Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

Humanity’s brutal and bellicose past provides ample justification for pursuing settlements on the moon and Mars, Elon Musk says.

The billionaire entrepreneur has long stressed that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help make humanity a multiplanet species — a giant leap that would render us much less vulnerable to extinction.

Human civilization faces many grave threats over the long haul, from asteroid strikes and climate change to artificial intelligence run amok, Musk has said over the years. And he recently highlighted our well-documented inability to get along with each other as another frightening factor. [The BFR: SpaceX’s Mars Colony Plan in Images].

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Https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

In the natural world, intelligence takes many forms. It could be a bat using echolocation to expertly navigate in the dark, or an octopus quickly adapting its behavior to survive in the deep ocean. Likewise, in the computer science world, multiple forms of artificial intelligence are emerging — different networks each trained to excel in a different task. And as will be presented today at the 25th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), cognitive neuroscientists increasingly are using those emerging artificial networks to enhance their understanding of one of the most elusive intelligence systems, the human brain.

“The fundamental questions cognitive neuroscientists and computer scientists seek to answer are similar,” says Aude Oliva of MIT. “They have a complex system made of components — for one, it’s called neurons and for the other, it’s called units — and we are doing experiments to try to determine what those components calculate.”

In Oliva’s work, which she is presenting at the CNS symposium, neuroscientists are learning much about the role of contextual clues in human image recognition. By using “artificial neurons” — essentially lines of code, software — with neural network models, they can parse out the various elements that go into recognizing a specific place or object.

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Some of my thoughts on AI politicians out in The Next Web: https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/03/27/the-case-for-an-artificially-intelligent-potus/ #transhumanism

The duties of the President of the United States of America could, arguably, be performed by a computer. Here’s how and why we should make that happen.

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Alphabet’s self-driving arm Waymo is introducing a new vehicle into its fleet of driverless rides, an all-electric car produced by Jaguar Land Rover.

Waymo unveiled the new vehicle, called the Jaguar I-Pace, at a press event in New York City on Tuesday and said it expected to begin production on the cars equipped with its technology in 2020. In the first two years, the companies expect to manufacture 20,000 cars.

The vehicles will first be available in a ride-hail service in Phoenix, Ariz., where the company will begin testing prototypes this year. Waymo currently has a fleet of driverless Chrysler Pacifica vans as part of its ongoing agreement with Fiat Chrysler.

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Elevation — How Drones Will Change Cities

Drones will transform cities, revolutionising how people travel, how goods are delivered and how buildings look and are constructed, according to a documentary by Dezeen.

“Aerial highways” will relieve pressure on roads as deliveries and human transportation take to the skies in unmanned electric vehicles.

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Transhumanist thinking has gained a remarkable amount of traction and publicity this year. Powerful Silicon Valley interests have been mounting a charm offensive designed to persuade us of both the value and the inevitability of this transformation.

In a startling leap towards a future that many thought only existed in sci-fi, a Wisconsin high-tech company, Three Square Market, started microchipping its employees last year.

The announcement followed on the heels of a similar move by Swedish company Epicenter, the first to begin this practice. While Three Square Market’s approach is voluntary, the company is financially subsidizing the procedure.

Transhumanist agenda

There is a name of this kind of cultural weirdness: Transhumanism, a strange agglomeration of technology, politics, and even aspects of religion. The Transhumanist view of the future features a fully mechanized simulacrum of society teeming with visible and invisible robots and robotic functions that will engineer the minutia of life at every turn, presumably to make life easier and more fulfilling.

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