Lifeboat Foundation

#aliens #robots Welcome to an extraordinary exploration of artificial intelligence and its cosmic counterpart, the astro-chicken! Join me in this mind-blowing video where we delve into the captivating concept of interstellar colonization. You can find my book Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes here on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gravity-Fall… The Cosmic Mystery Tour here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cosmic-Myste… Artificial intelligences offers the only way to explore the stars. Humans are very delicate and not at all suited to interstellar travel. After all, it is a long long way to the stars. The nearest star is 40 trillion kilometres away. The distance between the stars is too great for it to be feasible to travel so far within human lifespans. The limitations of our biology will prevent us from exploring deep space in person. Although we might like to fantasize about traveling from star system to star system with Captain Kirk, it is almost inconceivable that any humans will ever reach the stars. But maybe there is another way to colonize the galaxy. The British theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson certainly thought so. In the 1960s Dyson, who was one of the architects of quantum electrodynamics — our best theory of electromagnetism — speculated that any sufficiently advanced civilisation would explore the galaxy by launching fleets of autonomous self-replicating robots. There are, of course, many advantages to sending robots rather than humanoids. Robots are more robust than organic lifeforms, they never get bored, and they require far less in the way of maintenance and life support systems. They can survive in harsh environments, and they are adaptable — they can be upgraded. Robots equipped with artificial intelligence could operate autonomously and perform tasks that are impossible for humans, and they could survive indefinitely. Robots could also be miniaturized so they would require far less propulsion to send them on their way. Dyson’s robots would take a blueprint or template that would enable them to create more self-replicating robots. On arrival at a suitable asteroid or planet they would establish a base and set up a means of generating and storing energy. They would then extract and refine minerals and eventually build factories with assembly lines for creating more autonomous robots, each with its own copy of the blueprint, and a propulsion system for the colonization of other star systems. Dyson called these robots astro-chickens. They would travel between the stars as cosmic eggs, hatch on arrival at a suitable destination, then create and disperse the next generation of cosmic eggs. There is no reason, in principle, why super-advanced civilizations could not create such robot explorers. They could attain high speeds as cosmic eggs using some sort of nuclear fusion engine, perhaps. The diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years. Traveling between stars at a significant fraction of the speed of light, the astro-chickens could colonize the entire galaxy in under one million years, which is not long by astronomical or evolutionary time-scales. So where are the astro-chickens? No artefact of an alien civilization has ever been discovered. But, if alien civilizations exist, it might be easier to find their robot descendants than the original aliens. Maybe they are closer than we think. In fact, I have already created my own design for an autonomous, self-replicating robot, which you can witness here on my laptop. Prepare to be enthralled!

Back in June, YouTube quietly made a subtle but significant policy change that, surprisingly, benefits users by allowing them to remove AI-made videos that simulate their appearance or voice from the platform under YouTube’s privacy request process.

First spotted by TechCrunch, the revised policy encourages affected parties to directly request the removal of AI-generated content on the grounds of privacy concerns and not for being, for example, misleading or fake. YouTube specifies that claims must be made by the affected individual or authorized representatives. Exceptions include parents or legal guardians acting on behalf of minors, legal representatives, and close family members filing on behalf of deceased individuals.

According to the new policy, if a privacy complaint is filed, YouTube will notify the uploader about the potential violation and provide an opportunity to remove or edit the private information within their video. YouTube may, at its own discretion, grant the uploader 48 hours to utilize the Trim or Blur tools available in YouTube Studio and remove parts of the footage from the video. If the uploader chooses to remove the video altogether, the complaint will be closed, but if the potential privacy violation remains within those 48 hours, the YouTube Team will review the complaint.

I will be on tour of North America, UK & EU talking about my latest book, religion, life on earth and beyond. I will be joined on stage by a range of friends…

Patreon: https://bit.ly/3v8OhY7Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Insti…

Want to join the debate? Check out the Intelligence Squared website to hear about future live events and podcasts: http://www.intelligencesquared.com.
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How come there are conscious minds?
How do language and culture evolve?
Should we still teach children things which computers can do better?
Will our smart electronic devices rob us of our intelligence?
Will human intelligence and AI co-evolve?

Continue reading “Daniel Dennett on the Evolution of the Mind, Consciousness and AI” »

An international collaborative research team has developed an image recognition technology that can accurately determine the elemental composition and the number of charge and discharge cycles of a battery by examining only its surface morphology using AI learning.

Professor Seungbum Hong from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in collaboration with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and Drexel University in the United States, has developed a method to predict the major elemental composition and charge-discharge state of NCM cathode materials with 99.6% accuracy using convolutional neural networks (CNN).

The paper is published in the journal npj Computational Materials.

Microsoft already has a board seat as well.

Living brain cells wired into organoid-on-a-chip biocomputers can now learn to drive robots, thanks to an open-source intelligent interaction system called MetaBOC. This remarkable project aims to re-home human brain cells in artificial bodies.

Most of our progress in disease treatment and prevention to date has been the product of the linear process of hit-or-miss efforts to find useful interventions. Because we have lacked tools for systematically exploring all possible treatments, discoveries under this paradigm have owed a lot to chance. Likely the most notable chance breakthrough in medicine was the accidental discovery of penicillin — which opened up the antibiotic revolution and has since saved perhaps as many as 200 million lives. But even when discoveries aren’t literally accidental, it still takes good fortune for researchers to achieve breakthroughs with traditional methods. Without the ability to exhaustively simulate possible drug molecules, researchers have to rely on high-throughput screening and other painstaking laboratory methods, which are much slower and more inefficient.

To be fair, this approach has brought great benefits. A thousand years ago, European life expectancy at birth was just in the twenties, since so many people died in infancy or youth from diseases like cholera and dysentery, which are now easily preventable. By the middle of the nineteenth century, life expectancy in the United Kingdom and the United States had increased to the forties. As of 2023, it has risen to over eighty in much of the developed world. So, we have nearly tripled life expectancy in the past thousand years and doubled it in the past two centuries. This was largely achieved by developing ways to avoid or kill external pathogens — bacteria and viruses that bring disease from outside our bodies.

Today, though, most of this low-hanging fruit has been picked. The remaining sources of disease and disability spring mostly from deep within our own bodies. As cells malfunction and tissues break down, we get conditions like cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. To an extent we can reduce these risks through lifestyle, diet, and supplementation — what I call the first bridge to radical life extension. But those can only delay the inevitable. This is why life expectancy gains in developed countries have slowed since roughly the middle of the twentieth century. For example, from 1,880 to 1900, life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from about thirty-nine to forty-nine, but from 1980 to 2000 — after the focus of medicine had shifted from infectious disease to chronic and degenerative disease — it only increased from seventy-four to seventy-six.