Lifeboat Foundation

In an article published yesterday in MIT Technology Review, Rachel Nuwer wrote a thought provoking piece exploring the boundaries between life and death.

Beyond the brain and brain death itself, related efforts are studying and attempting to develop techniques for restoring metabolic function in a number of organs other than the brain after death, including the heart and kidneys, which could greatly enhance organ donation capabilities.

While these developments are promising, researchers caution against overpromising. The path to these medical advancements is paved with years of research and ethical considerations. The exploration into the dying process will surely challenge not only scientific and medical fields but also societal, theological, and legal considerations, as it reshapes our understanding of one of life’s most profound phenomena. At some point, policy and regulations will need to follow—further adding to the complexity of the topic.

Continue reading “Re-Thinking The ‘When’ And ‘How’ Of Brain Death” »

One question has relentlessly followed ChatGPT in its trajectory to superstar status in the field of artificial intelligence: Has it met the Turing test of generating output indistinguishable from human response?

Two researchers at the University of California at San Diego say it comes close, but not quite.

ChatGPT may be smart, quick and impressive. It does a good job at exhibiting apparent intelligence. It sounds humanlike in conversations with people and can even display humor, emulate the phraseology of teenagers, and pass exams for law school.

An hypothesized term to fix a small mathematical inconsistency predicted electromagnetic waves, and that they had all the properties of light that were observed before and after him in the Nineteenth Century. Unwittingly, he also pointed science inexorably in the direction of the special theory of relativity

My last two articles, two slightly different takes on “recipes” for understanding Electromagnetism, show how Maxwell’s equations can be understood as arising from the highly special relationships between the electric and magnetic components within the Faraday tensor that is “enforced” by the assumption that the Gauss flux laws, equivalent to Coulomb’s inverse square force law, must be Lorentz covariant (consistent with Special Relativity).

From the standpoint of Special Relativity, there is obviously something very special going on behind these laws, which are clearly not from the outset Lorentz covariant. What i mean is that, as vector laws in three dimensional space, there is no way you can find a general vector field that fulfills them and deduce that it is Lorentz covariant — it simply won’t be so in general. There has to be something else further specializing that field’s relationship with the world to ensure such an in-general-decidedly-NOT-Lorentz covariant equation is, indeed covariant.

A recent study published in AGU Advances examines how the conservation and protection of two Alaskan forests, Tongass and Chugach, are essential in fighting the effects of climate change due to their expanse for wildlife habitats, abundant carbon stocks, and landscape integrity. This study was led by researchers from Oregon State University and holds the potential to help scientists better understand the steps that need to be taken to mitigate the long-term effects of climate change by preserving the resources of today.

Tongass National Forest (Credit: Logan Berner)

“More thoroughly safeguarding those forests from industrial development would contribute significantly to climate change mitigation and species adaptation in the face of the severe ecological disruption that’s expected to occur over the next few decades as the climate rapidly gets warmer,” said Dr. Beverly Law, who is a Professor Emeritus of Global Change Biology & Terrestrial Systems Science at Oregon State University and lead author of the study.

Artificial intelligence already wears multiple hats in the workplace, whether its writing ad copy, handling customer support requests, or filtering job applications. As the technology continues its ascent and capabilities, the notion of corporations managed or owned by AI becomes less far-fetched. The legal framework already exists to allow “Zero-member LLCs.”

How would an AI-operated LLC be treated under the law, and how would AI respond to legal responsibilities or consequences as the owner/manager of an LLC? These questions speak to an unprecedented challenge facing lawmakers: the regulation of a nonhuman entity with the same (or better) cognitive capabilities as humans that, if left unresolved or poorly addressed, could slip beyond human control.

“Artificial intelligence and interspecific law,” an article by Daniel Gervais of Vanderbilt Law School and John Nay of The Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University, and a Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt, argues for more AI research on the legal compliance of nonhumans with human-level intellectual capacity.

Nuclear arms are the most destructive, indiscriminate and monstrous weapons ever produced – but today, we can all celebrate a major milestone in the long march towards peace: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is now part of international law!

The year 2021 also marks the 50th anniversary of Greenpeace, which began life in September 1971 when a small group of activists set sail to the island of Amchitka, off the west coast of Alaska, to try and stop nuclear weapons testing from taking place. Greenpeace could not be more delighted that in the anniversary year of our founding journey, we can join the celebration to mark this historic Treaty coming into force and pay our deepest respects to advocates for this momentous achievement, led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

Greenpeace France interviewed Jean-Marie Collin of ICAN France about the challenges and prospects that arise from the Treaty’s entry into force.

In a world first, artificial intelligence demonstrated the ability to negotiate a contract autonomously with another artificial intelligence without any human involvement.

British AI firm Luminance developed an AI system based on its own proprietary large language model (LLM) to automatically analyze and make changes to contracts. LLMs are a type of AI algorithm that can achieve general-purpose language processing and generation.

Jaeger Glucina, chief of staff and managing director of Luminance, said the company’s new AI aimed to eliminate much of the paperwork that lawyers typically need to complete on a day-to-day basis.

Dr. Isaac Asimov was a prolific science fiction author, biochemist, and professor. He was best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science essays. Born in Russia in 1920 and brought to the United States by his family as a young child, he went on to become one of the most influential figures in the world of speculative fiction. He wrote hundreds of books on a variety of topics, but he’s especially remembered for series like the “Foundation” series and the “Robot” series.
Asimov’s science fiction often dealt with themes and ideas that pertained to the future of humanity.

The “Foundation” series for example, introduced the idea of “psychohistory” – a mathematical way of predicting the future based on large population behaviors. While we don’t have psychohistory as described by Asimov, his works did reflect the belief that societies operate on understandable and potentially predictable principles.

Continue reading “Isaac Asimov Predicts The Future In 1982. Was He Correct?” »

The US has relied on computer simulations since 1992 for verifying the performance of its nuclear stockpile but will soon get more realistic estimates.

Three US national defense labs are engaged in the process of building a test site, one thousand feet under the ground in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that will send powerful X-rays and verify the reliability of the country’s nuclear stockpile, a press release said.

The US nuclear program heavily relied on actual testing of warheads to determine if its stockpile could serve as a deterrent when called upon. This, however, changed in 1992, after then-President George H.W. Bush signed a law calling for a moratorium on nuclear testing.