Lifeboat Foundation

From high-tech fighting machines to supercomputers and killer robots, science fiction has a lot to say about war. You might be surprised to learn that some governments (including the UK and France) are now turning their attention to these fantastical stories as a way to think about possible futures and try and ward off any potential threats.

For many years now, science fiction writers have made prophesies about futuristic technologies that have later become a reality. In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted the internet. And in 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that modern life would become impossible without computers.

Continue reading “Science Fiction Is Influencing How We Conduct War And We Might Not Like The Results” »

This paper aims to promote a quantum framework that analyzes Industry 4.0 cyber-physical systems more efficiently than traditional simulations used to represent integrated systems. The paper proposes a novel configuration of distributed quantum circuits in multilayered complex networks that enable the evaluation of industrial value creation chains. In particular, two different mechanisms for the integration of information between circuits operating at different layers are proposed, where their behavior is analyzed and compared with the classical conditional probability tables linked to the Bayesian networks. With the proposed method, both linear and nonlinear behaviors become possible while the complexity remains bounded. Applications in the case of Industry 4.0 are discussed when a component’s health is under consideration, where the effect of integration between different quantum cyber-physical digital twin models appears as a relevant implication.

Subject terms: Quantum simulation, Qubits.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are integrations of computational and physical components that can interact with humans through new and different modalities. A key to future technological development is precisely this new and different capacity of interaction together with the new possibilies that these systems pose for expanding the capabilities of the physical world through computation, communication and control¹. When CPS are understood within the industrial practice fueled by additional technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), people refer to the Industry 4.0 paradigm². The design of many industrial engineering systems has been performed by separately considering the control system design from the hardware and/or software implementation details.

ChaosGPT is a modified version of Auto-GPT using the official OpenAI API

ChaosGPT’s Twitter account: @chaos_gpt

Can we connect human brains together? What are the limits of what we can do with our brain? Is BrainNet our future?
In science fiction movies, scientists’ brains are downloaded into computers and criminal brains are connected to the Internet. Interesting, but how does it work in real life?
Original title: The greedy brain.
Scientific journalist Rob van Hattum wondered what information we can truly get from our brain and came across an extraordinary scientific experience.
An experiment where the brains of two rats were directly connected: one rat was in the United States and the other rat was in Brazil. They could influence the brain of the other directly. Miguel Nicolelis is the Brazilian neurologist who conducted this experiment. In his book ‘Beyond Boundaries’ he describes his special experiences in detail and predicts that it should be possible to create a kind of BrainNet.
For Backlight, Rob van Hattum went to Sao Paulo and also visited all Dutch neuroscientists, looking for what the future holds for our brain. He connected his own brain to computers and let it completely be scanned, searching for the limits of reading out the brain.
Originally broadcasted by VPRO in 2014.
© VPRO Backlight July 2014

On VPRO broadcast you will find nonfiction videos with English subtitles, French subtitles and Spanish subtitles, such as documentaries, short interviews and documentary series.
VPRO Documentary publishes one new subtitled documentary about current affairs, finance, sustainability, climate change or politics every week. We research subjects like politics, world economy, society and science with experts and try to grasp the essence of prominent trends and developments.

Continue reading “Connecting Brains: The BrainNet — VPRO documentary” »

An app called Poe will now let users make their own chatbot using prompts combined with an existing bot, like ChatGPT, as the base. First launched publicly in February, Poe is the latest product from the Q&A site Quora, which has long provided web searchers with answers to the most Googled questions. With chatbots now potentially powering the future of web search and Q&A, the company chose to expand into this market by allowing consumers to play with the latest AI technologies from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic via a simple mobile interface.

Initially, Poe debuted with support for a handful of general knowledge chatbots including Sage and Dragonfly, powered by OpenAI technology, and Claude, powered by Anthropic. Last month, Poe rolled out subscriptions that allow users to pay to access the more powerful bots based on new language models, including GPT-4 from OpenAI and Claude+ from Anthropic. Poe is also the only consumer-facing internet product with access to either Claude or Claude+, the company noted at the time.

Now, Poe will offer the ability for users to create their own bots using prompts — that is, ways of directing a chatbot to perform highly specific tasks.

People around the globe are so dependent on the internet to exercise socioeconomic human rights such as education, health care, work, and housing that online access must now be considered a basic human right, a new study reveals.

Particularly in developing countries, internet access can make the difference between people receiving an education, staying healthy, finding a home, and securing employment—or not.

Even if people have offline opportunities, such as accessing social security schemes or finding housing, they are at a comparative disadvantage to those with Internet access.

Facebook Gaming, a division of Meta, has announced that you can now play games during video calls on Messenger. At launch, there are 14 free-to-play game available in Messenger video calls on iOS, Android and the web. The games include popular titles like Words With Friends, Card Wars, Exploding Kittens and Mini Gold FRVR.

To access the games, you need to start a video call on Messenger and tap the group mode button in the center, then tap on the “Play” icon. From there, you can browse through the games library. The company notes that there must be two or more people in your call to play games.

“Facebook Gaming is excited to announce that you can now play your favorite games during video calls on Messenger,” the company wrote in a blog post. “This new, shared experience in Messenger makes it easy to play games with friends and family while in a video call, allowing you to deepen connections with friends and family by engaging in conversations and gameplay at the same time.”

As deepfake videos become more widespread, counter programs that could make the internet a safer place are in development, too.

Greg Tarr, a 17-year-old student at Bandon Grammar School in County Cork, Ireland, has been declared the winner of the 2021 BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year (BTYSTE) award for his project “Towards Deepfake Detection”, per a press release.

It is interesting to watch SpaceX continue to massively expand, with the goal of going from 61 launches last year to 100 launches this year.

SpaceX’s old record for a month was 7 launches, but in March they completed 8 launches, and almost did 9 but their latest launch had technical difficulties, and the closest they got to launch during the past two days was an abort with 2 seconds to go. They will try a 3rd time to launch this rocket tomorrow.

Continue reading “SpaceX aborts launch with initial satellites for Space Development Agency” »