Lifeboat Foundation

The University of British ColumbiaOne year ago, Tamara Etmannski became the first Canadian Global Impact Competition winner. The award earned her a scholarship to take part in a 10-week program at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University — a non-accredited institution that aims to solve the world’s greatest challenges through technology. The university was founded by tech legends Peter Diamandis, of the X PRIZE Foundation, and Ray Kurzweil, of Google.

Etmannski, now a UBC Faculty of Applied Science lecturer, is helping develop a new Masters of Engineering Leadership program, tied to the Sauder School of Business. As the second Canadian Global Impact Competition heats up — the winner will be announced April 2 — Etmannski explains how her experience at Singularity University transformed her thinking, and what engineering and business can teach each other.

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By Steven Kotler — SingularityHub

For most of the last century, the study of emotions was not considered serious science. The problem was subjectivity. Science is objective, rigorously objective. Emotions, though, are internal states, so the only way to study them is through subjective inference (essentially asking people to report how they feel). But — because people lie, because we often misinterpret our emotions and because comparisons between subjects, that is the depth of my anger versus your anger, is impossible to measure—there’s no objective data to be found.

Thus, until recently, the topic was taboo.

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By Chris Welch — The Verge

Tesla’s preparing a software update that will bring powerful auto-steering functionality to its Model S fleet. During today’s press call — which mostly focused on curing range anxiety — CEO Elon Musk revealed that Tesla will ship a software update “in about three months” that will turn on auto-steering, or “autopilot” as Musk often refers to it. “We can basically go between San Francisco and Seattle without the driver doing anything,” Musk said of the autonomous system that Tesla has developed. For now, you’ll only be able to engage auto-steering on highways. We got a preview of the autopilot functionality during our initial test drive in the P85D, which you can watch below.
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One of the things that I’ve always liked about Star Trek, is the concept of a galaxy spanning civilization. I would expect that before we ever get to that point, we will have a civilization that spans our solar system. Having a solar system spanning civilization has many advantages. It would give us access to resources many times greater than what is found here on Earth. It also provides the opportunity for civilization to expand, and in a worst case scenario, help ensure the survival of humanity.

Millions of people living in spacious environmentally controlled cities on planetary surfaces and in rotating cylinders in free space, with industry that extends from Mercury to the comets is to me, a grand vision worthy of an ambitious civilization. But trying to make that vision a reality will be difficult. The International Space Station has the capacity to house just six people and cost approximately $100B to put in place. With a little simple division, that works out to about $17B per inhabitant! If we used that admittedly crude figure, it would cost $17 trillion to build a 1,000 person habitat in Earth orbit. Clearly, the approach we used to build the ISS will not work for building a solar system civilization!

The ISS model relies on building everything on Earth, and launching it into space. A different model championed by Dr. Philip Metzger, would develop industrial capacity in space, using resources close to home, such as from the Moon. This has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of building and maintaining systems in space. But how to develop that industrial capacity? Remember we can’t afford to launch and house thousands of workers from Earth. The answer it would seem, is with advanced robotics and advanced manufacturing.

But is even this possible? The good news is that advanced robotics and advanced manufacturing are already being rapidly developed here on Earth. The driver for this development is economics, not space. These new tools will still have to be modified to work in the harsh environment of space, and with resources that are different from what are commonly used here on Earth. While learning to adapt those technologies to the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system is not trivial, it is certainly better that having to develop them from scratch!

Continue reading “The Robotic Double-Edged Sword” »

by Bridget Butler Millsaps — 3Dprint.com
There’s one thing you may have begun to notice about digital design and 3D printing: whatever you think might happen in the future is probably going to advance far beyond whatever you envisioned or thought might be a cool idea.

And literally, one day you may be envisioning your entire world, and recording it as well, through completely artificially constructed, 3D printed eyeballs. You may be able to say goodbye to prescription glasses and contact lenses — and even your camera, as your original retina is replaced by a new and digital network contained inside your head, and even able to be swapped out for different versions.Read more

Maddie Stone — Gizmodo

Quantum computers—theoretical machines which can process certain large and difficult problems exponentially faster than classical computers—have been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. But actually building one has proven incredibly challenging.

A group of researchers at Aarhus University believes the secret to creating a quantum computer lies in understanding human cognition. So, they’ve built computer games to study us, first.

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By Anitha Vadavatha and Anish Mohammed — SingularityHub

The world is urbanizing—and fast. Why are cities so popular?

They’re where the opportunities are. In 2014, the world’s 300 largest cities accounted for 20 percent of the world’s population and nearly half of global output. It is estimated that growing cities could bring nearly $30 trillion a year into the global economy by 2025.

As we rapidly urbanize—and 70 percent of urban growth takes place in emerging economies—understanding cities becomes critical. How can we, for example, improve livability and resource management? Manage disease and sanitation?

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Larry Hardesty | MIT News OfficeResearchers at the MIT Media Laboratory are developing a system that enables young children to program interactive robots by affixing stickers to laminated sheets of paper.

Not only could the system introduce children to programming principles, but it could also serve as a research tool, to help determine which computational concepts children can grasp at what ages, and how interactive robots can best be integrated into educational curricula.Read more

Christine Magee — TechCrunchIf Hollywood’s depiction of artificial intelligence were accurate, we would be falling in love with operating systems, sharing our homes with Stepford wives, and fending off cyborg attacks by now. While movies like Ex Machina and Her stoke the fears and desires of our imaginations, new innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence are bringing our visions of tomorrow closer to today.

You can now take a ride in a Google autonomous car, order dinner from a robot butler at a hotel in Cupertino, and buy a personal quadcopter drone for under a thousand bucks. These robots aren’t quite the cylons from Battlestar Galactica or the space bots from Interstellar, but there’s no question that we’re getting close.

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