Lifeboat Foundation

Some possible economic and geopolitical implications.

Human Immortality — If you thought Human Immortality was just a concept in science fiction, this episode reveals how it will become science fact. For some scientists featured in this program, achieving Immortality is not a question of ‘If’. The real question is ‘When?’.

Human Immortality (2022)
Director: Emma Watts.
Writers: Kyle McCabe, Christopher Webb Young.
Stars: Samantha Brady, Aubrey DeGrey, Leonard Guarente.
Genre: Documentary.
Country: United States.
Language: English.
Release Date: August 31, 2022 (United States)

Continue reading “Human Immortality | Life Extension | Advancements in Science” »

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a term for Artificial Intelligence systems that meet or exceed human performance on the broad range of tasks that humans are capable of performing. There are benefits and downsides to AGI. On the upside, AGIs can do most of the labor that consume a vast amount of humanity’s time and energy. AGI can herald a utopia where no one has wants that cannot be fulfilled. AGI can also result in an unbalanced situation where one (or a few) companies dominate the economy, exacerbating the existing dichotomy between the top 1% and the rest of humankind. Beyond that, the argument goes, a super-intelligent AGI could find it beneficial to enslave humans for its own purposes, or exterminate humans so as to not compete for resources. One hypothetical scenario is that an AGI that is smarter than humans can simply design a better AGI, which can, in turn, design an even better AGI, leading to something called hard take-off and the singularity.

I do not know of any theory that claims that AGI or the singularity is impossible. However, I am generally skeptical of arguments that Large Language Models such the GPT series (GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-X) are on the pathway to AGI. This article will attempt to explain why I believe that to be the case, and what I think is missing should humanity (or members of the human race) so choose to try to achieve AGI. I will also try to convey a sense for why it is easy to talk about the so-called “recipe for AGI” in the abstract but why physics itself will prevent any sudden and unexpected leap from where we are now to AGI or super-AGI.

To achieve AGI it seems likely we will need one or more of the following:

Countering China and bolstering national security dominated the conversation in a Hilton hotel on Guam, 15 hours before and oceans away from the Milwaukee arena hosting the first Republican primary debate.

Nine members of the GOP-led House committee on natural resources convened in the US-governed Pacific island territory for a rare field hearing – during the summer recess – on countering China’s influence in the region.

At a time when Democrats and Republicans view China as an economic and global security threat, island nations who offer the US military proximity to China in exchange for aid emphasized they are especially vulnerable to Chinese cyber-attacks and economic exploitation as they struggle to recover from the pandemic.

In order to enhance the accessibility of hydrogen-powered vehicles and establish hydrogen as a viable energy source, it’s imperative to reduce the cost of hydrogen production, thereby achieving economic feasibility. To achieve this goal, maximizing the efficiency of electrolysis-hydrogen evolution, the process responsible for producing hydrogen from water, is crucial.

Recently, a team of researchers comprising Professor In Su Lee, Research Professor Soumen Dutta, and Byeong Su Gu from the Department of Chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) achieved a significant improvement in production efficiency of hydrogen, a green energy source, through the development of a platinum nanocatalyst. They accomplished this feat by depositing two different metals in a stepwise manner.

The findings of their research were published in Angewandte Chemie.

Lots of experts on AI say it can only be as good as the data it’s trained on — basically, it’s garbage in and garbage out.

So with that old computer science adage in mind, what the heck is happening with Google’s AI-driven Search Generative Experience (SGE)? Not only has it been caught spitting out completely false information, but in another blow to the platform, people have now discovered it’s been generating results that are downright evil.

Continue reading “Google’s Search AI Says Slavery Was Good, Actually” »

Why is everyone so worried about teenagers using AI to write their term papers while no one is talking about AI crashing the financial markets? If high school Pat gets an A they didn’t earn that’s one thing, but Megla Corp using AI to corner the stock market and crash the world economy, well that is quite another. I have no proof that large corporations are in a competition to build the perfect trader, the ultimate hedge fund manager, the killer quant, and the optimal analyst all rolled into one ultra-economist AI, but I know, we all know, in our greedy little capitalist hearts, it’s true. This wanna-be hegemonic corporation will have unleashed an economic weapon that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are broke!

The legendary Hedge fund manager Kyle Reese aside, think about the implications of a trading bot that has even just a 2% advantage and how much money that can mean. Casino empires were built on games that have less advantage than that so you are crazy if you don’t think there is a race to build the ultimate TradeGPT. Everyone is looking for an edge because, in a land where money is king, he or she who owns a money printer owns the crown. Wall Street was an early adopter of computers and networks and they got so far out ahead of the regulators that they crashed the market on Black Monday in 1987 dropping the US market almost 25% in a day that sent reverberations around the world.

Texas A&M University’s board of regents voted to approve the construction of a new institute in Houston that hopes to contribute to maintaining the state’s leadership within the aerospace sector.

This week, the Texas A&M Space Institute got the greenlight for its $200 million plan. The announcement follows a $350 million investment from the Texas Legislature. The institute is planned to be constructed next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“The Texas A&M Space Institute will make sure the state expands its role as a leader in the new space economy,” John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M System, says in a news release. “No university is better equipped for aeronautics and space projects than Texas A&M.”

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A new study reveals that artificial intelligence models can actually have varying political opinions. Researchers from Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Xi’an Jiaotong universities worked with 14 large language models (LLMs) and discovered that they all had different political opinions and biases.

According to Interesting Engineering, the researchers presented the language models with 62 politically sensitive statements and asked them to agree or disagree. The answers were then used to create a political compass that measures the degree of social and economic liberalism or conservatism.