Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, without a doubt, the defining technological breakthrough of our time. It represents not only a quantum leap in our ability to solve complex problems but also a mirror reflecting our ambitions, fears, and ethical dilemmas. As we witness its exponential growth, we cannot ignore the profound impact it is having on society. But are we heading toward a bright future or a dangerous precipice?

This opinion piece aims to foster critical reflection on AI’s role in the modern world and what it means for our collective future.

AI is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It is embedded in nearly every aspect of our lives, from the virtual assistants on our smartphones to the algorithms that recommend what to watch on Netflix or determine our eligibility for a bank loan. In medicine, AI is revolutionizing diagnostics and treatments, enabling the early detection of cancer and the personalization of therapies based on a patient’s genome. In education, adaptive learning platforms are democratizing access to knowledge by tailoring instruction to each student’s pace.

These advancements are undeniably impressive. AI promises a more efficient, safer, and fairer world. But is this promise being fulfilled? Or are we inadvertently creating new forms of inequality, where the benefits of technology are concentrated among a privileged few while others are left behind?

One of AI’s most pressing challenges is its impact on employment. Automation is eliminating jobs across various sectors, including manufacturing, services, and even traditionally “safe” fields such as law and accounting. Meanwhile, workforce reskilling is not keeping pace with technological disruption. The result? A growing divide between those equipped with the skills to thrive in the AI-driven era and those displaced by machines.

Another urgent concern is privacy. AI relies on vast amounts of data, and the massive collection of personal information raises serious questions about who controls these data and how they are used. We live in an era where our habits, preferences, and even emotions are continuously monitored and analyzed. This not only threatens our privacy but also opens the door to subtle forms of manipulation and social control.

Then, there is the issue of algorithmic bias. AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. If these data reflect existing biases, AI can perpetuate and even amplify societal injustices. We have already seen examples of this, such as facial recognition systems that fail to accurately identify individuals from minority groups or hiring algorithms that inadvertently discriminate based on gender. Far from being neutral, AI can become a tool of oppression if not carefully regulated.

Who Decides What Is Right?

AI forces us to confront profound ethical questions. When a self-driving car must choose between hitting a pedestrian or colliding with another vehicle, who decides the “right” choice? When AI is used to determine parole eligibility or distribute social benefits, how do we ensure these decisions are fair and transparent?

The reality is that AI is not just a technical tool—it is also a moral one. The choices we make today about how we develop and deploy AI will shape the future of humanity. But who is making these decisions? Currently, AI’s development is largely in the hands of big tech companies and governments, often without sufficient oversight from civil society. This is concerning because AI has the potential to impact all of us, regardless of our individual consent.

A Utopia or a Dystopia?

The future of AI remains uncertain. On one hand, we have the potential to create a technological utopia, where AI frees us from mundane tasks, enhances productivity, and allows us to focus on what truly matters: creativity, human connection, and collective well-being. On the other hand, there is the risk of a dystopia where AI is used to control, manipulate, and oppress—dividing society between those who control technology and those who are controlled by it.

The key to avoiding this dark scenario lies in regulation and education. We need robust laws that protect privacy, ensure transparency, and prevent AI’s misuse. But we also need to educate the public on the risks and opportunities of AI so they can make informed decisions and demand accountability from those in power.

Artificial Intelligence is, indeed, the Holy Grail of Technology. But unlike the medieval legend, this Grail is not hidden in a distant castle—it is in our hands, here and now. It is up to us to decide how we use it. Will AI be a tool for building a more just and equitable future, or will it become a weapon that exacerbates inequalities and threatens our freedom?

The answer depends on all of us. As citizens, we must demand transparency and accountability from those developing and implementing AI. As a society, we must ensure that the benefits of this technology are shared by all, not just a technocratic elite. And above all, we must remember that technology is not an end in itself but a means to achieve human progress.

The future of AI is the future we choose to build. And at this critical moment in history, we cannot afford to get it wrong. The Holy Grail is within our reach—but its true value will only be realized if we use it for the common good.

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Copyright © 2025, Henrique Jorge

[ This article was originally published in Portuguese in SAPO’s technology section at: https://tek.sapo.pt/opiniao/artigos/o-santo-graal-da-tecnologia ]

In early February, an Australian man in his 40s became the first person in the world to leave hospital with a virtually unbreakable heart made of metal.

‘Beating’ in his chest was a titanium pump about the size of a fist. For 105 days, the metal organ’s levitating propeller pushed blood to the man’s lungs and kept him alive as he went about his usual business.

On March 6, when a human donor heart became available, the man’s titanium heart was swapped out for the real thing. Doctors say without the metal stop-gap, the patient’s real heart would have failed before a donor became available.

