Lifeboat Foundation

There was a flurry of activity towards the end of the year as large corporations look to establish local HQs. Other firms that have recently received such licenses are Airbus SE, Oracle Corp. and Pfizer Inc.

Saudi Arabia announced the new rules for state contracts in February 2021, saying it wanted to limit ‘economic leakage’ — a term used by the government for state spending that can benefit firms that don’t have a substantial presence in the country.

A key part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s economic agenda has been to limit some of the billions in spending by the government and Saudi citizens that leave the country each year. Government officials want to stop giving contracts to international firms who only fly executives in and out of the kingdom.

A new mysterious nonprofit group backed by the crypto industry has set up a mailing address about 100 miles away from Washington, D.C., and is making moves to exert power in the nation’s capital.

The Cedar Innovation Foundation, a 501©(4) that was incorporated in Delaware in April, has launched advertisements against at least one powerful lawmaker who’s up for reelection, and quietly hired a group of strategists to fight on its behalf, according to records uncovered by CNBC.

It’s part of a broader effort by the crypto industry to influence Congress ahead of the 2024 elections and as a variety of crypto-related bills begin to weave their way through Washington.

Scientific knowledge can progress rapidly, yet its social, economic, and political impacts often unfold at a painstakingly slow pace. The medicine of the 21st century draws upon genetic and embryological breakthroughs of the 19th century. Our current technology is firmly grounded in quantum physics, which was formulated a century ago. And the topic of the day, artificial intelligence (AI), traces its origins to the secret weapons research during World War II.

‌In 1935, the brilliant British mathematician, Alan Turing, envisioned a conceptual computer. His genius would later lead him to crack the Enigma code used by German submarines for secret communications during the war. Turing’s contributions extended beyond cryptography, as he introduced fundamental concepts of AI, including the training of artificial neural networks. Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed Turing in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which earned a screenplay Oscar that year. All this historical context brings us to the heart of the current AI revolution.

‌AI uses neural networks, also known as artificial neural networks, which are comprised of multiple layers of artificial neurons. Each neuron receives numerous inputs from the lower layer and produces a single output to the upper layer, similar to the dendrites and axon of natural neurons. As information progresses through each layer, it gradually becomes more abstract, resembling the process that occurs in the visual cortex of our brains.

In a paper published in npj Imaging, King’s researchers have assessed the use of fertilized chicken eggs as an alternative model that can resolve both ethical and economic issues for preclinical cancer research.

The use of animal models in cancer research is a major contributor to the clinical development of drugs and diagnostic imaging. However, while invaluable tools, the current standard of using mouse models to recreate diseases is expensive, time-intensive, and complicated by both variable tumor take rates and the associated welfare considerations.

Fertilized chicken eggs contain a highly vascularized membrane, known as the chicken chorioallantoic membrane (CAM), which can provide an ideal environment for tumor growth and study, but to date, relatively few studies have used chick CAM to evaluate novel radiopharmaceuticals.

Here’s my new Opinion article for Newsweek on AI!

Like so many in America, I watch astounded as generative artificial intelligence (AI) evolved at lighting speed in 2023, performing tasks that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. Just last month, a survey found that nearly 40 percent of more than 900 companies were planning to cut jobs in 2024 in part because of AI. If robotics takes a giant leap in the next 12 months, as some suspect, then the survey might end up being too conservative. Generative AI combined with humanoids, which many companies are racing to turn out, is a game changer. Construction jobs, physician jobs, police jobs, and many more will soon be at stake.

Clearly, capitalism is facing a crisis. For years, I have advocated for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), as a way to transition society into the AI age. My method was by leasing out the trillions of dollars worth of empty U.S. federal land to big business, and using some of the proceeds to pay for a basic income for every American. However, any method of a basic income will now help offset the loss of jobs AI will bring.

Continue reading “Why Nationalizing AI Is a Bad Idea” »

The Effective Accelerationism movement — a staunchly pro-AI ideology that has Silicon Valley split over how artificial intelligence should be regulated — appears to be walking a razor’s edge between being a techno-libertarian philosophy and a nihilistic, even reckless, approach to advancing one of…

Silicon Valley’s new ideological faction, called Effective Accelerationism or e/acc, is focused on the pursuit of AI development with no guardrails to slow its growth.

Scientists trained GPT-4 to be an AI trader for a fictional financial institution — and it performed insider trading when put under pressure to do well.

An interview with J. Storrs Hall, author of the epic book “Where is My Flying Car — A Memoir of Future Past”: “The book starts as an examination of the technical limitations of building flying cars and evolves into an investigation of the scientific, technological, and social roots of the economic…

J. Storrs Hall or Josh is an independent researcher and author.

Continue reading “Ep. 20: J. Storrs Hall — Bringing Back A Future Past With Flying Cars, Nano-Robots and Multi-Level Cities By Nurturing A Techno-Optimist Culture and a Unleashing Second Nuclear Age” »

WASHINGTON — DARPA has selected 14 companies, ranging from small startups to established aerospace corporations, to participate in a study on developing commercial lunar infrastructure.

DARPA announced Dec. 5 that 14 companies will collaborate over the next seven months on its 10-Year Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10, study. The goal of the effort, announced in August, is to develop an integrated architecture to support a commercial lunar economy by the mid-2030s.

“LunA-10 has the potential to upend how the civil space community thinks about spurring widespread commercial activity on and around the Moon within the next 10 years,” Michael Nayak, DARPA program manager for LunA-10, said in a statement.