Lifeboat Foundation

Governments, businesses, and economists have all been caught off guard by the geopolitical shifts that happened with the crash of oil prices and the slowdown of China’s economy. Most believe that the price of oil will recover and that China will continue its rise. They are mistaken. Instead of worrying about the rise of China, we need to fear its fall; and while oil prices may oscillate over the next four or five years, the fossil-fuel industry is headed the way of the dinosaur. The global balance of power will shift as a result.

LED light bulbs, improved heating and cooling systems, and software systems in automobiles have gradually been increasing fuel efficiency over the past decades. But the big shock to the energy industry came with fracking, a new set of techniques and technologies for extracting more hydrocarbons from the ground. Though there are concerns about environmental damage, these increased the outputs of oil and gas, caused the usurpation of old-line coal-fired power plants, and dramatically reduced America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Continue reading “These Technologies Will Shift the Global Balance of Power in the Next 20 Years” »

This is Disney’s wall-riding robot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9P9_QM8cN8

Discover & Share this Robot Car GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

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My latest piece for The Huffington Post. It’s a recap of 2015 for transhumanism and includes some select stories & videos:

Last year, I wrote that 2014 was a great year for the transhumanism movement. But 2015 was simply incredible — it might end up being called a breakout year. I’m not yet willing to declare transhumanism as “mainstream,” but it’s getting quite close now. Transhumanism has become a word that is used frequently by people around the world and in major media when discussing radical science and technology changing our species.

Below is a quick recap of some select stories in English that came out this year on transhumanism and some of my efforts to bring the future closer.

Continue reading “Will 2015 Be Remembered as the Breakout Year for Transhumanism?” »

‘In a surprisingly polemic report, ITIF think-tank president Robert Atkinson misinterprets this growing altruistic focus of AI researchers as innovation-stifling “Luddite-induced paranoia.”’

The report released by the ITIF think tank suffers from many problems. It accuses Elon Musk in risking research in the “cars that Google and TESLA are testing”, missing entirely the irony. IMHO, the nomination is not the product of research in what Nick Bostrom, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, & Elon Musk actually say.

Each year, the ITIF produces a list of 10 groups they think are holding back technological progress with their annual Luddite award. This year, they included researchers who support AI safety research and autonomous weapons bans, and they called out Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking by name. The ITIF doesn’t seem to see the irony of calling Elon Musk a luddite despite just landing a rocket, launching auto-piloted electric cars and investing in a $1Bn AI-startup. Read the response written by Stuart Russell and Max Tegmark:

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For decades now we’ve been teased with hoverboard concepts, either from science fiction or highly limited real-life versions, but now aerospace company Arca is taking orders for what it claims is the real deal. The ArcaBoard appears to be the closest thing to the technology from Back to the Future: Part II that we’ve seen so far.

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Looks pretty sweet, although maybe make it look more like a surf board.

With Arca Space’s hoverboard prototype the world has finally came closer to inventing a somewhat flying “board” capable of lifting a person above any type of ground and transporting them over “distances.”

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Self-driving cars could mean a lot of free time for drivers.

We won’t have to drive soon, so what’re we going to do in cars? Nissan has an answer: http://voc.tv/1P6L9zh

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Specifications:

Performance Power output: 1088 hp Torque: 1600 Nm from 0 to 6500 rpm Acceleration: 0–100 km/h (0−62 mph) 2,8 seconds Range: up to 600 km (realistic range — 500 km) Braking distance: 31.5m (100−0 km/h) Lateral g-force: 1.4 g Efficiency: 140–550 Wh/km 40 kW on-board charging 100 kW fast DC-charging Weight-to-power ratio: 1.79 kg/hp Weight distribution: 42% front, 58% rear

Continue reading “Rimac — Electric Concept One Super Car 1088hp” »

2015 was literally and figuratively the year of the hoverboard. While everyone was talking about the self-balancing scooters, two companies showed off skateboard-shaped boards that actually hovered a few inches above the Earth: Lexus with the “Slide” board, and Arx Pax with its second generation Hendo Hoverboard. Now, just days before the new year, another company called ArcaSpace is taking a shot at making the mythical hoverboard.

ArcaSpace is primarily a private space company, and one of the original 26 teams that competed in the Ansari X Prize competition in 2004. (It also entered the Lunar X Prize competition, too, before pulling out in 2013.) But early this morning the company released a video that shows off the “ArcaBoard,” a fan-powered rectangle that can lift a person off the ground by almost a foot.

The ArcaBoard gets its power — 430 pounds of thrust, or 272 horsepower, according to the company — from 36 electric fans. The company also says its built in some self-balancing tech to make it fly smoothly. Beyond that, though, it doesn’t look like there’s much to the experience. Dumitru Propescu, ArcaSpace’s CEO, is seen riding it in the video, but it doesn’t look like he has much control over where it’s going. It’s actually pretty reminiscent of the Hendo Hoverboard videos — sure, it hovers, but you can’t really steer it enough to ever use it to get anywhere.

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