Lifeboat Foundation

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Professor Donald Sadoway reflects on teaching, batteries, and world peace as he retires after 45 years at MIT.

A disturbing documentary titled Childhood 2.

Spoiler alert: It’s worse than you could imagine.

Returning to Childhood 2.0 and so many discouraging—okay—depressing documentaries from the past few years (The Great Hack, Requiem for The American Dream, The Social Dilemma, etc.), it’s tempting to throw up our hands. To surrender to disillusionment. Even nihilism.

Continue reading “Can The Metaverse Fix Our Generosity Crisis?” »

“Everyone at school thinks I am very smart.”

Yusuf Shah, a Year 6 student at Wigton Moor Primary School, took the Mensa IQ test as he wanted to know if he figured in the top two percent of the people who take the test.

Bruno Vincent/Getty Images.

Continue reading “11-year-old schoolboy beats Stephen Hawking in Mensa IQ test, achieving highest possible score” »

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Every day brings us new technological advances, today we’ll explore many of those of such as robotics, automation, rapid delivery, education, medical science, nanotechnology, and more.

Episodes referenced in the Episode:
Power Satellites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBCbdThIJNE
Fusion Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM
Quiet Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvH-7XX6pkk.
The Santa Claus Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmgYoryG_Ss.
Synthetic Meat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NULFAItoBs.
Cyborgs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYKCTFIZLI
Mind Augmentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQpYOVvU17Y
Mind-Machine Interfaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCLLzI4R3bc.
Life Extension https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKmdc2AuXec.
The Science of Aging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDpjv2z3dyE
Happily Ever After: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ypfzvQ-Q2w.
Attack of the Drones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oZCUtgnQkE
Advanced Metamaterials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0UZ6-oeiIE
Portable Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXqcf48D9Q
The Nuclear Option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aBOhC1c6m8
Moon: Industrial Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y47MMNqKGxE
Machine Rebellion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHd22kMa0_w.
The Paperclip Maximizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mk7NVFz_88
Technological Stagnation: Coming Soon.
Non-Carbon Based Life: Coming Soon.

Continue reading “New Technologies that May be in the Cards” »

A new artificial intelligence tool called GPT-3 has recently been created, and it’s able to perform some tasks better than humans can. That’s because GPT-3 isn’t taught or trained by…

In this bonus interview for the series Science Uprising, computer scientist and AI expert Selmer Bringsjord provides a wide-ranging discussion of artificial intelligence (AI) and its capabilities. Bringsjord addresses three features humans possess that AI machines won’t be able to duplicate in his view: consciousness, cognition, and genuine creativity.

Selmer Bringsjord is a Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Director of the Rensselaer AI and Reasoning Laboratory. He and his colleagues have developed the “Lovelace Test” to evaluate whether machine intelligence has resulted in mind or consciousness.

Continue reading “Three Things AI Machines Won’t Be Able to Achieve” »

When you need someone to narrate the history of the universe — and Mel Brooks is busy — you might as well go with Morgan Freeman. Not only has Freeman played God in “Bruce Almighty” and “Evan Almighty,” but he’s also told “The Story of God” and “The Story of Us” for National Geographic.

In “Our Universe,” Freeman is lending his voice to a new six-part nature documentary series for Netflix. As the title implies, this series is even bigger in scope than “The Story of Us.” It’s looking back at the whole history of the universe and how 13.8 billion years have led us to this moment.

Continue reading “Our Universe Trailer: Morgan Freeman Narrates The History Of Everything” »

Like most physicists, I spent much of my career ignoring the majority of quantum mechanics. I was taught the theory in graduate school and applied the mechanics here and there when an interesting problem required it … and that’s about it.

Despite its fearsome reputation, the mathematics of quantum theory is actually rather straightforward. Once you get used to the ins and outs, it’s simpler to solve a wide variety of problems in quantum mechanics than it is in, say, general relativity. And that ease of computation—and the confidence that goes along with wielding the theory—mask most of the deeper issues that hide below the surface.

Deeper issues like the fact that quantum mechanics doesn’t make any sense. Yes, it’s one of the most successful (if not the most successful) theories in all of science. And yes, a typical high school education will give you all the mathematical tools you need to introduce yourself to its inner workings. And yes, for over a century we have failed to come up with an alternative theory of the subatomic universe. Those are all true statements, and yet: Quantum mechanics doesn’t make any sense.