Lifeboat Foundation

Other questions to the experts in this canvassing invited their views on the hopeful things that will occur in the next decade and for examples of specific applications that might emerge. What will human-technology co-evolution look like by 2030? Participants in this canvassing expect the rate of change to fall in a range anywhere from incremental to extremely impactful. Generally, they expect AI to continue to be targeted toward efficiencies in workplaces and other activities, and they say it is likely to be embedded in most human endeavors.

The greatest share of participants in this canvassing said automated systems driven by artificial intelligence are already improving many dimensions of their work, play and home lives and they expect this to continue over the next decade. While they worry over the accompanying negatives of human-AI advances, they hope for broad changes for the better as networked, intelligent systems are revolutionizing everything, from the most pressing professional work to hundreds of the little “everyday” aspects of existence.

One respondent’s answer covered many of the improvements experts expect as machines sit alongside humans as their assistants and enhancers. An associate professor at a major university in Israel wrote, “In the coming 12 years AI will enable all sorts of professions to do their work more efficiently, especially those involving ‘saving life’: individualized medicine, policing, even warfare (where attacks will focus on disabling infrastructure and less in killing enemy combatants and civilians). In other professions, AI will enable greater individualization, e.g., education based on the needs and intellectual abilities of each pupil/student. Of course, there will be some downsides: greater unemployment in certain ‘rote’ jobs (e.g., transportation drivers, food service, robots and automation, etc.).”

An active supermassive black hole is one of the greatest wonders in the cosmos.

A dense, invisible object that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun is surrounded by a vast, churning disk and torus of material, blazing with light as it swirls down onto the black hole center. But how big do these structures grow?

Continue reading “For The First Time, The Roiling Mass Circling a Monster Black Hole Has Been Measured” »

Plus: Google DeepMind’s watermark.

CAMBRIDGE, MA —The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University announces the appointment of Dr. Kanaka Rajan, the first faculty member hired within the recently launched Kempner Institute. As a founding faculty member at the Kempner, Dr. Rajan will serve as an institute investigator. She will also have a dual appointment, serving as a member of the faculty in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.

Working jointly with the HMS Department of Neurobiology and the Kempner Institute, Dr. Rajan will support the intersecting research, scientific, and educational missions of both communities. Dr. Rajan starts in September 2023.

“We are thrilled to have Dr. Rajan join the Kempner, where she will play a key role in helping to shape and advance the institute’s research program,” said Kempner Co-Director Bernardo Sabatini. “She is a true leader in the field, using innovative techniques to tackle big, difficult questions, and expanding the possibilities for how we use artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand the enduring mysteries of the brain.”

Evolutionary robotics is a sub-field of robotics aimed at developing artificial “organisms” that can improve their capabilities and body configuration in response to their surroundings, just as humans and animals evolve, adapting their skills and appearance over time. A growing number of roboticists have been trying to develop these evolvable robotic systems, leveraging recent artificial intelligence (AI) advances.

A key challenge in this field is to effectively transfer robots from simulations to real-world environments without compromising their performance and abilities. A paper by researchers at University of York, Edinburgh Napier University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of the West of England and University of Sunderland, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, investigated the impact that hardware can have on the development space of evolvable robots.

“One of the greatest challenges for evolutionary robotics is bringing it into the hardware space and creating real, useful robots,” Mike Angus, a research engineer who designed hardware for the study, told Tech Xplore.

Intel demoed a non-x86 chip with eight cores, 528 threads, and 1TB/s of optical I/O at Hot Chips 2023.

The novel photosynthetic biocomposite material is a 3D-printed structure made of a seaweed-based polymer combined with genetically engineered cyanobacteria to produce an enzyme that transforms various organic pollutants into benign molecules.

Summary: New findings challenge our understanding of fruit fly social behaviors. While traditionally thought to rely primarily on chemical receptors for social interactions, the fruit fly’s visual system plays a pivotal role too.

By manipulating the visual feedback neurons in male fruit flies, researchers discovered that their social inhibitions were altered, leading males to court other males. This novel insight can potentially enlighten our comprehension of social behaviors in humans, including those with bipolar disorder and autism.

Wobbly jets blasting out from active galaxies are ‘smoking gun’ evidence for supermassive black hole binary systems that elude astronomers, a new study reports.