Lifeboat Foundation

David is one of the world’s best-known philosophers of mind and thought leaders on consciousness. I was a freshman at the University of Toronto when I first read some of his work. Since then, Chalmers has been one of the few philosophers (together with Nick Bostrom) who has written and spoken publicly about the Matrix simulation argument and the technological singularity. (See, for example, David’s presentation at the 2009 Singularity Summit or read his The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis)

During our conversation with David, we discuss topics such as: how and why Chalmers got interested in philosophy; and his search to answer what he considers to be some of the biggest questions – issues such as the nature of reality, consciousness, and artificial intelligence; the fact that academia in general and philosophy, in particular, doesn’t seem to engage technology; our chances of surviving the technological singularity; the importance of Watson, the Turing Test and other benchmarks on the way to the singularity; consciousness, recursive self-improvement, and artificial intelligence; the ever-shrinking of the domain of solely human expertise; mind uploading and what he calls the hard problem of consciousness; the usefulness of philosophy and ethics; religion, immortality, and life-extension; reverse engineering long-dead people such as Ray Kurzweil’s father.

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon.

Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science.

Introducing the Qinglong humanoid robot with open-source AI, plus Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2 is shown for the first time ever in public. Meta HOT3D dataset is bringing robotic hands closer than ever before, plus China’s KLING is now available on a web app.

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Continue reading “China Demos New QINGLONG AI Robot with 43 DoF (2024 WORLD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONFERENCE)” »

With their ability to generate human-like language and complete a variety of tasks, generative AI has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate, learn and work. But what other doors will this technology open for us, and how can we harness it to make great leaps in technology innovation? Have we finally done it? Have we cracked AI?

Join Professor Michael Wooldridge for a fascinating discussion on the possibilities and challenges of generative AI models, and their potential impact on societies of the future.

Continue reading “The Turing Lectures: The future of generative AI” »

Vending machines are an old charming piece of technology that supposedly makes the lives of people easier by making water, snacks and food in general readily available.

American Rounds says that it aims to redefine convenience in ammunition purchasing, as its ammo dispensers can be accessed round the clock.

Continue reading “Ammo ATM? AI-powered bullet vending machines introduced in US” »

Pushback on self service check out due to higher theft and increased discontent from customers.

Scientists run into a lot of tradeoffs trying to build and scale up brain-like systems that can perform machine learning. For instance, artificial neural networks are capable of learning complex language and vision tasks, but the process of training computers to perform these tasks is slow and requires a lot of power.

Training machines to learn digitally but perform tasks in analog—meaning the input varies with a physical quantity, such as voltage—can reduce time and power, but small errors can rapidly compound.

An electrical network that physics and engineering researchers from the University of Pennsylvania previously designed is more scalable because errors don’t compound in the same way as the size of the system grows, but it is severely limited as it can only learn linear tasks, ones with a simple relationship between the input and output.

1/ Chinese AI company SenseTime introduced its new multimodal AI model SenseNova 5o at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which SenseTime claims is China’s first GPT-4o-level multimodal real-time model.

2/ It processes audio, text, image and video data to interact with users as if they…

Chinese AI company SenseTime introduced its new multimodal AI model SenseNova 5o and the improved language model SenseNova 5.5 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Continue reading “SenseTime unveils SenseNova 5o, China’s first real-time multimodal AI model to rival GPT-4o” »

According to Fox 45 Baltimore, the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP) is a new plan to build a 70-mile 500,000-volt transmission line across three counties: Frederick, Baltimore, and Carroll. The line will connect a substation in southern Frederick County and supply the area with additional load capacity to handle surging power demand from AI data centers.

MPRP’s website explains that the new transmission lines will require the acquisition of private property through the use of an eminent domain, or government-mandated seizure to complete the construction.

“If PSEG and a property owner cannot agree on mutually acceptable value, PSEG may seek to use the power of eminent domain using the process set forth by the state of Maryland to acquire the necessary property rights,” the developer’s website states.