Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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153913542“Creative” machines are already here. There are composition programs that write original music, data analysis programs that produce original news reports, and artistic robots that create original paintings. Leave the composition program running after breakfast, and you’ll have 5,000 chorales by lunch. Immediately after the last NFL game of the week, the analysis program will prepare 300 unique football reports and recaps for you per second. The painting robot can even mix its own paints and wash its own brushes.

But what about fiction? David Cope, the music professor who created Emmy, the composition program that can create 5,000 original music pieces in a morning, says in an email, “I believe that without a doubt computer programs will write novels. Even great novels. It seems to me that we would be selling human creativity short if we didn’t believe that to be true.” That represents quite an endorsement of human ingenuity: We are creative enough to make machines that can relieve us of the need to be creative. However, Joe Procopio of Automated Insights, which provided Yahoo Sports with more than 50 million fantasy football recaps and reports during the 2012 NFL season, takes a more guarded view. “I’m very skeptical of the possibility of machines being able to generate viable fiction in the near term,” he cautions in an email before adding, “But I’m sure it can be done.”

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By BRIAN COHEN

Thanksgiving day, while many of us were eating turkey, The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published JPMorgan Chase’s (Chase) patent application 20130317984, “Method and system for processing internet payments using the electronic funds transfer network.” The application was filed with the USPTO on August 5th, 2013.

Without mentioning Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies at all for that matter, Chase appears to be building a competing centralized network to Bitcoin. The application defines the problems that legacy banking has with online transactions and then provides a detailed explanation how Chase will address these problems with this new technology. The application states that Chase’s technology is a “new paradigm.” Moreover that it permits the creation of “virtual cash” (also referred to as “web cash”) with a “real-time digital exchange of value.”

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Jonah Goldberg, National Review

After you heard President Barack Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots?

But just in case the question didn’t occur to you, let me explain. On Tuesday, the day before Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, the restaurant chain Applebee’s announced that it will install iPad-like tablets at every table. Chili’s already made this move earlier this year.

With these consoles customers will be able to order their meals and pay their checks without dealing with a waiter or waitress. Both companies insist that they won’t be changing their staffing levels, but if you’ve read any science fiction, you know that’s what the masterminds of every robot takeover say: “We’re here to help. We’re not a threat.”

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Altering the surface of orthopaedic implants has already helped patients – and nanotech can fight infections too

One of medicine’s primary objectives is to trick the body into doing something it doesn’t want to do. We try to convince our immune systems to attack cancer cells (our immune systems don’t normally attack our own bodies), we try to convince neurons to regrow (another unnatural phenomenon), and we try to convince the body to accept foreign bits, such as someone else’s kidney or a fake bone. In order to accomplish this, we try to make parts of our bodies we don’t want, such as cancers, look foreign. We try to make foreign bits that we do want, such as orthopaedic implants, look natural. Nanotechnology, as you might have guessed, can help us do just that.

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The leader of the payments business looks to the future and says Bitcoin is a good idea — but not yet actually a currency. Tap-to-pay, meanwhile, is a dud.

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PayPal President David Marcus at LeWeb

PARIS — Online payments will look completely different in the next decade, and Bitcoin has a better chance at revolutionizing commerce than the NFC tap-to-pay technology, PayPal President David Marcus predicted Tuesday.

“I really like Bitcoin. I own bitcoins,” Marcus said at the LeWeb conference here. However, he believes people today don’t correctly understand what bitcoins actually are, and he’s not yet ready to let people link their bitcoin wallets with their PayPal accounts.

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By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer

Smart home

Picture the scene: It’s a few days before Christmas. Your fridge is stocked with ingredients for a feast — and it knows exactly when you bought each item so you don’t use anything past its expiration date.

Your Aunt Edna flies in today and will reach your house before you’re home from work, so you use your smartphone to tell your garage door to open to let her in. Oops, you forgot to program the thermostat to heat the house up early, but no worries. Motion sensors embedded in your home will cue your heating system to start cranking when she enters.

