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?
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.
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.
