Lifeboat Foundation

Still keeping my optics working looking for news to apply to your cyberpunk games and writings.

A way to defend against counterfeit drugs and maybe food too, miniature edible barcodes. Inexpensive, practical and readable with a slight modification of a smart phone.

For some reason, the idea of edible food wrappers just seems very cyberpunk to me. Full of advertising and nutrition!

Machines enrich and enhance our lives, whether it’s the smartphones that allow us to stay connected or the supercomputers that solve our toughest computational problems. Imagine how much more productive and innovative our world will be when computers become infinitely more powerful. Indeed, the growing field of quantum computing may make our current technological capacities look feeble and primitive in comparison. It could even transform the workings of the human brain and revolutionize how we think in ways we can’t begin to imagine.

Today, computers operate at the most basic level by manipulating two states: a zero or a one. In contrast, quantum computers are not limited to two states, but can encode information in multiple states that exist in superposition, also known as quantum bits or qubits.

Continue reading “This Is Your Brain on Quantum Computers” »

How we can use CRISPR/Cas9 to treat the processes of aging.

Oliver Medvedik, Cofounder of the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and the Lifespan.io Crowdfunding platform, discusses the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system in depth and highlights how it may be used to help overcome the diseases and disabilities of aging. He also gives an overview of other promising areas in aging research, such as senescent cell-clearing drugs, or “senolytics”, and “augmentive” compounds that may help restore the body to youthful functionality.

Continue reading “CRISPR Cas9: Will it Cure Aging? — Talk” »

Technology for reading signals directly from the brain developed by Stanford Bio-X scientists could provide a way for people with movement disorders to communicate.

The system directly reads brain signals to drive a cursor moving over a keyboard. In a pilot experiment conducted with monkeys, the animals were able to transcribe passages from the New York Times and Hamlet at a rate of 12 words per minute.

Continue reading “Direct brain-sensing technology allows typing at a rate of 12 words per minute” »

I was interviewed by The Express on AI:

WHICHEVER nation develops AI first will completely control the military landscape as the machine has the potential to be ten times as devastating as the nuclear bomb, an expert has warned.

A new survey of existing and planned smart weapons finds that AI is increasingly used to replace humans, not help them.

The Pentagon’s oft-repeated line on artificial intelligence is this: we need much more of it, and quickly, in order to help humans and machines work better alongside one another. But a survey of existing weapons finds that the U.S. military more commonly uses AI not to help but to replace human operators, and, increasingly, human decision making.

The report from the Elon Musk-funded Future of Life Institute does not forecast Terminators capable of high-level reasoning. At their smartest, our most advanced artificially intelligent weapons are still operating at the level of insects … armed with very real and dangerous stingers.

Continue reading “Report: Weapons AI Increasingly Replacing, Not Augmenting, Human Decision Making” »

Construction just got a lot faster 🏠.

If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The obvious answer is yes—a tree falling makes a sound whether or not we hear it—but certain experts in quantum mechanics argue that without an observer, all possible realities exist. That means that the tree both falls and doesn’t fall, makes a sound and is silent, and all other possibilities therein. This was the crux of the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Learn more about it in the video below.

Does reality exist when we’re not watching?

One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is to make computers more similar to the human brain. We want them to speak, understand and solve problems — and now we want them to see and recognize images.

For a long time, our smartest computers were blind. Now, they can see.

This is a revolution made possible by deep learning.

Continue reading “How deep learning allowed computers to see” »