Lifeboat Foundation

SAN FRANCISCO – In a policy speech that puts Microsoft front-and-center in the shifting ground of both politics and nationalism, company president Brad Smith said tech companies must declare themselves neutral when nations go up against nations in cyberspace.

“Let’s face it, cyberspace is the new battlefield,” he told an overflow audience in the opening keynote at the RSA computer security conference.

Tech must be committed to “100% defense and zero percent offense,” Smith said.

Continue reading “Microsoft calls for ‘digital Geneva Convention’” »

Elon Musk says humans need to merge with machines to become a sort of cyborg. “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

“It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.”

Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at “a trillion bits per second”, while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says that humans must have a high bandwidth cyborg connection to computers to remain relevant in the age of Artificial Intelligence” »

Let’s just go ahead and address the question on everyone’s mind: will AI kill us? What is the negative potential of transhuman superintelligence? Once its cognitive power surpasses our own, will it give us a leg-up in ‘the singularity’, or will it look at our collective track record of harming our own species, other species, the world that gave us life, etc., and exterminate us like pests? AI expert Ben Goertzel believes we’ve been at this point of uncertainty many times before in our evolution. When we stepped out of our caves, it was a risk – no one knew it would lead to cities and space flight. When we spoke the first word, took up agriculture, invented the printing press, flicked the internet on-switch – all of these things could have led to our demise, and in some sense, our eventual demise can be traced all the way back to the day that ancient human learnt how to make fire. Progress helps us, until the day it kills us. That said, fear of negative potential cannot stop us from attempting forward motion – and by now, says Goertzel, it’s too late anyway. Even if the U.S. decided to pull the plug on superhuman intelligence research, China would keep at it. Even if China pulled out, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Nigeria would march on. We know there are massive benefits – both humanitarian and corporate – and we have latched to the idea. “The way we got to this point as a species and a culture has been to keep doing amazing new things that we didn’t fully understand,” says Goertzel, and for better or worse, “that’s what we’re going to keep on doing.” Ben Goertzel’s most recent book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence.

Ben Goertzel’s most recent book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence.

University of Michigan micro-motes aim to make the Internet of Things smarter without consuming more power.

This new development in technology could provide wireless communications faster than 5G before 5G is even released in 2020.

Since the past 4–5 years, we have seen a change in the shopping behavior of users, both online as well as offline. It has resulted from user’s reviews and recommendations about the products ranging from fashion to home to technology, all thanks to social websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and many other global as well as regional social sites. Social commerce is a term, coined by Yahoo in 2005, as a set of online shopping tools that take into account the user liking patterns, sharing reviews, information and advices on products, as per their usages, thus affecting the sales of those products.

There are two types of social commerce strategies — one is offsite where the e-retailer brings in the social angle from external social platforms, separate from their own websites, thus enhancing the sales and second is onsite social commerce platform where the website/platform uses its own channel to enhance sales based on content, context, and reviews etc. AI and ML Tech comes into play after these reviews and recommendations have been provided by the users and then placing the same in front of potential buyers for better decision making.

Artificial and machine learning technologies have been used by giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple for more than a decade to enhance their platforms for better user experience which can now be seen to be mandatory adaptation for most of the internet based businesses, not only as it shows better ROI, but also open countless doors for future digital opportunities.

Continue reading “How AI and machine learning tech can aid your startup strategy” »

Andrew Ng (left), Chief Scientist at Baidu and Eric Horvitz (right), Managing Director at Microsoft Research.

If the internet was the birth of the digital revolution, then today’s artificial intelligence is its first baby steps toward maturity.

Today, A.I. researchers feed an algorithm data and painstakingly help it learn.

Continue reading “How Will Robots Learn?” »

Poor Americans, people in rural locations, and those with disabilities would benefit most.

More on ORNL’s breakthrough on breaking qubits transmittal speeds to further mature quantum networking. BTW — Los Alamos (sister lab to ORNL) has had a quantum network since 2009.

Work from Oak Ridge National Laboratory could have implications for Internet and technology companies.