Lifeboat Foundation

The artificial intelligence chatbot asked the believers in the fully packed St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth to rise from the pews and praise the Lord.

The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar, then began preaching to the more than 300 people who had shown up on Friday morning for an experimental Lutheran church service almost entirely generated by AI.

“Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany,” the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotonous voice.

A vast fungal web braids together life on Earth. Merlin Sheldrake wants to help us see it.

Tesla has unveiled a new retail concept called ‘Giga Laboratory’, which appears to be a showcase of its manufacturing capacity.

While Tesla announced a move to online sales and moved back from physical retail back in 2019, the automaker has, in practice, continued to rely heavily on retail locations as part of its marketing effort.

In fact, Tesla’s number of physical locations (retail and service) has more than doubled to now 1,000 locations around the work over the last 3 years.

The General Theory of General Intelligence: A Pragmatic Patternist Perspective — paper by Ben Goertzel: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15100 Abstract: “A multi-decade exploration into the theoretical foundations of artificial and natural general intelligence, which has been expressed in a series of books and papers and used to guide a series of practical and research-prototype software systems, is reviewed at a moderate level of detail. The review covers underlying philosophies (patternist philosophy of mind, foundational phenomenological and logical ontology), formalizations of the concept of intelligence, and a proposed high level architecture for AGI systems partly driven by these formalizations and philosophies. The implementation of specific cognitive processes such as logical reasoning, program learning, clustering and attention allocation in the context and language of this high level architecture is considered, as is the importance of a common (e.g. typed metagraph based) knowledge representation for enabling “cognitive synergy” between the various processes. The specifics of human-like cognitive architecture are presented as manifestations of these general principles, and key aspects of machine consciousness and machine ethics are also treated in this context. Lessons for practical implementation of advanced AGI in frameworks such as OpenCog Hyperon are briefly considered.“
Talk held at AGI17 — http://agi-conference.org/2017/#AGI17 #AGI #ArtificialIntelligence #Understanding #MachineUnderstanding #CommonSence #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence #PhilMind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenceMany thanks for tuning in!

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Continue reading “Ben Goertzel — Approaches Towards a General Theory of General AI” »

One thing all quantum computers have in common is the fact that they manipulate information encoded in quantum states. But that’s where the similarities end, because those quantum states can be induced in everything from superconducting circuits to trapped ions, ultra-cooled atoms, photons, and even silicon chips.

While some of these approaches have attracted more investment than others, we’re still a long way from the industry settling on a common platform. And in the world of academic research, experimentation still abounds.

Now, a team from the University of Chicago has taken crucial first steps towards building a quantum computer that can encode information in phonons, the fundamental quantum units that make up sound waves in much the same way that photons make up light beams.

Summary: A novel artificial intelligence system, the semantic decoder, can translate brain activity into continuous text. The system could revolutionize communication for people unable to speak due to conditions like stroke.

This non-invasive approach uses fMRI scanner data, turning thoughts into text without requiring any surgical implants. While not perfect, this AI system successfully captures the essence of a person’s thoughts half of the time.

A discussion of the fascinating concept of space folding as it is presented in the Dune legendarium. In order to fill the needs of the vast interstellar empire of Frank Herbert’s universe the mechanism of space-folding is heavily relied upon. This form of faster-than-light travel enables spaceships to traverse astronomical distances instantaneously, and has proven crucial in shaping its social, economic, and political dynamics. Spoiler warning if you are unfamiliar with Frank Herbert’s Dune.

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Continue reading “Space Folding Explained | Spacing Guild Navigation | Dune Lore” »

Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer talks about Oppenheimer and about his Alternate History book: The Oppenheimer Alternative.

Where to find ‘The Oppenheimer Alternative” book?
Robert J. Sawyer’s website: https://sfwriter.com.

Continue reading “Oppenheimer — with Robert J. Sawyer” »

The latest recruit at SpaceX is a software engineer who passed its “technically challenging” and “fun” interview process.

What’s different about Kairan Quazi is that he’s just 14 years old.

He said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday: “I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a software engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”