Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: internet

Engineer Robert Grass says that though we believe information is here forever, it’s actually fragile. Hard drives and physical sources of information, like books, decay over time. In a video for the BBC, Grass describes his quest to find a method of preserving information that could be stable for millions of years. The secret is DNA.

In 2012, research showed that you could translate a megabyte (MB) of information into DNA and then read it back again. DNA has a language of its own, and is written in sequences of nucleotides (A, C, T, and G). Think of it as similar to binary, which breaks information down into ones and zeros.

And DNA has the advantage of being able to put an enormous amount of information in a tiny space. Theoretically, one gram of DNA could hold 455 exabytes of information. That’s “enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, with room to spare”, according to New Scientist.

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In the “RoboWatch” project at Cornell, researchers let robots search the Internet for online how-to videos to instruct themselves on how to complete certain tasks.

Cornell researchers are using instructional videos off the Internet to teach robots the step-by-step instructions required to perform certain tasks. This ability may become necessary in a future where menial laborer robots – the ones responsible for mundane tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and other household chores – can readily carry out such tasks.

Robots such as these will definitely be beneficial in assisting the elderly and the disabled, though it remains to be seen when (and if) they will truly become available for use. Hopefully, these early tests will help us make such determinations.

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Tim-Berners Lee is often called the inventor of the world wide web because wrote the original proposal for the web and built the first web browser. But in recent years, he’s turned his attention to artificial intelligence.

In a new wide-ranging interview with Campaign Asia, Berners-Lee spoke about the turing test, Ex Machina, and why we should feel nervous about the future of AI.

The pace of AI research is accelerating, Berners-Lee says, but one problem is that lots of current work in the field is done by private companies, which don’t publish their findings. “Most of the work today is completely under wraps,” Berners-Lee said. “We don’t see what companies are working on. AI development is pretty secretive.”

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Are we evolving into new species with hybrid thinking interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point will the Web may become self-aware? Or is it already? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?

In his book “The Global Brain” Howard Bloom argues that humans are a lot like neurons of the “global connectome”, and the coming Internet of Things (IoT) with trillions of sensors around the planet will become effectively the nervous system of Earth.

According to Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock, we have always been an integral part of this “Meta-Mind”, collective consciousness, global adaptive and self-regulating system while tapping into vast resources of information pooling and at the same time having a “shared hallucination”, we call reality.

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Here are the top 10 countries with the fastest Internet.

Global average connection speeds rose 14 percent year over year to 5.1 Mbps in Q3 2015. Unfortunately, just over 5 percent of users now have broadband speeds of at least 25.0 Mbps. The latest figures come from Akamai, which today published its quarterly State of the Internet Report for Q3 2015.

The firm found 126 countries experienced an increase in average connection speeds year over year, ranging from 0.2 percent in Japan to a 147 percent rise in Congo (the only country to see average connection speeds more than double from the previous year). Nineteen countries saw their average connection speeds decrease year over year, with losses ranging from 0.6 percent (to 1.8 Mbps) in Namibia to 64 percent (to 1.3 Mbps) in Sudan.

As you can see below, seven of the top 10 countries/regions saw growth year over year, and seven also saw growth quarter over quarter:

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Launched in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind some of the biggest innovations in the military — many of which have crossed over to the civilian technology market. These include things like advanced robotics, global positioning systems, and the Internet.

So what’s going to happen in 2045?

It’s pretty likely that robots and artificial technology are going to transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leap from the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable.

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Samsung Mobile is building a virtual reality browser.

Maybe it’s my game industry roots talking, but when I think of virtual reality, the last thing I imagine is checking updates on Facebook or poking through a Reddit thread.

Yet come tomorrow, December 2, Samsung is going to provide proof of this concept with a virtual reality web browser called the Samsung Internet for Gear VR. Users of the Samsung S6 family of mobile phones and the Samsung Note 4 or 5 — coupled with the Samsung Gear VR unit — will be able to shake their head in disgust watching Black Friday fight videos and scan for offensive tweets on Twitter from the glorious world of virtual reality. The app will support HTML5 based videos, as well as 3D streaming and 360-degree content.

If the urge to add a comment to the Internet void hits you, Samsung Internet takes advantage of both voice input and a Gaze Mode keyboard to facilitate hands-free typing. Simply stare at the key you want to press for a few moments. Activating links, traversing menus, and adding bookmarks will also use the Gaze Mode feature.

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Keysight Technologies, Inc., in collaboration with electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego, has demonstrated the world’s first 64 (8 x 8) and 256-element (16 x 16), 60-GHz silicon wafer-scale phased-array transmitter with integrated high-efficiency antennas for Gbps communications at 100 to 200 meters. With this demonstration, Keysight and UC San Diego have proven that a 5G communication link is not only possible, but can deliver record performance.

Keysight’s collaboration with UC San Diego builds on an earlier effort between the university and TowerJazz, which resulted in development of the industry’s first 64- and 256-element system-on-a chip (SoC) phased arrays operating at 60-GHz. Each wafer-scale SoC comprises a 60-GHz source, amplifiers, , phase shifters, voltage controlled amplifiers and high-efficiency on-chip antennas. The chips were designed to meet the needs of 5G high-performance Gbps data-rate communication systems with beamforming capabilities and for Aerospace & Defense systems.

Following the development of the phased-array SoCs, Keysight and UC San Diego set out to prove they could be used in a communications link. All work was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Keysight.

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