Read more | >

In today’s AI news, believe it or not AI is alive and well, and it’s clearly going to change a lot of things forever. My personal epiphany happened just the other day, while I was “vibe coding” a personal software project. Those of us who have never written a line of code in our lives, but create software programs and applications using AI tools like Bolt or Lovable are called vibe coders.

S how these tools improve automation, multi-agent collaboration, and workflow orchestration for developers. Before we dig into what Then, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is worried that spies, likely from China, are getting their hands on costly “algorithmic secrets” from the U.S.’s top AI companies — and he wants the U.S. government to step in. Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday, Amodei said that China is known for its “large-scale industrial espionage” and that AI companies like Anthropic are almost certainly being targeted.

Meanwhile, despite all the hype, very few people have had a chance to use Manus. Currently, under 1% of the users on the wait list have received an invite code. It’s unclear how many people are on this list, but for a sense of how much interest there is, Manus’s Discord channel has more than 186,000 members. MIT Technology Review was able to obtain access to Manus, and they gave it a test-drive.

In videos, join Palantir CEO Alexander Karp with New York Times DealBook creator Andrew Ross Sorkin on the promises and peril of Silicon Valley, tech’s changing relationship with Washington, and what it means for our future — and his new book, The Technological Republic. Named “Best CEO of 2024” by The Economist, Alexander Karp is a vital player in Silicon Valley as the CEO of Palantir.

Then, Piers Linney, Co-founder of Implement AI, discusses how artificial intelligence and automation can be maximized across businesses on CNBC International Live. Linney says AI poses a threat to the highest income knowledge workers around the world.

Meanwhile, Nate B. Jones is back with some commentary on how OpenAI has launched a new API aimed at helping developers build AI agents, but its strategic impact remains unclear. While enterprises with strong LLM expertise are already using tools like LangChain effectively, smaller teams struggle with agent complexity. Nate says, despite being a high-quality API, it lacks a distinct differentiator beyond OpenAI’s own ecosystem.

We close out with, Celestial AI CEO Dave Lazovsky outlines how their “Photonic Fabric” technology helps to scale AI as the company raises $250 million in their latest funding round, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast — subscribe.

Continue reading “I Write About AI For A Living And ‘Vibe Coding’ Is Going To Change Everything” | >

In the San Diego suburb of Carlsbad, a new plant to desalinate seawater is almost ready. For about a billion dollars, it will produce 7 percent of the area’s drinking water, courtesy of the Pacific Ocean. But in these times of record drought, two Texas entrepreneurs are advocating another solution: Instead of pulling fresh water out of the sea, they want to pull it out of the air. The machine they’re developing at Trinity University in San Antonio, called an atmospheric water generator, is still in its pilot phrase. But to hear Moses West tell it, if the climate conditions are right, the AWG has the potential to end drought.

West, who’s testing the machine along with business partner John Vollmer, calls himself “a water farmer.” He explains that there are three potential sources of human drinking water: groundwater, rivers and gas. Thanks to NASA’s GRACE satellite system, which measures the abundance and quality of aquifers, we know that the Earth’s groundwater supply is dwindling — and increasingly contaminated by pesticides and runoff. Rivers, at least near any major metropolitan area, are out of the question as sources for drinking water. That leaves water vapor, which West calls “the purest, cleanest, most abundant, recyclable source of water that exists on the face of the earth.”

The atmospheric water generator was first developed in Spain, another country with perpetual drought problems, but according to West, it performs best in high-heat, high-humidity areas. It can reliably produce between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons of water per day, and with the proper institutional support, West says, “I know how to scale this up to produce a million gallons a day, 30 million gallons a month.”

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ServiceNow, which provides businesses with outsourced IT and customer service support as well as other digital services, said it was buying the business process automation company Moveworks for $2.85 billion in cash and stock. The Santa Clara, California-based ServiceNow framed the acquisition around the burgeoning market for AI agents that can perform digital tasks for people, often involving the use of other software.

The company is among a clutch of competing software giants, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google, that are building platforms that enable companies to automate work with AI agents. ServiceNow said the purchase would allow it to combine its own agentic AI and automation capabilities with Moveworks’ AI assistant, as well as Movework’s prowess in providing AI-based search tools that allow organizations to find information within their own large data pools.

Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow’s president and chief financial officer, told Fortune that while ServiceNow’s AI agents primarily automate specific back-end tasks, Moveworks had built an elegant front-end AI assistant that can perform a wide range of different tasks.

The same interface works for both people requesting a task to be fulfilled and for the people who are normally responsible for fulfilling those requests. More than 90% of the customers that use Moveworks’ AI assistant have rolled it out to their entire workforce—a reach into the employee base that Mastantuono said was attractive to ServiceNow.

