Lifeboat Foundation

Right now, Fast Company reporters (not bots!) are covering how generative AI is enabling us to work better—and more creatively—than we have before. We’ve reported on how Stable Animation is giving creators a team of talented animators akin to having their own Disney studio, how workflow can be supercharged for productivity on Airtable, how you can use it to create more compelling marketing efforts, and even how AI makes a compelling case for liberating workers from the office, amid all the RTO mandates. And we’ve done a deep dive into how UX designers tap into the power of plug-ins like those on Figma to level up all aspects of their work from testing for accessibility to creating final code. If you’re curious, we’ve rounded up a bunch of AI tools you can try for free.

On the flip (read: darker) side, we’re already seeing how generative AI is threatening some jobs. A recently released report from the World Economic Forum revealed a number of jobs that would likely not exist in five years including bank tellers, cashiers, insurance clerks, and legislators, among others. Right now, even makeup artists —who you might think are so hands-on there’s no way they could be replaced—have proven to be dispensable. That’s thanks to a host of tools that can reshape entire video clips. The results are astounding and soon will be as easy to use as a TikTok filter.

Join us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/MichaelLustgartenPhD

Discount Links:
NAD+ Quantification: https://www.jinfiniti.com/intracellular-nad-test/
Use Code: ConquerAging At Checkout.

Continue reading “Grape Seed Proanthocyanidins Increase NAD” »

The ability of the phenomenon of criticality to explain the sudden emergence of new properties in complex systems has fascinated scientists in recent decades. When systems are balanced at their “critical point,” small changes in individual units can trigger outsized events, just as falling pebbles can start an avalanche. That abrupt shift in behavior describes the phase changes of water from ice to liquid to gas, but it’s also relevant to many other situations, from flocks of starlings on the wing to stock market crashes. In the 1990s, the physicist Per Bak and other scientists suggested that the brain might be operating near its own critical point. Ever since then, neuroscientists have been searching for evidence of fractal patterns and power laws at work in the brain’s networks of neurons. What was once a fringe theory has begun to attract more mainstream attention, with researchers now hunting for mechanisms capable of tuning brains toward criticality.

Learn more about the critical brain hypothesis: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-physical-theory-for-when-th…-20230131/

Continue reading “Could One Physics Theory Unlock the Mysteries of the Brain?” »

Much ink has been spilled over fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will eliminate jobs in the economy. While some of those fears may be well-founded, red-hot interest in AI innovation is creating new jobs as well.

This graphic visualizes data from Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm, which shows how many AI-related jobs were posted in each state throughout 2022.

In total there were 795,624 AI jobs posted throughout the year, of which 469,925 (59%) were in the top 10. The full tally is included in the table below.

At Apple’s WWDC23, I think I saw the future. [Pausing to ponder.] Yeah, I’m pretty sure I saw the future–or at least Apple’s vision of the future of computing. On Tuesday morning, I got to try the Apple Vision Pro, the new $3,499 mixed-reality headset that was announced this week and ships next year.

I’m here to tell you the major details of my experience, but the overall impression I have is that the Vision Pro is the most impressive first-gen product I’ve seen from Apple–more impressive than the 1998 iMac, or the 2007 iPhone. And I’m fully aware that other companies have made VR headsets, but Apple does that thing that it does, where it puts its understanding of what makes a satisfying user experience and creates a new product in an existing market that sets a higher bar of excellence.

Yes, it’s expensive, and yes, this market hasn’t proven that it can move beyond being niche. Those are very important considerations to discuss in other articles. For now, I’ll convey my experiences and impressions here, from a one-hour demonstration at Apple Park. (I was not allowed to take photos or record video; the photos posted here were supplied by Apple.) The device I used is an early beta, so it’s possible—likely even—that the hardware or software could change before next year.

Basic, or “elementary,” cellular automata like The Game of Life appeal to researchers working in mathematics and computer science theory, but they can have practical applications too. Some of the elementary cellular automata can be used for random number generation, physics simulations, and cryptography. Others are computationally as powerful as conventional computing architectures—at least in principle. In a sense, these task-oriented cellular automata are akin to an ant colony in which the simple actions of individual ants combine to perform larger collective actions, such as digging tunnels, or collecting food and taking it back to the nest. More “advanced” cellular automata, which have more complicated rules (although still based on neighboring cells), can be used for practical computing tasks such as identifying objects in an image.

Marandi explains: “While we are fascinated by the type of complex behaviors that we can simulate with a relatively simple photonic hardware, we are really excited about the potential of more advanced photonic cellular automata for practical computing applications.”

Marandi says cellular automata are well suited to photonic computing for a couple of reasons. Since information processing is happening at an extremely local level (remember in cellular automata, cells interact only with their immediate neighbors), they eliminate the need for much of the hardware that makes photonic computing difficult: the various gates, switches, and devices that are otherwise required for moving and storing light-based information. And the high-bandwidth nature of photonic computing means cellular automata can run incredibly fast. In traditional computing, cellular automata might be designed in a computer language, which is built upon another layer of “machine” language below that, which itself sits atop the binary zeroes and ones that make up digital information.

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

A notorious ransom gang has gone on a cyberattacking spree.

A notorious LockBit Russia-linked ransomware gang has been enjoying a spree of cybercrime attacks, claiming 24 victims in a span of 24 hours. They are the most bountiful ransomware gang on the cybercrime scene, with the DarkFeed monitoring website tracking its total haul of victims at close to 1,800 at the time of writing.

A new theory has radically revised Stephen Hawking’s 1974 theory of black holes to predict that all objects with mass may eventually disappear.

When we communicate with others over wireless networks, information is sent to data centers where it is collected, stored, processed, and distributed. As computational energy usage continues to grow, it is on pace to potentially become the leading source of energy consumption in this century. Memory and logic are physically separated in most modern computers, and therefore the interaction between these two components is very energy intensive in accessing, manipulating, and re-storing data.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State University is exploring materials that could possibly lead to the integration of the memory directly on top of the transistor. By changing the architecture of the microcircuit, processors could be much more efficient and consume less energy. In addition to creating proximity between these components, the nonvolatile materials studied have the potential to eliminate the need for computer memory systems to be refreshed regularly.

Their recent work published in Science explores materials that are ferroelectric, or have a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by the application of an external electric field. Recently discovered wurtzite ferroelectrics, which are mainly composed of materials that are already incorporated in semiconductor technology for integrated circuits, allow for the integration of new power-efficient devices for applications such as non-volatile memory, electro-optics, and energy harvesting.