Lifeboat Foundation

That’s because so much of the technology is still in its infancy. Physicists still can’t control and manipulate quantum signals very well. Pan’s quantum satellite may have been able to send and receive signals, but it can’t really store quantum information—the best quantum memories can only preserve information for less than an hour. And researchers still don’t know what material makes the best quantum memory.

A Chinese physicist hopes that quantum communications will span multiple countries by 2030. So… what’s it for?

If the idea of processing data at the edge sounds familiar, it should. Levine points out computing has gone in massive cycles, shifting from centralized to distributed and back again, and the coming move to the edge is just another manifestation of that.

In his view, it only makes sense that the next trend will swing back to a distributed system driven by the sheer volume of Internet of Things devices. When the number of devices on the planet is no longer limited by the number of humans, it has the potential to raise the number of computers in the world by an order of magnitude, and that will force a change in the way we think about computing in the future.

Continue reading “Edge computing could push the cloud to the fringe” »

Note by note, machines are learning to express themselves. But if you think the fusion of artificial intelligence and music is bound to produce soulless, robotic-sounding tunes, Taryn Southern urges you to give our weird future another listen. The singer and internet personality is prepping what she calls the world’s first AI-composed album, I AM AI. Of course, others have dabbled in AI-generated music, and the finished product is not entirely computer-composed (the lyrics and vocal melodies were written by Southern), but the human intervention is minimal. The output isn’t exactly Grammy material, but it’s not far off from something you might hear on a pop playlist on Spotify.

Using AI music creation software by Amper, Southern plugged in various parameters like mood, style, and tempo to auto-compose the underlying chords and instrumentation. The album will even be distributed online through Stem, a platform that allows royalties to be divvied up between various creators. So not only will machines write music in the future, they might even get paid.

Continue reading “This new AI-composed pop song sounds like something from a Spotify playlist” »

Set on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, the third annual Blockchain Summit, hosted by BitFury, a leading full service Blockchain company, and Bill Tai, a venture investor and technologist, has come to a close. This event was an intimate, if perfectly balanced, gathering of technology, policy, investment and business leaders from around the world and across sectors. Topics ranged from the public policy implications of what is being heralded as a foundational technology, to new emerging business models that can ride on the very rails that enabled the global bonanza of digital currencies like Bitcoin. A key question that underpinned the Summit is if Blockchain could not have existed without the Internet, what could not exist without Blockchain?

Blockchain technology can undoubtedly change industries, especially those that labor under often byzantine, opaque and friction-laden business models. While many of the early pioneers are focusing on finance and insurance, the opportunities for this radical technology may very well reorder society as we know it. The remarkable case of Estonia, for example, shows a country reinventing itself into a future-proof digital state, where citizen services are rendered nearly instantaneously and to people all over the world. Similarly, promising work inspired by the famed Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, on improving land registries is being carried out by BitFury in a host of countries. With land and property being the two largest assets people will own — and the principal vehicle of value creation and wealth transfer — an unalterable, secure and transparent registration process should give the world comfort and elected leaders longevity.

What drives this unique technology is the power of distributed singularity, from which Blockchain’s identity pioneers like Dr. Mariana Dahan, who launched the World Identity Network on Necker Island, and Vinny Lingham of Civic, draw their inspiration. Blockchain operates on the basis of a distributed ledger (or database) system, inexorably marching forward recording and time-stamping transactions or records. While some may herald Bitcoin as Blockchain’s “killer app,” it is easy to maintain that the killer app is not the digital currencies that ride on Blockchain’s rails, but rather the rail system altogether. Two trains can ride on rails. But a high-speed maglev train is a decidedly faster mode of transport than a steam engine. Just as the maglev makes little or no contact with the rails enabling low-friction transport, the Blockchain can greatly reduce the friction in how the world transfers and records value.

Continue reading “Blockchain and the Power of Singularity” »

It’s getting too easy to create dangerous viruses. The upcoming national biodefense strategy should ensure that scientific journals don’t help terrorists learn how.

The news that researchers have recreated an extinct cousin to the smallpox virus using only commercially available technology and items purchased over the Internet renews concerns that bioterrorists could do the same if detailed information about the methods were published. Here’s the problem: scientific journals are geared toward publication, often without sufficient understanding of the public-security risks. We need a better system to ensure that information that could help bad actors stays unpublished.

It took David Evans’ team of scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, about six months and $100,000 to recreate the horsepox virus, a close relative of the smallpox virus that killed perhaps 300 million people in the 20th century before it was eradicated in 1980. In a summary of the research, the World Health Advisory Committee on Variola Virus Research wrote that “recreation of such viral genomes did not require exceptional biochemical knowledge or skills, significant funds, or significant time.”

Continue reading “The Government Must Review What Bioresearch Journals Publish” »

“To Systrom, it’s pretty simple: Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to @&#$post.”

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Three Chinese internet majors have set up what is claimed to be the one of the largest open databases for artificial intelligence (AI) in the world, aimed at helping global talent advance AI research by harnessing the huge data pool generated by China’s 750 million internet users.

The platform wants to empower AI researchers and developers to advance their research without constraints of data resources, say its backers.

PUBLISHED : Monday, 14 August, 2017, 5:52pm.

Continue reading “Internet majors launch ‘AI Challenger’ platform to advance research with huge China data pool” »

With sufficient training on digitized writing, spoken words, images, video streams and other digital content, ML has become the basis of voice recognition, self-driving cars, and other previously only-imagined capabilities. As billions of phones, appliances, drones, traffic lights, security systems, environmental sensors, and other radio-connected devices sum into a rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT), there now is a need to apply ML to the invisible realm of radio frequency (RF) signals, according to program manager Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. To further that cause, DARPA today announced its new Radio Frequency Machine Learning Systems (RFMLS) program. Find out more: http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-08-11a

Why are we often so wrong about how the future and future technology will reshape society and our personal lives? In this new video from the Galactic Public Archives, Futurist Gray Scott tells us why he thinks it is important to look at all aspects of the future.

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Continue reading “Futurist Gray Scott: We Can’t Ignore Our Psychological Future” »