat Foundation

Here’s my speech and panel participation from yesterday at the Annual Danish Top Executive Annual Summit via VL-dognet 2018: It was covered by Danish Jyskebank TV. My panel included a minister, an ambassador, a country company head, a television host, and Sophia the Robot. I had a great time at the wonderful event (hosted at a castle), and the Danish people are very nice. The Vice President of the EU spoke a few sessions before me. My solo speech that started my afternoon session was on the future of politics and transhumanism. It’s the first 10 minutes of the video:

To find new exoplanets, just turn to Google.

Last year, an artificial intelligence (AI) network, equipped with data from the Kepler space telescope, discovered two new exoplanets. Now, citizen scientists looking to support discovery at home can use the exoplanet-hunting neural network — Google plans to make it open source, a Google engineer announced recently in a blog post.

Exoplanets are difficult to find and harder to directly observe – most of the time scientists only know these celestial bodies exist when they block some light from their closest star. To help scientists learn more about exoplanets, including those in the “Goldilocks Zone” (the “just right” zone in which planets are most likely to host life), NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft in 2009. Its mission: make observations that might lead to the discovery of exoplanets.

AMD at Computex 2018 unveiled what may turn out to be one of the most exciting GPU designs in town, the world’s first 7nm GPU, which packs as much as 32GB of high-bandwidth memory.

However, that product won’t really be available for purchase anytime soon, unless you’re in the business of developing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) products.

Don’t Miss : Amazon’s offering a rare discount on the adapter that speeds up your Fire TV Stick or 4K Fire TV.

Continue reading “AMD just unveiled the world’s most exciting GPU, but you’re not going to be playing ‘Fortnite’ on it” »

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed tiny ultrasound-powered nanorobots that can swim through blood, removing harmful bacteria and the toxins they produce.

Continue reading “Ultrasound-powered nanorobots clear bacteria and toxins from blood” »

When the disembodied cockroach leg twitched, Yeongin Kim knew he had finally made it.

A graduate student at Stanford, Kim had been working with an international team of neuroengineers on a crazy project: an artificial nerve that acts like the real thing. Like sensory neurons embedded in our skin, the device—which kind of looks like a bendy Band-Aid—detects touch, processes the information, and sends it off to other nerves.

Yup, even if that downstream nerve is inside a cockroach leg.

Continue reading “Robots Will Be Able to Feel Touch With This Artificial Nerve” »

Microsoft is leveraging technology from submarines and working with pioneers in marine energy for the second phase of its moonshot to develop self-sufficient underwater datacenters that can deliver lightning-quick cloud services to coastal cities. An experimental, shipping-container-size prototype is processing workloads on the seafloor near Scotland’s Orkney Islands, Microsoft announced today.

The deployment of the Northern Isles datacenter at the European Marine Energy Centre marks a milestone in Microsoft’s Project Natick, a years-long research effort to investigate manufacturing and operating environmentally sustainable, prepackaged datacenter units that can be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate lights out on the seafloor for years.

“That is kind of a crazy set of demands to make,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft AI and Research, who leads the New Experiences and Technologies, or NExT, group. “Natick is trying to get there.”

Continue reading “Under the sea, Microsoft tests a datacenter that’s quick to deploy, could provide internet connectivity for years” »

Robot maker Boston Dynamics has spent a quarter century and at least $150 million in defense money building ominous machines. It’s finally ready to start selling them.

A diagrammatic explanation of how machine consciousness might be feasible.

About 20 years ago I gave my first talk on how to achieve consciousness in machines, at a World Future Society conference, and went on to discuss how we would co-evolve with machines. I’ve lectured on machine consciousness hundreds of times but never produced any clear slides that explain my ideas properly. I thought it was about time I did. My belief is that today’s deep neural networks using feed-forward processing with back propagation training can not become conscious. No digital algorithmic neural network can, even though they can certainly produce extremely good levels of artificial intelligence. By contrast, nature also uses neurons but does produce conscious machines such as humans easily. I think the key difference is not just that nature uses analog adaptive neural nets rather than digital processing (as I believe Hans Moravec first insighted, a view that I readily accepted) but also that nature uses large groups of these analog neurons that incorporate feedback loops that act both as a sort of short term memory and provide time to sense the sensing process as it happens, a mechanism that can explain consciousness. That feedback is critically important in the emergence of consciousness IMHO. I believe that if the neural network AI people stop barking up the barren back-prop tree and start climbing the feedback tree, we could have conscious machines in no time, but Moravec is still probably right that these need to be analog to enable true real-time processing as opposed to simulation of that.

I may be talking nonsense of course, but here are my thoughts, finally explained as simply and clearly as I can. These slides illustrate only the simplest forms of consciousness. Obviously our brains are highly complex and evolved many higher level architectures, control systems, complex senses and communication, but I think the basic foundations of biomimetic machine consciousness can be achieved as follows:

Continue reading “Biomimetic insights for machine consciousness” »

“This, of course, will deepen scientific and technological cooperation at the experts’ level in many areas, including but not limited to, advanced material sources. We are talking here of biotechnology, nanotechnology, data analysis, artificial intelligence, space technology, innovation policy,” Hernandez said.

By Genalyn Kabiling and Argyll Cyrus Geducos

Seoul, South Korea — The country’s vibrant relations with South Korea are expected to be strengthened with the planned cooperation accords on transportation safety, technological development, port expansion, and revitalized trade during President Duterte’s official visit.

Continue reading “Stronger, deeper PH-SoKor ties sought” »