Meanwhile, you flip through a magazine that shows a photo of a cozy home, bathed in yellow light. You grab your phone and take a picture, and then use that photo to tell your wireless-enabled lightbulb system to recreate the lighting. On Christmas morning, you’ll program those same bulbs gradually to light up the house a little earlier than usual — perfect for starting the annual present-unwrapping frenzy.

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Tim Parker, Benzinga Staff Writer

Before scientists create something that has mainstream uses, it often starts as science fiction.

A new technology deep within IBM’s (NYSE: IBM [FREE Stock Trend Analysis]) Singapore research facility isn’t quite ready for the mainstream but when it is, the implications for those who suffer from fungal infections and later, other infections, could have a new ally in their fight but this ally is completely different than current treatments.

If you’re a fan of Star Trek, you’ve seen nanotechnology. These are microscopic machines that get inside machines or in this case, the body, to identify and fix problems.

Scientists have developed a nanomedicine 1,000 times small than a grain of sand that fights fungal infections. Here’s how it works: By creating an electrical charge on each of these tiny particles, they can be programmed to attack only fungal cells while leaving healthy cells alone.

The particles attach themselves to the fungi and rip their cellular membranes apart killing the cell.

This is different than conventional treatments in that it’s a physical attack where the cell is torn apart instead of a drug-like attack where the cell is put to sleep. By killing the cell, there is no opportunity for it to develop a resistance to the nanoparticle. This eliminates the growing problem plaguing doctors: Infections that are increasingly becoming resistant to current therapies.

“It rips the membrane out in a physical attack,” said IBM scientist, James Hedric. “It’s kind of like popping a balloon. We don’t put them to sleep like most drugs do. We kill them. That is why it is so effective. And they can’t adapt to a physical attack. They can adapt to drugs.”

By Danielle Elliot CBS News

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/12/09/article-2520818-19FB489500000578-0_634x345.jpg

German postal carrier Deutsche Post DHL is testing a drone delivery service that could deliver medical and food supplies to areas with minimal road access.

On Monday, the company ran a test delivery of its so-called “parcelcopter.” In a flight that lasted two minutes, remote-controlled drone carried a batch of medicine from a pharmacy in the city of Bonn to the company’s headquarters, just across the Rhine River.

The test came just a week after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced on 60 Minutes that his company is developing plans for drone delivery, though it still faces many technological and legal hurdles.

In the DHL test, with two employees controlling it from the ground, the drone flew a little more than half a mile, at a height of about 165 feet.

It is capable of carrying up to 2.6 pounds, and can autonomously navigate using GPS coordinates. The drone cost about $54,900, according to Reuters.

“We are at the beginning of the research project,” DHL manager Ole Nordhoff told Germany’s English news service The Local. “It is an exciting bit of technology.”

Facebook is diving headlong into AI.

The company plans to launch expand its research laboratory dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence, and has hired New York University professor Yann LeCun to spearhead the effort.

The goal, according to LeCun, is long-term: To bring about major advances in the field, while doubling down in a research partnership with NYU to intensely study machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence.

The news of the hire, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to announce at an industry conference on Monday, comes courtesy of LeCun himself, who posted his new position at Facebook to his Google+ and Facebook pages (thanks, Yann!). LeCun plans to continue working and teaching at NYU, as well.

“The new AI Group at Facebook will have locations in Menlo Park, CA, in London, UK, and at Facebook’s new facility in New York City, one block away from NYU’s main campus,” LeCun wrote.

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Summary:

The incident, which was probably a case of the French finance ministry going overboard in its efforts to monitor employee activities, provides a timely reminder of how certificates are the weak point in online security.

Google appears to have caught the French finance ministry spying on its workers’ internet traffic by spoofing Google security certificates, judging from an episode that took place last week.

The web firm said in a blog post on Saturday that, on the preceding Tuesday, it had become aware of “unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains.” It tracked the provenance of these certificates back to ANSSI, the French state information security agency, which in turn pointed to the Treasury as the culprit.

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