Lifeboat Foundation

If you think your mind is the only safe place left for all your secrets, think again, because scientists are making real steps towards reading your thoughts and putting them on a screen for everyone to see.

A team from the University of Oregon has built a system that can read people’s thoughts via brain scans, and reconstruct the faces they were visualising in their heads. As you’ll soon see, the results were pretty damn creepy.

“We can take someone’s memory — which is typically something internal and private — and we can pull it out from their brains,” one of the team, neuroscientist Brice Kuhl, told Brian Resnick at Vox.

Continue reading “Scientists have invented a mind-reading machine that visualises your thoughts” »

“People are increasingly living past 100. That means some big changes for the future of work”

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“Alternatively, you could just avoid this entire first batch of VR hardware altogether.”

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My new story for Vice Motherboard on the future of political campaining:

Lest we think future elections are all about the candidates, perhaps the largest possibility on the horizon could come from digital direct democracy—the concept where citizens participate in real time input in the government. I gently advocate for a fourth branch of government, in which the people can vote on issues that matter to them and their decrees could have real legal consequence on Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency.

Of course, that’s only if government even exists anymore. It’s possible the coming age of artificial intelligence and robots may replace the need for politicians. At least human ones. Some experts think superintelligent AI might be here in 10 to 15 years, so why not have a robot president that is totally altruistic and not susceptible to lobbyists and personal desires? This machine leader would simply always calculate the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, and go with that. No more Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, or whatever else we are.

Continue reading “Wild Transhumanist Campaign Tech We’ll See in Future Presidential Elections” »

Matt Mullican’s virtual worlds.

Planck’s constant put the “quantum” in “quantum mechanics.”

Physicists from the Russian Quantum Center (RQC), MIPT, the Lebedev Physical Institute, and L’Institut d’Optique (Palaiseau, France) have devised a method for creating a special quantum entangled state. This state enables producing a high-precision ruler capable of measuring large distances to an accuracy of billionths of a metre. The results of the study have been published in Nature Communications (“Loss-tolerant state engineering for quantum-enhanced metrology via the reverse Hong–Ou–Mandel effect”).

“This technique will enable us to use quantum effects to increase the accuracy of measuring the distance between observers that are separated from one another by a medium with losses. In this type of medium, quantum features of light are easily destroyed,” says Alexander Lvovsky, a co-author of the paper, the head of the RQC scientific team that conducted the research, and a professor of the University of Calgary.

Continue reading “Physicists create a high-precision ‘quantum ruler’” »

Mobile phones have become commonplace. Modern communication devices like mobile phones need to exchange huge amounts of information. However, what is hidden underneath the elegantly shaped plastic casings is quickly forgotten: Complex signal processors constantly fighting against noise and steadily adapting themselves to changing environment.

But noise and changing environmental conditions do not only affect electrical circuits. In synthetic biology scientists are facing similar problems. However, in synthetic biology a methodology to deal with noise does not exist yet. Prof. Mustafa Khammash and Christoph Zechner of the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering have studied how conventional signal processors can be translated into biochemical processes — built and operated inside living cells.

A major limitation in engineering biological circuits is that host cells — even if they are genetically identical — are never the same. For instance, cell A might be in a different cell-cycle stage or have more ribosomes available than cell B. Therefore, the same synthetic circuit may behave very differently in each of these two cells. In extreme cases, only a small fraction of cells might show the correct behavior, while the remaining cells act unpredictably. This is referred to as context-dependency.

Sharing in case anyone is interested Prof. Scott Aaronson’s Computational discussion on “Complexity and Fundamental Physics”.

Summer continues, and the public lecture series on physics continues a pace at the Aspen Center for Physics with Dr. Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh talking today on the “Dark Side of the Universe”.

The talk is part of one of the three workshops currently taking place: