Lifeboat Foundation

July 9 update:
_{3 days after posting, Visa acknowledged that Bitcoin has a future in payments. This is an understatement, of course. The bank described below goes a step further by acknowledging that the entire financial infrastructure may cave to cryptocurrencies.}

French bank BNP Paribas warned customers and investors that the technology behind bitcoin might one day overtake conventional, account-based financial institutions, thus rendering existing companies redundant (that’s British for “obsolete”).* It’s a tectonic acknowledgement from one of the world’s biggest banks.

Analyst Johann Palychata writes in the company’s magazine Quintessence that Bitcoin’s blockchain, the underlying architecture that allows cryptocurrency to function, “should be considered as an invention like the steam or combustion engine,” that has the potential to transform the world of finance and beyond.

Check out the full story by Oscar Williams-Grut at Business Insider.

Continue reading “Major bank admits bitcoin could destroy banks, brokers & exchanges” »

Christoph Niemann Q: Is it OK to kick a robot? A: Robots: They’re just like us! Just look at them go! Exploring the ocean floor! Assembling cars! Detonating explosive devices! Vacuuming the living room! Performing surgery! I read about one, called OSHbot, that works at a hardware store in San Jose, greeting customers in five…

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This is quite the interesting article, but the sheer number of unknowns that surround the Fermi Paradox, without even taking into consideration all the hypotheticals of a potential multiverse, pretty much render the whole thing scientifically pointless.

That said, Philosophically speaking, it’s priceless.

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“Genetic improvement involves writing an automated “programmer” who manipulates the source code of a piece of software through trial and error with a view to making it work more efficiently. This might include swapping lines of code around, deleting lines and inserting new ones – very much like a human programmer. Each manipulation is then tested against some quality measure to determine if the new version of the code is an improvement over the old version. It is about taking large software systems and altering them slightly to achieve better results. Read more

Remember a few weeks back, when we learned that Google’s artificial neural network was having creepy daydreams, turning buildings into acid trips and landscapes into Magic Eye pictures? Well, prepare to never sleep again, because last week, Google made its “inceptionism” algorithm available to the public, and the nightmarish images are cropping up everywhere.

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“If goodwill and curiosity aren’t motivating researchers to work with open-source data on their own, there is still something that probably will: human limitation. ‘We have tiny little brains. We can’t understand the big stuff anymore,’ said Paul Cohen, a DARPA program manager in the Information and Innovation Office. ‘Machines will read the literature, machines will build complicated models, because frankly we can’t.’ When all you have to do is let your algorithms loose on a trove of publicly available data, there won’t be any reason not to pull in everything that’s out there. ” Read more

A publically crowdfunded, owned and operated space program. Follow Bitnation for updates.

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Elon Musk has donated millions to the Future of Life Institute, and now the organization is putting that money to use by funding research into keeping artificial intelligence “robust and…

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I just discovered that a second 12-min video on transhumanism was done by YouTube personalities Rhett and Link on Good Morning MORE. This one explores transhumanism in a balanced but humorous way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjYbcxeXn88

Their first transhumanism video on Good Mythical Morning is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1PF99LtBLQ

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