Lifeboat Foundation

Forget curves. Check out Lenovo’s concept flexible phone.

Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and founder of Space X, Tesla and Paypal, has told an interviewer there is only a “one in billions” chance that we’re not living in a computer simulation.

Speaking at San Francisco’s Code Conference this week, Musk said that he has had “so many simulation discussions it’s crazy”, and that it got to the point where “every conversation [he had] was the AI/simulation conversation”.

He also claimed that, if we’re not living in a simulation, we could be approaching the end of the world.

Continue reading “We are ‘almost definitely’ living in a Matrix-style simulation, claims Elon Musk” »

Interesting perspective by Forrester.

For users who push their infrastructure to the max, public cloud virtual machines sometimes aren’t enough, so a new class of hosted bare metal infrastructure has emerged.

Google is to trying to combine the Adiabatic Quantum computing AQC method with the digital approach’s error-correction capabilities.

The Google team uses a row of nine solid-state qubits, fashioned from cross-shaped films of aluminium about 400 micrometres from tip to tip. These are deposited onto a sapphire surface. The researchers cool the aluminium to 0.02 degrees kelvin, turning the metal into a superconductor with no electrical resistance. Information can then be encoded into the qubits in their superconducting state.

The interactions between neighboring qubits are controlled by ‘logic gates’ that steer the qubits digitally into a state that encodes the solution to a problem. As a demonstration, the researchers instructed their array to simulate a row of magnetic atoms with coupled spin states — a problem thoroughly explored in condensed-matter physics. They could then look at the qubits to determine the lowest-energy collective state of the spins that the atoms represented.

Continue reading “Google team predicts quantum computing supremacy over classical computing around 2018 with a 40 qubit universal quantum computer” »

Remember when we played with Google’s Deep Dream neural network to create trippy visuals that featured a whole lot dogs? The creators behind the short film Sunspring do. Instead of Google’s product, however, they turned to a neural network named “Jetson” to do all the heavy lifting. The result? A bizarre nine minutes that you’ll remember for quite some time.

Starring Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp, the short features a special script compiled by the neural network that even wrote a song unique to the film. After being fed scripts like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Watchmen and Aliens (as well as tons of others) it produced a nonsensical mess that actually works quite well in practice. It’s terrible. But then again, it’s so intense it’s entertaining. The film was shot and edited in 48 hours, which is a feat considering how polished it looks in practice.

As one character says “Well, I don’t know anything about any of this, so…” You might get that feeling after viewing the film, but it’s just like watching the insane ramblings of porn stars in Vernon Chatman’s Final Flesh. They’re both eerily similar in tone, though Sunspring is far more incoherent. Check it out for yourself below.

Continue reading “This short film was written by a sci-fi hungry neural network” »

Theoretical physicists have confirmed that it’s not just the information coded into our DNA that shapes who we are — it’s also the way DNA folds itself that controls which genes are expressed inside our bodies.

That’s something biologists have known for years, and they’ve even been able to figure out some of the proteins responsible for folding up DNA. But now a group of physicists have been able to demonstrate for the first time through simulations how this hidden information controls our evolution.

Let’s back up for a second here, because although it’s not necessarily news to many scientists, this second level of DNA information might not be something you’re familiar with.

Continue reading “Physicists confirm there’s a second layer of information hidden in our DNA” »

Ric Edelman is one the top financial advisors in the US. His firm, Edelman Financial Services, has 41 offices across the country. And he thinks, all things constant, most financial advisors as we’ve known them won’t be around much longer.

At Exponential Finance, Edelman said, “I firmly believe that in the next ten years, half of all the financial advisors in this country will be gone.”

Continue reading “Exponential Finance: Financial Advice In the Age of AI and Long Life” »

Facebook launched a feature that allows users to upload photos with 360-degree views on Thursday.

Apart from photos taken from 360-degree cameras, panoramic photos taken on a mobile phone can be converted to a 360-degree view on the newsfeed, the company said on Thursday.

The photos can also be seen in virtual reality compatible devices, Facebook said.

Continue reading “Now you can upload photos to Facebook with 360-degree views” »

Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Watch live as hundreds of the world’s leading investors, entrepreneurs and innovators gather in New York to define the future of the way we do business.

In Bitcoin’s early years computer scientists and early adopters were running the show. Now, a new community of academics, entrepreneurs, and economists, are working with cryptocurrencies and blockchain to bring the technology to a new set of diverse applications.

From building peer-to-peer networks for secure data computation and storage to decentralized content management systems that give patients access to health-care records across hospital databases, blockchain and digital currencies are starting to rewrite the rules of the 21st century transaction.

Continue reading “Digital Currency Tech Will as Be Transformative as the Internet” »