Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: education – Page 104

While the metaverse might seem like a far off dream, more fit for the pages of a Neal Stephenson novel than reality, some are already attempting to cash in the concept — and even provide a digital workforce for it.

Enter Soul Machines 0 a New Zealand-based company that says it’s designing AI-driven digital humans for clients to use for things like customer service, promotional videos, and education. However, the company also has its sights set on the future — with co-founder Greg Cross saying it plans to create a “digital workforce” for a potential metaverse, according to The Verge.

“When we’re playing a game, we adopt a certain persona or personality, when we’re coaching our kids’ football team we adopt another persona, we have a different personality when we’re at the pub having a beer with our mates,” Cross told the Verge. “As human beings, we’re always adjusting our persona and the role we have within those parameters. With digital people, we can create those constructs.”

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In conversation with my teenage daughter last week, I pointed out a news report which flagged concerns over the use of facial recognition technologies in several school canteens in North Ayrshire, Scotland. Nine schools in the area recently launched this practice as a means to take payment for lunches more quickly and minimize COVID risk, though they’ve since paused rolling out the technology.

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Creating the most reusable launch vehicle, ever.

Far from the Space Race where billionaires are outwitting one another to build colonies and private stations in space, a quiet YouTuber has built a water rocket that uses a parachute to gently return to Earth.

We are always on the lookout for interesting bits of engineering. While we cover the achievements of private companies with as much enthusiasm as we have for space technology, there is something very soothing and peaceful about watching a water rocket go up from a launch site that is nothing more than a lush green meadow and an overcast sky.

Thanks to the YouTube channel The Q, you can sit back and enjoy this beautiful launch powered by just air and water; in case you want to go back to the school days and do it all over again over the weekend, the video presents instructions on how to make the rocket as well.

Continue reading “A DIY Man Has Launched a Water Rocket With a Functional Parachute” | >

Laura Hiscott reviews Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future by The Quantum Daily.

How could quantum computing help us to fix climate change? This is the question at the heart of Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future, a half-hour-long documentary published on YouTube in July.

Made by “The Quantum Daily”, a resource for news and information on all things quantum, the documentary consists of interviews with people working in a host of organizations in the sector, from Oxford Instruments NanoScience to Google Quantum AI. The main idea is that, since quantum computers have the potential to be much more powerful than classical ones, they could speed up the discovery of solutions, such as molecules that would be very effective at carbon capture.

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For us at the OEC promoting STEM Education and Artificial Intelligence as well as preparing students with future job skills has been our focus for the past 5 years. We would not relent as we know that the robots are not just coming to take over our jobs but they are coming to be our Bosses and many in Africa are not aware of this hence OEC is poised to change the narrative by engaging in Talk shows, workshops, boot camps, seminars, etc. The job is huge but we say thank you to our wonderful partners that have also been there for us each time we call for support. These awards are clarion calls to do more and we would continue to push to see that my dear continent does not lose out in the fourth industrial revolution powered by intelligent machines.

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Balancing Risk and Cutting Edge Medical Innovation — Dr. Paul Offit, MD, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Paul A. Offit, MD, (https://www.paul-offit.com/) is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of virology and immunology, Co-Inventor of a landmark vaccine for the prevention of Rotavirus gastroenteritis, and holds multiple titles including — Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia (CHOP), Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics, Perelmann School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and Adjunct Associate Professor, The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology.

Dr. Offit was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research, a member of the Institute of Medicine, and co-editor of the foremost vaccine text, Vaccines.

Continue reading “Dr Paul A Offit, MD — Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia (CHOP)” | >

Collaboration, transparency & urgency for rare disease research — mike graglia, managing director & co-founder, syngap research fund — SRF.

Mike Graglia is the Managing Director & Co-Founder of the SynGAP Research Fund (SRF — https://www.syngapresearchfund.org/), an organization that he set up in 2018 with his wife Ashley, after their son was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease caused by an insufficiency in SynGAP protein, which causes the life-changing diagnoses of Epilepsy, Autism, sleep disorder and intellectual disability.

The mission of SRF is to improve the quality of life of SynGAP1 patients through the research and development of treatments, therapies and support systems.

Continue reading “Mike Graglia, Managing Dir & Co-Founder, SynGAP Research Fund — Collaboration, Transparency, Urgency” | >

The joys of riding in a car.

When I was a youngster, my grandparents delighted in taking me for a trek in their car, especially on the weekends. They would come to visit during the summers. A car ride included rolling down the windows of the vehicle and we would all relish the rushing cool breeze on those hot and muggy summer days as we drove leisurely along.

Since I wasn’t old enough to drive, they instead did all the driving activity. I did though have a hand in where we went. Let’s go to the store, I would clamor. Let’s drive past the school ground and wave at anyone there. Let’s go driving around the local park and see all the trees and the ducks in the pond.

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1:42 Are we on the wrong train to AGI?
4:20 Marvin Minsky and AI generalization problem.
11:57 Defining intelligence in AI
17:17 Is AI masquerading as a trendy statistical analysis tool?
23:35 AI systems lack our most basic intuitions.
27:38 The public not wanting to face Reality.
29:36 Equipping AI with Kant’s categories of the mind (Time, Space, Causality)
33:40 Neural nets VS traditional tools.
34:50 Causality in AI
37:14 Lack of interdisciplinary learning.
45:54 How can we achieve human level of understanding in AI?
49:21 More limitations.
59:35 Motivation in inanimate systems.
1:01:31 Lack of body and transcendent consciousness.
1:05:55 What interdisciplinary learning would you encourage?
1:06:49 Book recommendations.

Gary Marcus is CEO and Founder of Robust AI, well-known machine learning scientist and entrepreneur, author, and Professor Emeritus at New York State University.

Dr. Marcus attended Hampshire College, where he designed his own major, cognitive science, working on human reasoning. He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his advisor was the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. He received his Ph.D. in 1993.

His books include The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Guitar Zero, which appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. He edited The Norton Psychology Reader, and was co-editor with Jeremy Freeman of The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientist, which included Nobel Laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. Together with Ernie Davis, he authored Rebooting AI and is well known to deconstruct myths of the AI community.

Continue reading “0:00 Introduction” | >

Demand for highly desirable digital skills is hitting new heights. A recent Learning and Work Institute report noted that one in four (27%) employers now need the majority of their workers to have in-depth specialist knowledge in one or more technology areas. And 60% of those surveyed expect their reliance on advanced digital skills to increase over the next five years.

The skills gap is particularly prevalent in the security tech sector. A global study from the Center for Cyber Safety and Education predicted a terrifying shortage of 1.8 million security workers by 2022. This is made worse by the number of young people taking IT-related GCSEs in the UK, falling by 40% since 2015 (according to Learning and Work Institute data).

This scarcity of qualified professionals has inflated salaries, making it hard for firms that cannot afford to offer large paychecks and grand benefit packages to secure top talent.

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