Lifeboat Foundation

Stanford computer science student Joshua Browder, whose DoNotPay bot helps you fight parking tickets in London and New York (it’s estimated to have overturned $4M in tickets to date) has a new bot in the offing: a chatbot that helps newly homeless people in the UK create and optimise their applications for benefits.

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In austerity-wracked Britain, where the Tories have made things easier than they’ve ever been for landlords and harder than they’ve ever been for workers, repossessions and evictions are at an all-time high. So Browder — who was born in the UK — decided to add a homelessness navigation aid to his bot, which had already been expanded to handle fight-delay reimbursement applications. He’s also researching adding New York City homelessness form-completing to the bot’s repertoire.

They have been warned in the past; and chose to ignore. Bot operated company gets hacked.

A funny thing happened on the way to a post-capitalist, crypto-anarchist utopia.

Nice paper on Neural Circuit structures.

Plasticity between neural connections plays a key role in our ability to process and store information. One of the fundamental questions on plasticity, is the extent to which local processes, affecting individual synapses, are responsible for large scale structures of neural connectivity. Here we focus on two types of structures: synfire chains and self connected assemblies. These structures are often proposed as forms of neural connectivity that can support brain functions such as memory and generation of motor activity. We show that an important plasticity mechanism, spike timing dependent plasticity, can lead to autonomous emergence of these large scale structures in the brain: in contrast to previous theoretical proposals, we show that the emergence can occur autonomously even if instructive signals are not fed into the neural network while its form is shaped by synaptic plasticity.

Citation: Ravid Tannenbaum N, Burak Y (2016) Shaping Neural Circuits by High Order Synaptic Interactions. PLoS Comput Biol 12: e1005056. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005056

Continue reading “Shaping Neural Circuits” »

WILLIAMSBURG, Va.: The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, warned today that the US might hobble itself in future warfare by insisting on human control of thinking weapons if our adversaries just let their robots pull the trigger. Kendall even worries that Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work is being too optimistic when Work says humans and machines working together will beat robots without oversight.

These are unnerving ideas — and top Army leaders swiftly responded with concern that robots would shoot civilians if you take the human out of the loop. This is what Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Paul Selva calls the Terminator Conundrum: “When do we want to cross that line as humans? And who wants to cross it first? Those are really hard ethical questions.” They are also a fundamental question of combat effectiveness.

Continue reading “Should US Unleash War Robots? Frank Kendall Vs. Bob Work, Army” »

Leading AI scientist Ben Goertzel says, “In the future, an AI will tutor your children and take care of your grandma. It won’t be Terminator robots marching down the street.” Watch Episode 2 of “Future First” with Popular Science.

My exclusive interview with Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson on some hard science & tech issues, including transhumanism, longevity, AI, and gene editing. This is also my first story for Futurism. For the record, I am trying, along with millions of others, to get Gary Johnson into the Presidentia l debates! No matter who you plan to vote for, it would be good for America to have him in the debates so a third voice is heard:

Libertarian Presidentia l candidate Gary Johnson wants humans to live a lot longer and isn’t worried about AI becoming the Terminator. Here, Futurist Zoltan Istvan gains an exclusive interview with Johnson, who is polling double digits nationally and hopes to be in the Presidentia l debates with Trump and Clinton in October.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views of Futurism or its affiliates.

Continue reading “Gary Johnson Wants Driverless Secret Service Cars and a US-Led Gene Editing Revolution” »

Ford says it’s going to deliver self-driving cars by 2021 – and these will ship in volume, and will also lack steering wheels, brake or gas pedals, offering full Level 4 self-driving features which don’t require a human driver at all, the company announced at a press conference in Palo Alto today.

The car maker says that it has held off making any announcements about when to deliver self-driving vehicles until now because it isn’t in a race to make announcements. But it did say it is making self-driving vehicle deployment a priority, because of the advantages it offers in terms of customer experience and passenger safety.

Case study from the Swarm Systems Ltd who will pitch their ideas to industry and investors at the CDE Marketplace on 6 September 2016.

DARPA recently put out a Request for Information on new ways to protect military forces from small unmanned air systems (sUAS).