Lifeboat Foundation

Taking the road less traveled is extremely difficult for self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles rely on highly visible lane markings, as well as detailed 3D maps in order to navigate their environment safely. Which is why most of the major companies have eschewed testing on unmapped rural roads in favor of suburbs and cities.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3D maps. Called MapLite, the system combines simple GPS data that you’d find on Google Maps with a series of sensors that observe the road conditions.

Continue reading “MIT built a self-driving car that can navigate unmapped country roads” »

The researchers found that when taking the supplement, dilation of subjects’ arteries improved by 42 percent, making their blood vessels, at least by that measure, look like those of someone 15 to 20 years younger.

Excess reactive oxygen species production by mitochondria is a key mechanism of age-related vascular dysfunction. Our laboratory has shown that supplementation with the mitochondrial-targeted antioxidant MitoQ improves vascular endothelial function by reducing mitochondrial reactive oxygen species and ameliorates arterial stiffening in old mice, but the effects in humans are unknown. Here, we sought to translate our preclinical findings to humans and determine the safety and efficacy of MitoQ. Twenty healthy older adults (60–79 years) with impaired endothelial function (brachial artery flow–mediated dilation 6%) underwent 6 weeks of oral supplementation with MitoQ (20 mg/d) or placebo in a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover design study.

Preliminary research in mice suggests that one day, it might be possible to reverse atherosclerosis in humans with a simple injection.

Faced with a navigational challenge, neural networks spontaneously evolved units resembling the brain cells that help living animals track their location.

Demis Hassabis, world-renowned British neuroscientist, artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, explores the groundbreaking research driving the application of AI to scientific discovery.

The talk launches the Royal Society’s 2018 series: You and AI, a collaborative effort to help people understand what machine learning and AI are, how these technologies work and the ways they may affect our lives.

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As humans, we are defined by, among other things, our desire to transcend our humanity. Mythology, religion, fiction and science offer different versions of this dream. Transhumanism – a social movement predicated on the belief that we can and should leave behind our biological condition by merging with technology – is a kind of feverish amalgamation of all four. Though it’s oriented toward the future, and is fuelled by excitable speculation about the implications of the latest science and technology, its roots can be glimpsed in ancient stories like that of the Sumerian king Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality.

Will humans ever conquer mortality by merging with technology? The 2018 Wellcome prize winner shares his favourite books on transhumanism, from a cyborg manifesto to a Don DeLillo novel.

Mark O’Connell

Continue reading “Mark O’Connell: five books to understand transhumanism” »

Let’s look at and discuss what Jack Ma, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are saying about artificial intelligence, along with my own thoughts and ideas on the subject.

AI — Artificial Intelligence is changing our world quickly and our future, just in the next 15 years, will be unimaginable. Learn how to prepare for it and what Tech Billionaires Elon Musk, Jack Ma, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos think will happen…find out here!

The historic first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes far outside our galaxy opened a new window to understanding the universe. A string of detections—four more binary black holes and a pair of neutron stars—soon followed the Sept. 14, 2015, observation.

Now, another detector is being built to crack this window wider open. This next-generation observatory, called LISA, is expected to be in space in 2034, and it will be sensitive to gravitational waves of a lower frequency than those detected by the Earth-bound Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

A new Northwestern University study predicts dozens of binaries (pairs of orbiting compact objects) in the globular clusters of the Milky Way will be detectable by LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). These binary sources would contain all combinations of black hole, neutron star and white dwarf components. Binaries formed from these star-dense clusters will have many different features from those binaries that formed in isolation, far from other stars.

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At the same time, the data that feeds AI decisions needs to be carefully vetted and reviewed. For example, “a robotic process automation solution that automates a loan process so the bank can deliver the loan faster to a client would be great,” according to Aditya Bhasin, head of consumer and wealth management technology at Bank of America, also quoted in American Banker. “But using AI or robotic process automation as a shortcut to data integration might not make sense. For example, when BofA launched a digital mortgage, ‘we could have done a whole bunch of robotics to go and pull data from different places and prepopulate the mortgage application, [but] it probably would have been fraught with error,” he said.

Too many organizations are rushing into AI without considering the full implications of the people element, according to Bessant. “It is time that we re-balance the discussion from being driven by the creators and the sellers of artificial intelligence to being balanced with the user perspective,” she says. “The discussion has been dominated by the sellers. Flip on any one of the morning financial shows and what you see is advertisement after advertisement for large and small-scale technology firms that are pushing the notion of data and modeling and that AI will help. Generally, society seems sold that artificial intelligence is better than we are as humans. However, because we build it, it is a subset of who we are and our thinking and bias.”

There’s a lot of buzz, and a lot of money now pouring into AIt’s important that some of that attention and money goes into education and building awareness of the processes behind the processes.

Continue reading “Time to break open AI’s black box, and keep it open” »