Lifeboat Foundation

Can the Moby store bring locally controlled convenience stores to places that lack a simple place to buy essentials?

Very interesting new feature in Aeon on AI that also discusses my short fiction The Jesus Singularity: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists…so-similar #transhumanism

The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why?

“Deep Learning” computer systems, based on artificial neural networks that mimic the way the brain learns from an accumulation of examples, have become a hot topic in computer science. In addition to enabling technologies such as face- and voice-recognition software, these systems could scour vast amounts of medical data to find patterns that could be useful diagnostically, or scan chemical formulas for possible new pharmaceuticals.

But the computations these systems must carry out are highly complex and demanding, even for the most powerful computers.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has developed a new approach to such computations, using light instead of electricity, which they say could vastly improve the speed and efficiency of certain deep learning computations. Their results appear today in the journal Nature Photonics (“Deep learning with coherent nanophotonic circuits”) in a paper by MIT postdoc Yichen Shen, graduate student Nicholas Harris, professors Marin Soljacic and Dirk Englund, and eight others.

Now you have until 6/30 to submit a proposal to the Agency’s Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) program.

Here’s the vision: Muster all the creativity that you can with the goal of developing fundamentally new machine learning approaches that enable systems to learn continually as they operate and apply previous knowledge to novel situations. Current AI systems only compute with what they have been programmed or trained for in advance; they have no ability to learn from data input during execution time and cannot adapt online to changes they encounter in real environments. The goal of L2M is to develop substantially more capable systems that are continually improving and updating from experience.

Consult the Broad Agency Announcement for more information: https://www.fbo.gov/…/…/DARPA/CMO/HR001117S0016/listing.html

Continue reading “Think you can develop machines that keep on learning” »

An anesthetic injection, delivered by a shot to the neck, is thought to alleviate symptoms better than traditional efforts. A $2 million study will be the first large-scale randomized control research into their use.

Astronomers could help asteroid miners identify the most promising targets, potentially slashing the cost of off-Earth resource extraction, Harvard astrophysicist Martin Elvis said.

I’ll be on a panel and also doing an author’s roundtable (The Transhumanist Wager) at FreedomFest in Las Vegas on July 21. It’s one of the largest gatherings of free minds in the world and this year is the 10th anniversary. If you’re there, please say hello! Others are speaking on life extension and AI. Here’s my speaker’s page:

Check out what Zoltan Istvan will be attending at FreedomFest 2017.

NASA has revealed plans to grow bioprinted cancer cells in space in a bid to advance cancer research.

Utilizing the microgravity environment, NASA hopes to the cell structures will grow in a more natural spherical shape. Since, back on earth in vitro the cells have only able been able to grow in two-dimensional layers. However to harness the cells without the presence of gravity, NASA is hoping to employ magnets.

We are incredibly excited to announce that Firmamentum, a division of Tethers Unlimited, Inc. (TUI), has signed a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a system that will use in-space manufacturing and robotic assembly technologies to construct on orbit a small satellite able to provide high-bandwidth satellite communications (SATCOM) services to mobile receivers on the ground.

Under the OrbWeaver Direct-to-Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) effort, Firmamentum aims to combine its technologies for in-space recycling, in-space manufacturing, and robotic assembly to create a system that could launch as a secondary payload on an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). This system would recycle a structural element of that rocket, known as an EELV Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) ring, by converting the ring’s aluminum material into a very large, high-precision antenna reflector. The OrbWeaver™ payload would then attach this large antenna to an array of TUI’s SWIFT® software defined radios launched with the OrbWeaver payload to create a small satellite capable of delivering up to 12 gigabits per second of data to K-band very small aperture terminals (VSAT) on the ground.