Midjourney is one of the leading drivers of the emerging technology of using artificial intelligence (AI) to create visual imagery from text prompts. The San Francisco-based startup recently made news as the engine behind the artwork that won an award in a Colorado state fair competition, and that’s unlikely to be the last complicated issue that AI art will face in the coming years.
Midjourney differentiates from others in the space by emphasizing the painterly aesthetics in the images it produces.
Serial entrepreneur David Holz explains the goals and methods of the revolutionary text-to-image platform and his vision for the future of human imagination.
Yoshua Bengio (MILA), Irina Higgins (DeepMind), Nick Bostrom (FHI), Yi Zeng (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and moderator Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT) discuss possible paths to artificial general intelligence.
After our Puerto Rico AI conference in 2015 and our Asilomar Beneficial AI conference in 2017, we returned to Puerto Rico at the start of 2019 to talk about Beneficial AGI. We couldn’t be more excited to see all of the groups, organizations, conferences and workshops that have cropped up in the last few years to ensure that AI today and in the near future will be safe and beneficial. And so we now wanted to look further ahead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the classic goal of AI research, which promises tremendous transformation in society. Beyond mitigating risks, we want to explore how we can design AGI to help us create the best future for humanity.
We again brought together an amazing group of AI researchers from academia and industry, as well as thought leaders in economics, law, policy, ethics, and philosophy for five days dedicated to beneficial AI. We hosted a two-day technical workshop to look more deeply at how we can create beneficial AGI, and we followed that with a 2.5-day conference, in which people from a broader AI background considered the opportunities and challenges related to the future of AGI and steps we can take today to move toward an even better future.
Sustensis is a Think Tank providing inspirations, suggestions, and solutions for Humanity’s transition to the time when it will coexist with Superintelligence. In some way it falls into a broad spectrum of Transhumanism. However, we only consider certain aspects of Transhumanism, emphasizing technological progress, which may ultimately lead to the emergence of a new species – Posthumans. Thus for us “Transhumanism is about Humanity’s transition to its coexistence with Superintelligence until it evolves into a new species”. Such a transition must start with an urgent reform of democracy, promoting a planetary outlook, and evolving the most mature organisation, such as the European Union, into a Human Federation. That is covered by our subsidiary website Euro Agora.
Our websites have been designed using our own Digitized Structured Content. It can be used for debating complex political, social, scientific or economic problems. On this website it is focused on minimizing the risk of developing a malicious Superintelligence, which requires a global co-operation. Similarly, as in a book, the Content (in this case – the problem area) is described in chapters. As you move from left to right, the numbered top level tabs describe the problem in more detail.
You can access the content and leave comments without registering. However, to make standalone posts or articles, you need to register.
A grim future awaits the United States if it loses the competition with China on developing key technologies like artificial intelligence in the near future, the authors of a special government-backed study told reporters on Monday.
If China wins the technological competition, it can use its advancements in artificial intelligence and biological technology to enhance its own country’s economy, military and society to the determent of others, said Bob Work, former deputy defense secretary and co-chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project, which examined international artificial intelligence and technological competition. Work is the chair of the U.S. Naval Institute Board of Directors.
Losing, in Work’s opinion, means that U.S. security will be threatened as China is able to establish global surveillance, companies will lose trillions of dollars and America will be reliant on China or other countries under Chinese influence for core technologies.
Ray Kurzweil predicted Technological Singularity nearly 20 years ago. Elon Musk could enable a world of economic abundance with real world AI. Robotaxi and Teslabot will transform the world more than car and the first industrial revolution.
Tesla sells Model Ys for about $60000, but it currently costs them about $30000–40000 to make them. A Teslabot is 1/30th of the mass of a Model Y. It will use 1/30th of the batteries. The software is an overall cost of development. If billions of bots are produced then the cost would trend toward the cost of the hardware plus Apple iPhone-like margins including the software (say 40% gross margin). At Model Y cost of $30k then the hardware cost for Teslabot will go to $1000. $2000 with margins and software. A bot can work for 8,000 hours in a year. 8,760 hours in a year. $2000 divided by 8,000 hours is $0.25. If you add 10 cents per hour for electricity then it is $0.35 per hour. Going beyond that is bots can work in the factory and work cheaper than humans. Currently 15,000 workers in Tesla China factory. Replace all of them with $0.35 per hour bots. Reduce labor cost component. If a lot of bots can increase production rates. by 2X then all costs spread over more units. Bot-produced solar and batteries can lower the cost of energy by vastly increasing the supply. Those trends could get us to $500‑1000 per bot costs and lower energy costs. Having virtually unlimited labor costing less than 35 cents per hour will be transformational.
