Lifeboat Foundation

Here’s my latest Opinion piece for Newsweek. It discusses the panel I chaired at the House of Lords, UK Parliament supporting enhanced athletes & the Enhanced Games!

Antagonists of the Enhanced Games say it will be dangerous. Some insist athletes will overdose and possibly die while competing. D’Souza said these fears are overblown. The Enhanced Games will also have some regulations, including pre-competition tests that show an athlete is healthy to compete, regardless of what they’re on.

Many athletes don’t seem to mind the risks. That’s partially because they’re being offered large financial sums to compete. Magnussen was offered $1.5 million dollars to try to break the 50-meter freestyle world record, and he appeared quite happy with that sizable amount of money. Furthermore, many athletes have already been taking enhancements, so now they’d just be out in the open about it.

Continue reading “Let’s Support Enhanced Athletes” »

The film industry, always at the forefront of technological innovation, is increasingly embracing artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize movie production, distribution, and marketing. From script analysis to post-production, Already AI is reshaping how movies are made and consumed. Let’s explore the current applications of AI in movie studios and speculates on future uses, highlighting real examples and the transformative impact of these technologies.

AI’s infiltration into the movie industry begins at the scriptwriting stage. Tools like ScriptBook use natural language processing to analyze scripts, predict box office success, and offer insights into plot and character development. For instance, 20th Century Fox employed AI to analyze the script of Logan, which helped in making informed decisions about the movie’s plot and themes. Consider, in pre-production, AI has also aided in casting and location scouting. Warner Bros. partnered with Cinelytic to use AI for casting decisions, evaluating an actor’s market value to predict a film’s financial success. For example, let’s look at location scouting. AI algorithms can sift through thousands of hours of footage to identify suitable filming locations, streamlining what was once a time-consuming process.

Continue reading “The AI Takeover In Cinema: How Movie Studios Use Artificial Intelligence” »

We’re still years away from seeing physical quantum computers break into the market with any scale and reliability, but don’t give up on deep tech just yet. The market for high-level quantum computer science — which applies quantum principles to manage complex computations in areas like finance and artificial intelligence — appears to be quickening its pace.

In the latest development, a startup out of San Sebastian, Spain, called Multiverse Computing has raised €25 million (or $27 million) in an equity funding round led by Columbus Venture Partners. The funding values the startup at €100 million ($108 million), and it will be used in two main areas. The startup plans to continue building out its existing business working with startups in verticals like manufacturing and finance, and it wants to forge new efforts to work more closely with AI companies building and operating large language models.

In both cases, the pitch is the same, said CEO Enrique Lizaso Olmos: “optimization.”

The Rebellionaire Road Rally has made its way down to Austin, TX. This time we’re joined by Farzad (@farzyness) to test out Tesla FSD v12 on the streets of the greater Austin area. This is part 2 of the journey with Farzad joining in the car adding helpful commentary.

#Tesla #rebellionaire.

Continue reading “Tesla FSD v12 drives like a teenager!” »

The first was to continue with a legacy vendor. Three companies — Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic — control roughly 90 percent of the U.S. voting technology market. All three are privately held, meaning they’re required to reveal little about their financial workings and they’re also committed to keeping their source code from becoming fully public.

The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with only 17 employees and voting machine contracts in just five small counties, all in Mississippi. The company has taken the opposite approach to the Big Three. Its financial statements are posted on its website, and every line of code powering its machines is published on GitHub, available for anyone to inspect.

At a San Diego laboratory, four women do the painstaking work of preserving cells amid a growing extinction crisis.

From early in his career, Kamal Kesour understood the damaging effects of urban noise and was aware of the instrumentation used to measure and control it. He had lived in big cities, and after his PhD he went to work for an environmental consulting firm that specialized in urban noise. But it wasn’t until later, during a research position at Innovation Maritime in Canada, that he realized marine mammals can experience similarly noisy environments. This noise comes from underwater vibrations generated by shipping vessels transporting goods around the world. Kesour now has a career helping to make maritime transportation vessels less noisy.

Kesour has spent the past few years in Rimouski, Canada, at the Marine Acoustic Research Station (MARS), which lies on the banks of the St. Lawrence Estuary and is jointly led by Innovation Maritime, the Rimouski Institute of Marine Sciences, and engineering consultancy OpDAQ systems. There, he measures ambient underwater noise from ships as they pass on their way to and from the Atlantic Ocean or North America’s Great Lakes. He also conducts on-ship measurements to help pinpoint noise sources and to “fingerprint” the vibrations of individual ships. Physics Magazine caught up with Kesour to learn more about his measurements and their implications for noise pollution produced by the shipping industry.

All interviews are edited for brevity and clarity.

Professor Ronjon Nag presents about his project on AI and healthcare, aiming at creating a multi-faceted approved therapy for extending lifespan and curing aging.

Dr. Ronjon Nag is an inventor, teacher and entrepreneur. He is an Adjunct Professor in Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine, becoming a Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute Fellow in 2016. He teaches AI, Genes, Ethics, Longevity Science and Venture Capital. He is a founder and advisor/board member of multiple start-ups and President of the R42 Group, a venture capital firm which invests in, and creates, AI and Longevity companies. As an AI pioneer of smartphones and app stores, his companies have been sold to Apple, BlackBerry, and Motorola. More recently he has worked on the intersection of AI and Biology. He has numerous interests in the intersection of AI and Healthcare including being CEO of Agemica.ai working on creating a therapy for aging.

Continue reading “Can We CURE AGING In 7 YEARS With Combination Therapy??” »

Interestingly enough, although Elon Musk’s Neuralink received a great deal of media attention, early in 2023, Synchron published results from its first-in-human study of four patients with severe paralysis who received its first-generation Stentrode neuroprosthesis implant. The implant allowed participants to create digital switches that controlled daily tasks like sending texts and emails, partaking in online banking, and communicating care needs. The study’s findings were published in a paper in JAMA Neurology in January 2023. Then, before September, the first six US patients had the Synchron BCI implanted. The study’s findings are expected by late 2024.

Let’s return to Upgrade. “One part The Six Million Dollar Man, one part Death Wish revenge fantasy” was how critics described the movie. While Death Wish is a 1974 American vigilante action-thriller movie that is partially based on Brian Garfield’s 1972 novel of the same name, the American sci-fi television series The Six Million Dollar Man from the 1970s, based on Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg, could be considered a landmark in the context of human-AI symbiosis, although in fantasy’s domain. Oscar Goldman’s opening line in The Six Million Dollar Man was, “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man… Better than he was before. Better—stronger—faster.” The term “cyborg” is a portmanteau of the words “cybernetic” and “organism,” which was coined in 1960 by two scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan S Kline.

At the moment, “cyborg” doesn’t seem to be a narrative of a distant future, though. Rather, it’s very much a story of today. We are just inches away from becoming cyborgs, perhaps, thanks to the brain chip implants, although Elon Musk perceives that “we are already a cyborg to some degree,” and he may be right. Cyborgs, however, pose a threat, while the dystopian idea of being ruled by Big Brother also haunts. Around the world, chip implants have already sparked heated discussions on a variety of topics, including privacy, the law, technology, medicine, security, politics, and religion. USA Today published a piece headlined “You will get chipped—eventually” as early as August 2017. And an article published in The Atlantic in September 2018 discussed how (not only brain chips but) microchip implants, in general, are evolving from a tech-geek curiosity to a legitimate health utility and that there may not be as many reasons to say “no.” But numerous concerns about privacy and cybersecurity would keep us haunted. It would be extremely difficult for policymakers to formulate laws pertaining to such sensitive yet quickly developing technology.