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Samuel Butler and the Technological Singularity

1863, a sheep farmer in New Zealand wrote that machines were evolving, that the process would not stop, and that we were busy building our own successors.

No computers. No electricity grid. No code. Steam engines and mechanical looms.

His name was Samuel Butler, and if you read his sentences cold today you would swear they were written the week after ChatGPT shipped.

Then he did the thing almost nobody remembers him for. He proposed a remedy. It was not regulation. It was not alignment. It was not a six-month pause.

Nine years later he built a whole fictional civilization around that remedy, complete with a rule about which machines were allowed to survive and which had to go. The cutoff he chose is oddly specific, and once you see the logic behind it you cannot unsee it.

A century later, another man arrived at a similar diagnosis and reached for a very different set of tools. One of them only ever wrote. The other did not stop at writing.

Butler was not a crank. He saw the arc, he ran it forward, and he was willing to say the part that most people in #AI today still swallow. The questions he left behind are the ones sitting on our desks right now: can machines become conscious, is this the next step in evolution, and what does that make us?

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Mars Curiosity rover discovers massive field of polygons

The surface of Mars is home to some of the most breathtaking and awe-inspiring landscapes in the solar system. This is primarily because the Red Planet lacks several resurfacing processes that Earth possesses, including plate tectonics, volcanism and flowing water.

While Mars does have dust storms, these have done little to reshape the planet’s surface, which has remained largely undisturbed for billions of years. However, this near-pristine landscape has enabled scientists to look back in time while slowly piecing together what Mars was like long ago.

Now, NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover recently beamed back images of a landscape featuring polygon-like features. This unique landscape has been observed in other regions of Mars but was a first-time observation for the car-sized rover.

‘Supportive’ brain cells may actively drive cognitive decline

Brain cells that produce the protective coating around nerve fibers can become dysfunctional with age and may actively contribute to cognitive decline, according to new research.

A study found that people with more severe cognitive decline had changes to nerve fibers and myelin—the protective coating around nerve fibers that helps messages travel efficiently through the brain. The study is published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Experiments in mice showed that disrupting oligodendrocytes—the cells that produce myelin—also altered the coating and impaired cognitive performance.

The biggest black hole merger ever observed could be less massive than it appears

Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime created when pairs of black holes spiral into each other and eventually merge. But if this ripple has been warped by another massive object on its way to Earth, a new analysis suggests that these black holes might appear far larger than they really are.

In the analysis published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Miguel Zumalacárregui and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics revisit the signal from what appeared to be the largest black hole merger ever recorded. They conclude that the objects were likely far lighter than first thought.

Brain activity patterns could help sharpen LLM deductive reasoning

Large language models (LLMs), the artificial intelligence systems underpinning the functioning of ChatGPT, Gemini and other similar conversational agents, are now widely used worldwide. In addition to processing, interpreting and generating texts, some of these models can solve basic logical problems and answer some user questions with striking accuracy.

While various past studies assessed the reasoning capabilities of some LLMs, how these models encode information to make logical predictions is poorly understood. In particular, the extent to which their activity patterns while processing reasoning problems resemble those in areas of the human brain linked with reasoning remains unclear.

Researchers at Peking University and Tsinghua University recently carried out a study comparing brain activity patterns during reasoning with the numerical patterns through which LLMs process information while generating logical answers to questions. Their paper, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, suggests that language models and the human brain represent deductive reasoning in similar, but not identical, ways, while also showing that LLM representations could potentially be steered using brain imaging data.

Transparent silicon-photonics chips could bring advanced optical systems to curved displays

The field of silicon photonics, which uses light rather than electricity to transmit and process data on semiconductor chips, has enabled optical systems to evolve from bulky setups to compact, advanced systems. Typically, however, these silicon-photonics chips are rigid and opaque.

MIT scientists have now figured out a scalable way to make silicon-photonics chips flexible and transparent, opening a route to advanced microchips that could be used in applications such as discrete health monitors that conform to the body or transparent augmented-reality displays that fit the curve of a pilot’s helmet.

While scientists have recently performed lab demonstrations of chips that were flexible or transparent, they could only fabricate a few devices at a time.

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