The Technological Singularity is a predicted point when technological growth becomes radically faster.
Real World AI would be general artificial human-level intelligence. Capabilities to provide broad levels of human jobs and tasks.
Teslabots able to perform loading and deliveries to massively boost the supply chain. Teslabots able to perform manufacturing tasks in the factory. Teslabots able to use machines built for humans. Teslabots able to work in factories to make factories self replicating. Teslabots able to perform mining.
These capabilities would make economic growth massively exponential.
Space is no longer a remote and special place – it is becoming a part of our life and economy.
In parallel with technological advances such as space travel, lunar exploration and next-generation spacecraft, the number of businesses that utilize space has grown. Space has become an indispensable part of our lives.
The Nikkei Virtual Global Forum “The Future of Space 2022” will explore the possibilities of space, from Earth’s orbit to the Moon, Mars and beyond, and the global benefits and impacts on the economy, business and society. We will also discuss such issues as international collaboration, sustainable space utilization and policy responses.
The Clemson Composites Center is developing new ways of 3D-printing low-cost manufacturing tools and is funding the research with $5.16 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office and industry partners. Collaborators on the project include Honda Development & Manufacturing of America, Ohio State University and Additive Engineering Solutions, LLC.
The Clemson Composites Center is leading a new study that could help manufacturers save time and money while reducing their environmental impact– a project that adds to the center’s fast-growing portfolio of industry-guided automotive and advanced manufacturing research.
The team is developing new ways of 3D-printing low-cost manufacturing tools and is funding the research with $5.16 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office and industry partners. Collaborators on the project include Honda Development & Manufacturing of America, Ohio State University and Additive Engineering Solutions, LLC.
The project will be based in the Clemson Composites Center’s cutting-edge facility in Greenville, South Carolina, placing it in the heart of a state where advanced manufacturing is a cornerstone of the economy.
At its height, the Roman Empire was home to about 30% of the world’s population, and in many ways the pinnacle of human advancement. Rome became the first city in history to reach one million inhabitants and was a center of technological, legal, and economic progress. An empire impossible to topple, stable and rich and powerful. Until it wasn’t anymore. First slowly then suddenly, the most powerful civilization on earth collapsed. If this is how it has been over the ages, what about us today? Will we lose our industrial technology, and with that our greatest achievements, from one dollar pizza to smartphones or laser eye surgery? Will all this go away too?
Title: Strong AI: Why we should be concerned about something nobody knows how to build. Synopsis: At the moment, nobody fully knows how to create an intelligent system that rivals or exceed human capabilities (Strong AI). The impact and possible dangers of Strong AI appear to concern mostly those futurists that are not working in day-to-day AI research. This in turn gives rise to the idea that Strong AI is merely a myth, a sci fi trope and nothing that is ever going to be implemented. The current state of the art in AI is already sufficient to lead to irrevocable changes in labor markets, economy, warfare and governance. The need to deal with these near term changes does not absolve us from considering the implications of being no longer the most intelligent beings on this planet. Despite the difficulties of developing Strong AI, there is no obvious reason why the principles embedded in biological brains should be outside of the range of what our engineering can achieve in the near future. While it is unlikely that current narrow AI systems will neatly scale towards general modeling and problem solving, many of the significant open questions in developing Strong AI appear to be known and solvable.
Talk held at ‘Artificial Intelligence / Human Possibilities’ event as adjunct to the AGI17 conference in Melbourne 2017.
Assessing emerging risks and opportunities in machine cognition.
With AI Experts Ben Goertzel, Marcus Hutter, Peter Cheeseman and Joscha Bach.
Event Focus: Given significant developments in Artificial Intelligence, it’s worth asking: What aspects of ideal AI have not been achieved yet? There is good reason for the growing media storm around AI — many experts agree on the big picture that with the development of Superintelligent AI (including Artificial General Intelligence) humanity will face great challenges (some polls suggest that AGI is not far). Though in order to best manage both the opportunities and risks we need to achieve a clearer picture — this requires sensitivity to ambiguity, precision of expression and attention to theoretical detail in understanding the implications of AI, communicating/discussing AI, and ultimately engineering beneficial AI.
