Lifeboat Foundation

FEBRUARY 02/2014UPDATES. By Mr.Andres Agostini at www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com

Mass unemployment fears over Google artificial intelligence plans
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/10603933/Mass-u…plans.html

Should We Re-Engineer Ourselves?
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pearce20140201

A New Physics Theory of Life
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/

Dr. Rachel Armstrong — Earth’s Bright Future
http://www.londonreal.tv/episodes/dr-rachel-armstrong-earths-bright-future/

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By Miranda Prynne, — The Telegraph

The development of artificial intelligence — thrown into spotlight this week after Google spent hundreds of millions on new technology — could mean computers take over human jobs at a faster rate than new roles can be created, experts have warned Artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment if computers develop the capacity to take over human work, experts warned days after it emerged that Google had beat competitors to buy a firm specialising in this kind of technology.

Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, gave the stark warning after it emerged that Google had paid £400m for the British artificial intelligence firm DeepMind.

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www.FUTURE-OBSERVATORY.blogspot.com JANUARY/30/2014 HEADLINES. By Mr. Andres Agostini

Cancer Researchers Identify New Drug to Inhibit Breast Cancer
http://guardianlv.com/2014/01/cancer-researchers-identify-ne…st-cancer/

Russia, US to join forces against space threats
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_01_29/Russia-US-to-join-f…eats-1145/

The rise of artificial intelligence
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-ne…317g3.html

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By Thomas Halleck — International Business Times

So what is Google getting for its half a billion? A company that’s very good at making computers that think and act as humans do. DeepMind has not yet developed any commercial products. Its main asset appears to be its personnel, including dozens of experts in machine learning, a branch of AI that attempts to teach computers to think like humans. It’s best-known project was a computer system it taught to master Atari video games.

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by P.H.| WASHINGTON D.C — The Economist

THE late Alfred Lanning, a leading robotics expert, once suggested that “robots might naturally evolve”—that they might one day gain sentience. Sadly, he died at the hands of a robot that, like all the others he designed, was controlled by an omniscient supercomputer known as VIKI, which stood for virtual interactive kinetic intelligence. VIKI had decided that human beings could not be trusted with their own survival, engineered a robot uprising, and then…

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By Sarah Griffiths — dailymail.co.uk

It might resemble the giant exoskeleton as seen in the James Cameron film Avatar, but this terrifying-looking machine of the future is set to become a reality.

A team of Canadian engineers and innovators are working on creating a giant human-controlled walking ‘anti-robot’ called Prosthesis, which is being built ‘by humans, for humans’.

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Written By: Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub

Back when Google was first getting started, there were plenty of skeptics who didn’t think a list of links could ever turn a profit. That was before advertising came along and gave Google a way to pay its bills — and then some, as it turned out. Thanks in part to that fortuitous accident, in today’s Internet market, advertising isn’t just an also-ran with new technologies: Marketers are bending innovation to their needs as startups chase prospective revenue streams.

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Dylan Love — Business Insider

You may have noticed we have a soft spot for sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. His fiction, especially as it pertains to robotics, cemented him in the sci-fi canon and advanced the thinking on what practical robotics would look like in the future.

He also used his fiction to entertain a foreboding question: Should a robot be able to kill a human?

Asimov decided not, and drew up three “laws of robotics” that governed how robots behaved in his fictional universes.

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