Lifeboat Foundation

This time I come to talk about a new concept in this Age of Artificial Intelligence and the already insipid world of Social Networks. Initially, quite a few years ago, I named it “Counterpart” (long before the TV series “Counterpart” and “Black Mirror”, or even the movie “Transcendence”).

It was the essence of the ETER9 Project that was taking shape in my head.

Over the years and also with the evolution of technologies — and of the human being himself —, the concept “Counterpart” has been getting better and, with each passing day, it makes more sense!

Imagine a purely digital receptacle with the basics inside, like that Intermediate Software (BIOS⁽¹⁾) that computers have between the Hardware and the Operating System. That receptacle waits for you. One way or another, it waits patiently for you, as if waiting for a Soul to come alive in the ether of digital existence.

Continue reading “Digital Doubles and Second Selves” »

Mark Rylance & Trudie Styler on AI, Singularity, Othering, Empathy, and Evolution.

Actor Mark Rylance and director/activist Trudie Styler sit down with Kyle Meredith to talk about Spark Hunter, a new audio drama about the world’s most advanced AI having dinner with her maker over a philosophical discussion to determine if she represents a new hope for the world, or its destruction. The two discuss how the Dalai Lama brought them together, what it means to have standing inside the laws of nature, and the points of othering, racism, empathy, and evolution that the spy-drama digs into. Rylance, who also starred in Ready Player One and Don’t Look Up, and Styler also consider if we’ll ever see singularity or if robots should even aspire to be more human, especially considering folks like Elon Musk and his actions.

Intelligence has evolved on an accelerating, exponential trendline to create a Sentience Singularity in the past, just like the progress of technology that followed it. The two are closely related, and form the first principles of futurism, and any attempt to make long-term predictions.

ATOM Chapter 1 : Prologue : https://atom.singularity2050.com/1-prologue.html.

Continue reading “The Sentience Singularity : The Evolutionary Trendline of Intelligence” »

In 1961 astronomers discovered a powerful x-ray source coming from the constellation Cygnus. Not knowing what it was, they named the source Cygnus X-1. It’s one of the strongest x-ray sources in the sky, and we now know it is powered by a stellar-mass black hole. Since it is only about 7,000 light-years away, it also gives astronomers an excellent view of how stellar-mass black holes behave. Even after six decades of study, it continues to teach us a few things, as a recent study in Science shows.

Cygnus X-1 is actually a binary system. The black hole itself is a 21 solar-mass stellar remnant, and it orbits a 41 solar-mass companion star. It’s a powerful x-ray source because material from the star is captured into an accretion disk of the black hole, which superheats the material and generates jets of plasma that flow away from the black hole. This is a common situation for black holes, but astronomers still don’t understand all the details of how this type of structure evolves.

For this study, the team used data from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), which can capture not just x-rays but also their polarization. When they combined this data with other observations of Cygnus X-1, they found the x-rays are emitted not from the regions along the jets, but from a 2,000 km region perpendicular to the jets. In other words, the accretion disk itself is the primary x-ray source. This supports the model where the innermost region of the accretion disk is what powers a black hole’s jets.

One small step for a machine… one giant leap for the singularity.

This AI actually improved a key algorithm that makes it run even faster.

Continue reading “This New AI is a Game Changer!” »

When in 2015, Eileen Brown looked at the ETER9 Project (crazy for many, visionary for few) and wrote an interesting article for ZDNET with the title “New social network ETER9 brings AI to your interactions”, it ensured a worldwide projection of something the world was not expecting.

Someone, in a lost world (outside the United States), was risking, with everything he had in his possession (very little or less than nothing), a vision worthy of the American dream. At that time, Facebook was already beginning to annoy the cleaner minds that were looking for a difference and a more innovative world.

Today, after that test bench, we see that Facebook (Meta or whatever) is nothing but an illusion, or, I dare say, a big disappointment. No, no, no! I am not now bad-mouthing Facebook just because I have a project in hand that is seen as a potential competitor.

I was even a big fan of the “original” Facebook; but then I realized, it took me a few years, that Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than a simple kid, now a man, who against everything and everyone, gave in to whims. Of him, initially, and now, perforce, of what his big investors, deluded by himself, of what his “metaverse” would be.

Continue reading “Meta what?” »

face_with_colon_three Tricorder from star trek here we come. #Singularity

An instrument found on workbenches around the world has been scaled down enough to be used in a smartphone.

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Trent Fowler is a machine learning engineer, author, and co-host of the Futurati Podcast. He recently appeared on the Cutting Edge Podcast with Lee Pierson to discuss artificial intelligence, consciousness, free will, epistemology, and AI risk. For more of their content, check out their excellent show at the Ayn Rand Center UK: https://www.youtube.com/c/AynRandCentreUK

Continue reading “Ep. 108: Are we close to a technological singularity? | Trent Fowler” »

Ben Goertzel, PhD, is author of many books on artificial intelligence including Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really Really Try; Engineering General Intelligence, Vols. 1 and 2; The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind; and The Path to Posthumanity. He is also editor (with Damien Broderick) of an anthology about parapsychology titled, Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports. He is chief scientific officer for Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong.

Here he notes that, while the question of reincarnation in robots seems outlandish, most of our present technology would have seemed nonsensical and incomprehensible to earlier generations of humans. He quotes the 14th Dalai Lama who suggested (half-jokingly) that artificial intelligence programmers of the future might incarnate into robots. He cites Stephen Braude’s book, Immortal Remains, as demonstrating that we must consider some version of consciousness operating outside of the body. He outlines the sort of scientific and metaphysical models that might lead to such a development.

Continue reading “Reincarnation and Robots with Ben Goertzel” »