Lifeboat Foundation

Quoted: “Tony Williams, the founder of the British-based legal consulting firm, said that law firms will see nearly all their process work handled by artificial intelligence robots. The robotic undertaking will revolutionize the industry, “completely upending the traditional associate leverage model.” And: “The report predicts that the artificial intelligence technology will replace all the work involving processing information, along with a wide variety of overturned policies.”

Read the article here > https://hacked.com/legal-consulting-firm-believes-artificial…yers-2030/

by Frederic Lardinois — TechCrunch

Designing a good-looking website has never been easy, and while many services promise to let you build a site without ever having to touch any code, you quickly reach their limits if you want to have a more advanced site. The Grid, which is launching its crowdfunding campaign today, promises to do away with all of this. Instead of designing your site pixel by pixel yourself, The Grid team wants to use artificial intelligence to design your site based on your content and goals (more followers, more customers, higher sales, etc.).

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Quoted: “If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.

The blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts behind the Bitcoin revolution that need to be well understood. In this post, I’d like to explain 5 of these concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us. They are: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts and proof of work / stake. This computing paradigm is important, because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.

Read the article here > http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-th…verything/

By Chris Wood — Gizmag

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has today revealed the designs for the New Tube for London – a fleet of 250 trains set to go into operation in the mid-2020s. The design, which pays homage to the heritage of the Underground, brings significant improvements to the service, with the trains capable of fully automatic operation.

The New Tube services aim to tackle the city’s rising population by not only increasing capacity, but also improving speed and frequency of trains. Transport for London (TfL) worked with PriestmanGoode on the new design, which is set to make significant improvements to the service while retaining the recognizable look of London Underground transportation.

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Homer Simpson on NASA and Bart Simpson on Book Of Five Rings and the Noda Secret!

Homer: Son, it has been said that Kaizen is “good change.”

Bart: Dad, good change, Do you mean the throttle?

Homer: Son, What do you mean by throttle?

Bart: Dad, the gas pedal gone lunatic!

Continue reading “Homer Simpson on NASA and Bart Simpson on Book Of Five Rings and the Noda Secret! By Mr. Andres Agostini” »

The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.

The 2014 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Elon Musk in recognition of his warnings about artificial intelligence, his promotion of space exploration including the creation of self-sustaining space colonies, and his efforts to improve our environment with electric cars and to expand solar energy generation.

Elon is often likened to a real-life Tony Stark from Marvel’s Iron Man comics for his role in cutting-edge companies including SpaceX, a private space exploration company that holds the first private contracts from NASA for resupply of the International Space Station, and the electric car company Tesla Motors. Watch Elon in Iron Man 2!

Continue reading “Elon Musk named Lifeboat Foundation 2014 Guardian Award winner” »

Written By: Peter Murray — Singularity Hub

UPDATE: To read more about how workers will be affected by automation technology, check out Hub’s follow up post Burger Robot Poised to Disrupt Fast Food Industry

No longer will they say, “He’s going to end up flipping burgers.” Because now, robots are taking even these ignobly esteemed jobs. Alpha machine from Momentum Machines cooks up a tasty burger with all the fixins. And it does it with such quality and efficiency it’ll produce “gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.”

Continue reading “Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour” »

Written by Jason Koebler — Motherboard

Remember when a majority of new tech jobs were going to India and China? Well, increasingly, those jobs are going away altogether. Outsourcing, it turns out, is in the early stages of being automated.

This morning, news broke that Yahoo would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2,000 jobs there. Cisco has been considering cuts in India as well.

Continue reading “Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated” »

Excerpted from “The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us” by Diane Ackerman — Salon.com

Hod Lipson is the only man I know whose first name means “splendor” in Hebrew and a V-shaped wooden trough for carrying bricks over one shoulder in English. The paradox suits him physically and mentally. He looks strong and solid enough to carry a hod full of bricks, but he would be the first to suggest that the bricks might not resemble any you’ve ever known. They might even saunter, reinvent themselves, refuse to be stacked, devise their own mortar, fight back, explore, breed more of their kind, and boast a nimble curiosity about the world. Splendor can be bricklike, if graced by complexity.

His lab building at Cornell University is home to many a skunk-works project in computer sciences or engineering, including some of DARPA’s famous design competitions (agile robots to clean up toxic disasters, superhero exoskeletons for soldiers, etc.). Nearby, two futuristic DARPA Challenge cars have been left like play-worn toys a few steps from a display case of antique engineering marvels and an elevator that’s old and slow as a butter churn.

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