Lifeboat Foundation

Perhaps it’s serendipitous, then, that the machines have finally arrived. Truly smart, truly impressive robots and machine learning algorithms that may help usher in a new Green Revolution to keep humans fed on an increasingly mercurial planet. Think satellites that automatically detect drought patterns, tractors that eyeball plants and kill the sick ones, and an AI-powered smartphone app that can tell a farmer what disease has crippled their crop.

Forget scarecrows. The future of agriculture is in the hands of the machines.

A Digital Green Thumb

Continue reading “The Future of Humanity’s Food Supply Is in the Hands of AI” »

And it’s not made of cardboard.

https://www.facebook.com//videos/496701823842355/

Say ‘Goodbye’ to Cracks, Self-Healing Concrete Has Arrived.

Fujitsu is building a robot that uses 3D laser sensors to detect motion without the need for athletes to wear any special suits. The robot will be ready for the Olympics in 2020 in Japan, and will precisely score gymnasts based on measurements taken by the sensors.

Japan is making sure the 2020 Olympics will be a technological festivity. They even may be spending a staggering $8.1 million for an artificial meteor shower.

In addition to the “fireworks,” Fujitsu, in partnership with the Japan Gymnastics Association, is developing the ultimate judge to end all biases in the Olympics: a robot programmed to precisely score gymnasts at the Olympics with absolute fairness by using 3D laser sensors capable of measuring 76,800 points of motion per frame up to 30 times per second.

Continue reading “Fujitsu is Making a Robot to Judge Tokyo’s 2020 Olympics” »

https://www.facebook.com/newscientist/videos/10154279383894589/

This implant turns heartbeat into electricity.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Matt O’Brien.

As the hype and pessimism around blockchain technology converge toward reality over the next several years, one certainty emerging among Wall Street and Main Street traders is that advancements in platform technology will profoundly change how commonly used securities known as derivative contracts will be traded. The distributed ledgers inconceivable just a couple of years ago are on the precipice of ushering in a new era of innovative financial engineering and precision in risk management.

Wall Street firms are beginning to tinker with blockchain and smart contract technology that will allow buyers, sellers and central clearing houses of derivative trades to share information, such as KYC (Know Your Customer), in real time across various distributed ledger platforms unleashing incredible efficiencies.

Continue reading “Blockchain Technology Will Profoundly Change the Derivatives Industry” »

An Israeli medical imaging company has signed a deal with a Utah-based healthcare provider that could change the way we diagnose certain conditions. Zebra Medical Imaging is teaming up with Intermountain to work on a neural network that will compare fresh X-rays with the “millions” stored in its own database. The eventual aim of the project is to offer up suggestions to radiographers and other medical professionals and eliminate costly misdiagnoses.

For instance, let’s imagine that you’ve gone to hospital for some unknown condition and you get an X-ray. Rather than handing the slide to a doctor, who could miss a small shadow or other minor clue, the image would be handed to the computer. It would use deep learning to trawl an anonymized patient database looking for any anomalies that you might be suffering from. The current system will work on bone health, cardiovascular analysis and lung conditions, although who knows where the possibilities will end.

As deep learning technology gets more powerful, smaller and significantly cheaper, the potential for AI to assist doctors becomes more realistic. IBM has spent the last few years pushing Watson, its homegrown supercomputer, as a system to aid decision making for patients. At the same time, companies like LG are trying to shrink medical imaging technology to end the days of bulky hospital equipment being available for a chosen few. All in all, the idea of a medical tricorder is going from fantastical to plausible in less time than you’d expect.

Continue reading “AI ‘doctors’ will diagnose your X-rays” »

Somewhere along the way people started considering me somewhat of an expert on the topic of basic income and so I’m frequently asked for book recommendations. Because of that, I put together a Listmania list, but Listmania no longer exists so I’ve decided to put together a new more comprehensive list here on Medium which I will make a point of updating as new books are released. If you don’t see a book here and think it should be listed, please let me know so I can add it.

Optionally, if you wish to purchase one of these books, please consider using Amazon Smile which you can do by changing www.amazon.com in the url to smile.amazon.com. This will give a portion of the purchase to charity, and the charity I recommend is GiveDirectly because that will help support their historic 10–15 year long universal basic income experiment in West Africa.

Also, due to popular request, books of fiction that include basic income can be found at the end of this list. And if you’re looking for academic papers to read instead, here’s a great list on basicincome.org.

Continue reading “The BIG Library: Books About Basic Income” »