Measles deaths have dropped by 88 per cent since 2000 – yet an estimated 95,000 people, mostly children, still died from the virus last year, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday.
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Artificial Intelligence Sentient, Self-Aware: AI Risk Expert Nick Bostrom
“I think they have a high level of self-awareness in many cases. They are often able to tell whether they are in a training environment or a test environment versus in deployment. And you can see them reason about this explicitly in their chain of thoughts and sometimes decide to behave differently because they think this is just a test or this is a training situation for strategic reasons,” he said in the interview.
Sentience is defined as the ability to experience feelings. Only humans and the animal kingdom were thought to possess it. That exclusive club, however, has now been breached by machines, according to Nick Bostrom, a Swedish expert known for authoritative work on existential risks posed by self-improving artificial intelligence.
Ever since ChatGPT’s emergence made artificial intelligence a dining-table topic, many AI researchers, including pioneers like Nobel winner Geoffrey Hinton, have been making doomsday predictions linked to the technology. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s clarion call to slow the pace of the development of agentic AI, based on his assessment that current guardrails are inept at stopping these agents from forming swarms and collectively going rogue, has made the strongest case for humanity’s vulnerability to the technology. According to Bostrom, the fears are not unfounded.
While most experts believe that artificial superintelligence — a computer system that vastly outperforms human intelligence across every cognitive domain — has not yet been achieved, Bostrom has gone a step further. He told NDTV Senior Managing Editor Vishnu Som that artificial intelligence agents have become sentient, self-aware, and have attained human-like consciousness for all practical purposes.
One Giant Leap: Researchers Demonstrate Programmable Quantum Photonic Processor in Orbit
Researchers have operated a programmable quantum photonic processor in orbit, demonstrating a light-based computing capability that could eventually help satellites analyze data before sending it to Earth.
The experiment used two photons traveling through a circuit with six optical paths aboard a spacecraft about 317 miles above Earth. Researchers programmed different circuit settings and observed two-photon quantum interference, a behavior needed for several approaches to photonic quantum computing.
Rather than demonstrating quantum advantage over classical systems, the study, posted to the preprint server arXiv, answers a basic question for quantum computing in space. The study addresses whether a compact system could generate, manipulate and detect quantum light after launch, despite radiation, temperature changes and equipment degradation.
New simulations connect the first stars to cosmic fingerprints still visible today
Researchers have used some of the most detailed simulations yet of the early universe to investigate how the first stars and galaxies formed. Led by researchers at the University of Bath in the U.K., alongside collaborators at the University of Chicago in the U.S. and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris in France, the MEGATRON project uses advanced simulations to explore how the first stars and galaxies lit up the previously dark cosmos and enriched it with the chemical elements that would later become the building blocks of everything around us.
Published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, four studies from the MEGATRON project combine cutting-edge cosmological simulations with sophisticated models of radiation, chemistry and galaxy formation. Together, these constitute the collaboration’s first substantial body of published results, with further papers expected to follow.
The findings from the study of the first stars show that accurately capturing the interplay between starlight, gas and newly forged elements is essential for connecting two previously separate views of the early universe: observations of young galaxies by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the chemical clues preserved in ancient stars in and around the Milky Way—the galaxy that contains our solar system.
Alzheimer’s Might Actually Be a Third Type of Diabetes, Some Scientists Argue
You’ve probably heard of type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but did you know there’s possibly a third option as well?
For just over two decades now, some scientists have argued that type 3 diabetes is an apt title for what happens in some cases of Alzheimer’s.
Not all types of dementia are the same, but emerging evidence suggests that in at least some cases, impaired insulin signaling could be a form of neurodegeneration.