Lifeboat Foundation

• Reed Albergotti — Wall Street Journal
  

Elon Musk made the electric car cool. Mark Zuckerberg created FacebookFB +0.40%. Ashton Kutcher portrayed AppleAAPL +0.79% founder Steve Jobs in a movie. Now, the three are joining in a $40 million investment in Vicarious FPC, a secretive artificial-intelligence company.

The funding round, the second major infusion of capital for the company in two years, is the latest sign of life in artificial intelligence. Last month, GoogleGOOG -1.18% acquired another AI company called Deep Mind for $400 million.

Vicarious has an ambitious goal: Replicating the neocortex, the part of the brain that sees, controls the body, understands language and does math. Translate the neocortex into computer code and “you have a computer that thinks like a person,” says Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix. “Except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep.”

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Futureketing: How to Systematically Understand and Succeed in a World of Frantically Accelerating Pace of Change! ─ An Omnimode Exploration. By © Copyright 2014 Mr. Andres Agostini ─ All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

(This Proprietary Book excerpt may be reproduced for noncommercial purposes if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice.

Please recall that “…if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice.…”)

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By Sebastian Anthony - ExtremeTech

A breakthrough in graphene imaging technology means you might soon have a smart contact lens, or other ultra-thin device, with a built-in camera that also gives you infrared “heat vision.” By sandwiching two layers of graphene together, engineers at the University of Michigan have created an ultra-broadband graphene imaging sensor that is ultra-broadband (it can capture everything from visible light all the way up to mid-infrared) — but more importantly, unlike other devices that can see far into the infrared spectrum, it operates well at room temperature.

As you probably know by now, graphene has some rather miraculous properties — including, as luck would have it, a very strong effect when it’s struck by photons (light energy). Basically, when graphene is struck by a photon, an electron absorbs that energy and becomes a hot carrier – an effect that can be measured, processed, and turned into an image. The problem, however, is that graphene is incredibly thin (just one atom thick) and transparent — and so it only absorbs around 2.3% of the light that hits it. With so little light striking it, there just aren’t enough hot carrier electrons to be reliably detected. (Yes, this is one of those rare cases where being transparent and super-thin is actually a bad thing.)

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The Future of Space-Age Risk Management: Transformative and Integrative Risk Management! [BOOK] By © Copyright 2014 Mr. Andres Agostini (AA) ─ All Rights Reserved Worldwide ─ « www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini »

(An Independent, Solemn, Most Thorough and Copyrighted Answer. Thoroughness, hereunder, will be then redefined by several orders of magnitude and without a fail).

What is a White Swan?

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By James Eng — NBC News

Many a human genius has taken the stage at TED, the annual big-idea-sharing conference for techies and innovators, and wowed audiences with thought-provoking talks. Now what if a robot were able to do the same, and earn a standing ovation for its effort?

Farfetched, you say? Not for the folks at X Prize, which on Thursday announced it was partnering with TED to create a competition “for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) so advanced that it could deliver a compelling TED Talk with no human involvement.”

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By Liz Gannes — Re/Code

Vancouver is a land of scenic harbors, tall mountains and startups trying to harness the limits of physics.

In town for the TED conference, I had the occasion to visit two such companies yesterday: D-Wave and General Fusion. D-Wave, a quantum computing company, is all about the very cold and the rather tiny. It has built enormous refrigerators that each house a single chip, laced with “qubits” that can be in the superposition of both 1 and 0 at the same time and can carry an electric current with no resistance at low temperatures.

Meanwhile, General Fusion is all about huge and hot. The company is putting together the pieces for an alpha version of a nuclear reactor plant that would use magnetized target fusion. That is, it slams together hydrogen atoms by shooting donut-shaped electrified plasma into a chamber where it’s squished by synchronized pistons from all angles. This happens at a temperature of 150 million degrees. The point: To create clean and cheap energy.

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By Tom McKay — Polymic

Civilization was pretty great while it lasted, wasn’t it? Too bad it’s not going to for much longer. According to a new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, we only have a few decades left before everything we know and hold dear collapses.

The report, written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center along with a team of natural and social scientists, explains that modern civilization is doomed. And there’s not just one particular group to blame, but the entire fundamental structure and nature of our society.

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By Evan Ackerman — IEEE Spectrum

Yesterday, DARPA announced the four companies that’ll be competing to develop a new experimental aircraft that combines the efficiency of an airplane with the versatility of a helicopter. It’ll be something like a V-22 Osprey, except that DARPA is hoping for “radical improvements in vertical and cruise flight capabilities.” Three of the companies provided concept art to DARPA; Boeing’s Phantom Swift is pictured above. And the thing that every proposal has in common? They’re all robots.

Robots weren’t a specific requirement for the VTOL X-Plane, but DARPA says that the best proposals ended up being unmanned. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is the case; in a contest based on speed, efficiency, and payload, including a human pilot would be a significant disadvantage: humans are fragile and require a lot of maintenance, and it’s becoming increasingly arguable that a human in an aircraft has the potential to be more of a liability than an asset, at least in some cases, which may include (say) cargo delivery into dangerous areas.

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Information Technology Vis-à-vis Technology Per Se! Is all “…technology…” an “…information technology…” only? Aren’t there other technologies above and beyond increasingly indispensable I.T.? The Most Authoritative and Functional Elucidation of the Technology Concept! By Mr. Andres Agostini at http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

With the advent of personal computers and the Internet, whenever anyone pronounces the word “…technology…” there is an unprecedented expectation to mean information technology. Something similar happens with the word system that goes, by far, further than just meaning "...computer system(s)…” But, let us just focus on technology now.

In addition of addressing I.T., it will also be coped with B.T., that is “…Business Technology …”, also called Business Technology Management (BTM).

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