Lifeboat Foundation

The US military agency is worried the country could lose its edge in semiconductor chips with the end of Moore’s Law.

THE famous ‘God Particle’ will lead to the destruction of the entire universe, scientists have warned. British researchers are warning that the Higgs Boson, otherwise known as the God Particle, will one day lead to the destruction of the universe.

Some physicists claim the popular landscape of universes in string theory may not exist.

• By Clara Moskowitz on July 30, 2018

See the Earth from 20 miles (32 km) above in this breathtaking 360° footage captured from a weather balloon.

Humanity will one day make it to Mars. But can we make it livable?

Machine learning is everywhere these days, but it’s usually more or less invisible: it sits in the background, optimizing audio or picking out faces in images. But this new system is not only visible, but physical: it performs AI-type analysis not by crunching numbers, but by bending light. It’s weird and unique, but counter-intuitively, it’s an excellent demonstration of how deceptively simple these “artificial intelligence” systems are.

Machine learning systems, which we frequently refer to as a form of artificial intelligence, at their heart are just a series of calculations made on a set of data, each building on the last or feeding back into a loop. The calculations themselves aren’t particularly complex — though they aren’t the kind of math you’d want to do with a pen and paper. Ultimately all that simple math produces a probability that the data going in is a match for various patterns it has “learned” to recognize.

The thing is, though, that once these “layers” have been “trained” and the math finalized, in many ways it’s performing the same calculations over and over again. Usually that just means it can be optimized and won’t take up that much space or CPU power. But researchers from UCLA show that it can literally be solidified, the layers themselves actual 3D-printed layers of transparent material, imprinted with complex diffraction patterns that do to light going through them what the math would have done to numbers.

Continue reading “This 3D-printed AI construct analyzes” »

The year is 2050 and researchers have developed an advanced method of replacing 99% of your brain’s functions for digital software/hardware. The process is slow to ensure individuals aren’t simply making copies of themselves. But in return, “digital immortality” has been achieved.

In a future of mind-uploaded “immortals,” will we achieve unlimited freedom or will we simply become slaves to a private entity which owns the data that makes up our own digital minds?

Continue reading “In a Future of Mind Uploading, Who Will Own the Data That is You?” »

They already perform remotely controlled operations – now robots look set to be the physicians of the future. Tim Adams investigates.