Lifeboat Foundation

Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the “structural collapse” of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged.

Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, foresees a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with “peak humanity” occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people.

This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called “geriatric-tech” related IP.

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Sony is planning to commercialize lithium-sulfur batteries by 2020, and promising increases of up to 40% over conventional lithium-ion architectures. The devil is in the details, but a battery with 40% more specific energy at the same weight and cost as lithium-ion would enable EVs at lower price points.

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We should use particle accelerators to propel our spacecraft to Alpha Centauri.

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Are we evolving into new species with hybrid thinking interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point will the Web may become self-aware? Or is it already? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?

In his book “The Global Brain” Howard Bloom argues that humans are a lot like neurons of the “global connectome”, and the coming Internet of Things (IoT) with trillions of sensors around the planet will become effectively the nervous system of Earth.

According to Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock, we have always been an integral part of this “Meta-Mind”, collective consciousness, global adaptive and self-regulating system while tapping into vast resources of information pooling and at the same time having a “shared hallucination”, we call reality.

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Don’t panic.

Unless the dolphins start leaving the planet.

At that point, by all mean panic.

Continue reading “Meteor Fireball Terrorizes Georgia Residents: NASA Confirms Asteroid Chunk Flying Near Atlanta, Other Sightings” »

Awe inspiring stuff, this.

Black holes are some of the strangest objects in the universe. But, just as impenetrable a mystery? The heavy cloud cover encircling some black holes. Now, for the first time, researchers say they’ve managed to get a glimpse inside of one of those clouds. And what they found has some serious implications for our most basic understanding of black holes.

Some black holes are shielded by heavy clouds of gas and dust that are so thick that they’re impossible to see through with our telescopes. The reasons why have plagued scientists. But a brand new X-ray view taken by a joint team from NASA and the European Space Agency of galaxy NGC 1068, and the black hole that lies at its center, just changed all that.

Continue reading “We Finally Know What’s Inside These Mysterious Black Hole Clouds” »

Finally, a flying car!

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As conventional computers draw ever closer to their theoretical limit, the race is on to build a machine that can truly harness the unprecedented processing power of quantum computing. And now two research teams have independently demonstrated how entangling atoms from different elements can address the problem of quantum memory errors while functioning within a logic gate framework, and also pass the all-important test of true entanglement.

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