David Orban

Joining the Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Board

I have been invited to join the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation. The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity. It will

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Upgrading Humans, Why Not? – Kevin Warwick speaks at Uvvy Island

Alerted by New World Notes, I attended the lecture by Kevin Warwick on Uvvy Island this afternoon, antitled “Upgrading Humans, Why Not?”, where he presented his experiences as a cyborg. At the Q&A sessions I asked him two questions, which he was kind enough to answer. “The UK has shown to be able and find

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Is Freebase from Metaweb going to be what Cyc could have become? Shall the two merge?

Freebase merges the bottom up approach of the social web, with the hierarchies of directories, and the orderliness of traditional relational databases to help ‘organize the world’s knowledge’. (If that sounds familiar, it is because that is what Google is blindly about, with algorithms that are striving to see with barely formed eyes under heavy

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Sony’s PlayStation Home validates, and pushes Second Life model

The blogosphere is abuzz (thanks, Massimo!) with the announcement at the Game Developers Conference of PlayStation Home, their take on shared online virtual worlds. Without having had the time to read about it enough, my guess is that the implementation will be flawless, the number of participants huge, the graphics stunning. And since it will

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