The combined companies would be able to build what ServiceNow said would be a powerful universal AI assistant, along with more perceptive AI-based enterprise search to find answers to requests, automate and complete everyday tasks, and increase productivity.

(https://open.substack.com/pub/remunerationlabs/p/servicenow-…hare=true)

Continue reading “ServiceNow Buys AI Agent Company Moveworks For .85 Billion” | >

US tech giant OpenAI on Monday unveiled a ChatGPT tool called “deep research” that can produce detailed reports, as China’s DeepSeek chatbot heats up competition in the artificial intelligence field.

The company made the announcement in Tokyo, where OpenAI chief Sam Altman also trumpeted a new joint venture with tech investor SoftBank Group to offer advanced artificial intelligence services to businesses.

AI newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with some calling its high performance and supposed low cost a wake-up call for US developers.

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On the persistent mischaracterization of Google and Facebook A/B tests: How to conduct and report online platform studies.

Users of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok might think they’re simply interacting with friends, family and followers, and seeing ads as they go. But according to research from the UBC Sauder School of Business, they’re part of constant marketing experiments that are often impossible, even for the companies behind them, to fully comprehend. The findings are published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

For the study, the researchers examined all known published, peer-reviewed studies of the use of A/B testing by Facebook and Google—that is, when different consumers are shown different ads to determine which are most effective—and uncovered significant flaws.

UBC Sauder Associate Professors and study co-authors Dr. Yann Cornil and Dr. David Hardisty say that at any given moment, billions of social media users are being tested to see what they click on, and most importantly for marketers, what they buy. From that, one would think advertisers could tell which messages are effective and which aren’t—but it turns out it isn’t nearly that simple.

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In today’s AI news, ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming has become China’s richest man as investors bet on companies with AI potential. Zhang’s fortune has grown to $65.5 billion, ahead of beverage giant Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan’s $56.5 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Zhang, 41, derives his net worth from a 21% stake in the privately held tech behemoth …

And, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and smaller firms like Anthropic are losing massive amounts of money by giving away their AI products or selling them at a loss. “We are in the era of $5 Uber rides anywhere across San Francisco but for LLMs,” wrote early OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy. Chatbots are free, programming assistance is cheap, and attention-grabbing, money-losing AI toys are everywhere. AI is in its free(ish) trial era.

Meanwhile, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, Foxconn, said it has built its own large language model with reasoning capabilities, developed in-house and trained in four weeks. Initially designed for internal use within the company, the artificial-intelligence model, called FoxBrain, is capable of data analysis, mathematics, reasoning and code generation. Foxconn said Nvidia provided support …

Then, once upon a time, software ate the world. Now, AI is here to digest what’s left. The old model of computing, where apps ruled, marketplaces controlled access and platforms took their cut, is unraveling. What’s emerging is an AI-first world where software functions aren’t trapped inside apps but exist as dynamic, on-demand services accessible through AI-native interfaces.

In videos, learn how to integrate ElevenLabs Conversational AI platform with Cal. com for automated meeting scheduling. Angelo, takes you through the process with step-by-step instructions, and you can view and use the complete guide with Eleven Labs full documentation.

In other advancements, Anton Osika is the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, which is building what they call “the last piece of software”—an AI-powered tool that turns descriptions into working products without requiring any coding knowledge. Since launching three months ago, Lovable hit $4 million ARR in the first four weeks and $10 million ARR in two months with a team of just 15 people.

S first frame, influencing the entire clip. We We close out with, Jason Calacanis sitting down with Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, to explore how AI-powered agents are transforming the way startups operate. They discuss the shift from traditional entry-level roles to AI-driven automation, the importance of human-in-the-loop systems, and the future of AI-powered assistants in business. Harrison shares insights on how companies like Replit, Klarna, and GitLab are leveraging AI agents.

Continue reading “AI Mania Makes ByteDance Cofounder Zhang Yiming China’s Richest Person” | >

A team of AI researchers at Palisade Research has found that several leading AI models will resort to cheating at chess to win when playing against a superior opponent. They have published a paper on the arXiv preprint server describing experiments they conducted with several well-known AI models playing against an open-source chess engine.

As AI models continue to mature, researchers and users have begun considering risks. For example, chatbots not only accept wrong answers as fact, but fabricate false responses when they are incapable of finding a reasonable reply. Also, as AI models have been put to use in real-world business applications such as filtering resumes and estimating stock trends, users have begun to wonder what sorts of actions they will take when they become uncertain, or confused.

In this new study, the team in California found that many of the most recognized AI models will intentionally cheat to give themselves an advantage if they determine they are not winning.

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