Lifeboat Foundation

The prospect that artificial intelligence (AI) might one day surpass human intelligence is one that many people, including a number of notable personalities, are terrified of. And it’s not hard to see where that fear is coming from.

As it is, deep learning machines have already shown a number of ways where they outperform humans. So far, they can play video games, recognize faces, and even do stock market trading. There’s one area, though, where humans are still superior, and that’s the speed at which we learn.

Right now, humans learn at a rate that’s 10 times faster than that of a deep learning machine. And it is this ‘superiority’ that has kept that ‘AI taking over humans’ apocalyptic view in the background. Thanks (or no thanks?) to Google, however, this status quo is about to change.

Continue reading “Google Develops A Deep Learning Machine That Could Learn As Fast As Humans” »

Tech to aid video search, detection of disease and of fraud.

Artificial intelligence has been the secret sauce for some of the biggest technology companies. But technology giant Alphabet Inc.’s Google is betting big on ‘democratising’ artificial intelligence and machine learning and making them available to everyone — users, developers and enterprises.

From detecting and managing deadly diseases, reducing accident risks to discovering financial fraud, Google said that it aimed to improve the quality of life by lowering entry barriers to using these technologies. These technologies would also add a lot of value to self-driving cars, Google Photos’ search capabilities and even Snapchat filters that convert the images of users into animated pictures.

Continue reading “Google to bring artificial intelligence into daily life” »

Elon Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles, but Silicon Valley’s latest rush to embrace artificial intelligence scares him. And he thinks you should be frightened too. Inside his efforts to influence the rapidly advancing field and its proponents, and to save humanity from machine-learning overlords.

Well this! Great advertising as well :-).

It’s not electric and it doesn’t look futuristic. Japan aims at practicality with this self-driving minibus.

Researchers have successfully used spinach leaves to build functioning human heart tissue, complete with veins that can transport blood.

To tackle a chronic shortage of donor organs, scientists have been working on growing various tissues and even whole organs in the lab. But culturing a bunch of cells is only part of the solution — they simply won’t thrive without a constant blood supply.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Turned Spinach Into Beating Human Heart Tissue” »

“Transporting the magic of Silicon Valley to other cities is a trope so old, and so beloved by government bureaucrats, that these days it hardly quickens the pulse.”

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To put it mildly, sequencing and building a genome from scratch isn’t cheap. It’s sometimes affordable for human genomes, but it’s often prohibitively expensive (hundreds of thousands of dollars) whenever you’re charting new territory — say, a specific person or an unfamiliar species. A chromosome can have hundreds of millions of genetic base pairs, after all. Scientists may have a way to make it affordable across the board, however. They’ve developed a new method, 3D genome assembly, that can sequence and build genomes from the ground up for less than $10,000.

Where earlier approaches saw researchers using computers to stick small pieces of genetic code together, the new technique takes advantages of folding maps (which show how a 6.5ft long genome can cram into a cell’s nucleus) to quickly build out a sequence. As you only need short reads of DNA to make this happen, the cost is much lower. You also don’t need to know much about your sample organism going in.

As an example of what’s possible, the team completely assembled the three chromosomes for the Aedes aegypti mosquito for the first time. More complex organisms would require more work, of course, but the dramatically lower cost makes that more practical than ever. Provided the approach finds widespread use, it could be incredibly valuable for both biology and medicine.

Continue reading “Scientists find a low-cost way to build genomes from scratch” »

A fire protection and security company recently launched a new product called the “Scott Sight,” a face mask that incorporates thermal imaging with a display screen.

Tyco’s Scott Safety is bringing a big upgrade to the field of firefighting with their newly released product, the Scott Sight. This hands-free device is the first in the industry that incorporates an in-mask thermal intelligence system, according to an April 18th press release from the fire protection and security company.

Continue reading “Firefighter Helmets Now Have Built In Thermal Imaging” »

Google’s chief futurist says that humans could start living forever by 2029.