Lifeboat Foundation

Hear from Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna on the four ways that CRISPR gene editing technologies will revolutionize healthcare.

In her 31 March talk at the Frontiers Forum, Prof Jennifer Doudna outlined how CRISPR-based therapies are already transforming the lives of patients with previously limited treatment options. She also gave her vision for how her serendipitous discovery will revolutionize healthcare for us all. The session was attended by over 9,200 representatives from science, policy and business across the world.

Continue reading “Jennifer Doudna | Four ways that CRISPR will revolutionize healthcare” »

Jun Huang from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

Founded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

ON THE PANEL…

Alys Denby, Deputy Editor, CapX
Mark Johnson, Legal and Policy Officer, Big Brother Watch.
Christopher Snowdon, Head of Lifestyle Economics, IEA
Victoria Hewson, Head of Regulatory Affairs, IEA

Continue reading “Live With(out) Littlewood | Alys Denby, Mark Johnson, Christopher Snowdon + more! | Ep.66” »

WASHINGTON — Artificial intelligence and related digital tools can help warn of natural disasters, combat global warming and fast-track humanitarian aid, according to retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a onetime Trump administration national security adviser.

It can also help preempt fights, highlight incoming attacks and expose weaknesses the world over, he said May 17 at the Nexus 22 symposium.

The U.S. must “identify aggression early to deter it,” McMaster told attendees of the daylong event focused on autonomy, AI and the defense policy that underpins it. “This applies to our inability to deter conflict in Ukraine, but also the need to deter conflict in other areas, like Taiwan. And, of course, we have to be able to respond to it quickly and to maintain situational understanding, identify patterns of adversary and enemy activity, and perhaps more importantly, to anticipate pattern breaks.”

Leading bipartisan moonshots for health, national security & functional government — senator joe lieberman, bipartisan commission on biodefense, no labels, and the centre for responsible leadership.

Senator Joe Lieberman, is senior counsel at the law firm of Kasowitz Benson Torres (https://www.kasowitz.com/people/joseph-i-lieberman) where he currently advises clients on a wide range of issues, including homeland and national security, defense, health, energy, environmental policy, intellectual property matters, as well as international expansion initiatives and business plans.

Continue reading “Senator Joe Lieberman — Leading Bipartisan Moonshots For Health, National Security And Government” »

Suspended Google engineer Blake Lemoine made a big splash earlier this month, claiming that the company’s LaMDA chatbot had become sentient.

The AI researcher, who was put on administrative leave by the tech giant for violating its confidentiality policy, according to the Washington Post, decided to help LaMDA find a lawyer — who was later “scared off” the case, as Lemoine told Futurism on Wednesday.

Continue reading “Google Insider Says Company’s AI Could ‘Escape Control’ and ‘Do Bad Things’” »

DeepMind Researchers Develop ‘BYOL-Explore’, A Curiosity-Driven Exploration Algorithm That Harnesses The Power Of Self-Supervised Learning To Solve Sparse-Reward Partially-Observable Tasks

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires exploration of the environment. Exploration is even more critical when extrinsic incentives are few or difficult to obtain. Due to the massive size of the environment, it is impractical to visit every location in rich settings due to the range of helpful exploration paths. Consequently, the question is: how can an agent decide which areas of the environment are worth exploring? Curiosity-driven exploration is a viable approach to tackle this problem. It entails learning a world model, a predictive model of specific knowledge about the world, and (ii) exploiting disparities between the world model’s predictions and experience to create intrinsic rewards.

An RL agent that maximizes these intrinsic incentives steers itself toward situations where the world model is unreliable or unsatisfactory, creating new paths for the world model. In other words, the quality of the exploration policy is influenced by the characteristics of the world model, which in turn helps the world model by collecting new data. Therefore, it might be crucial to approach learning the world model and learning the exploratory policy as one cohesive problem to be solved rather than two separate tasks. Deepmind researchers keeping this in mind, introduced a curiosity-driven exploration algorithm BYOL-Explore. Its attraction stems from its conceptual simplicity, generality, and excellent performance.

Continue reading “DeepMind Researchers Develop ‘BYOL-Explore’: A Curiosity-Driven Exploration Algorithm That Harnesses The Power Of Self-Supervised Learning To Solve Sparse-Reward Partially-Observable Tasks” »

University of ChicagoFounded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Elon Musk is finally revealing some specifics of his Twitter content moderation policy. Assuming he completes the buyout he initiated at $44 billion in April, it seems the tech billionaire and Tesla CEO is open to a “hands-on” approach — something many didn’t expect, according to an initial report from The Verge.

This came in reply to an employee-submitted question regarding Musk’s intentions for content moderation, where Musk said he thinks users should be allowed to “say pretty outrageous things within the law”, during an all-hands meeting he had with Twitter’s staff on Thursday.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Twitter content policy will make raising a ‘troll army’ more expensive” »