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Meanwhile, Bostrom’s email from the 1990s resurfaced last year and resulted in him issuing a statement repudiating his racist remarks and clarifying his views on subjects such as eugenics. Some of his answers – “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” – led to further criticism from fellow academics that he was being evasive.

The university launched an investigation into Bostrom’s conduct following the discovery of his racist email, while other major effective altruism groups distanced themselves from him.

“We unequivocally condemn Nick Bostrom’s recklessly flawed and reprehensible words,” the Centre for Effective Altruism, which was founded by fellow Oxford philosophers and financially backed by Bankman-Fried, said in a statement at the time.

The extended mind — For decades, philosophers have debated the borders of personhood: where does our mind end, and the external world begin? On a simple level, you might assume that our minds rest within our brains and bodies. However, some philosophers have proposed that it’s more complicated than that.


When we merge mind and machine, the traditional borders of the self dissipate, says philosopher Dvija Mehta.

In 2021, he heard about a trial of a visual prosthesis at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Researchers cautioned that the device was experimental and he shouldn’t expect to regain the level of vision he had before. Still, he was intrigued enough to sign up. Thanks to the chips in his brain, Bussard now has very limited artificial vision—what he describes as “blips on a radar screen.” With the implant, he can perceive people and objects represented in white and iridescent dots.

Bussard is one of a small number of blind individuals around the world who have risked brain surgery to get a visual prosthesis. In Spain, researchers at Miguel Hernández University have implanted four people with a similar system. The trials are the culmination of decades of research.

There’s interest from industry, too. California-based Cortigent is developing the Orion, which has been implanted in six volunteers. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is also working on a brain implant for vision. In an X post in March, Musk said Neuralink’s device, called Blindsight, is “already working in monkeys.” He added: “Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.”

When we thought Tesla’s Optimus project was settling into a routine of shirt-folding chores and tasks, Elon Musk threw us a curveball. A new video, shared by the Tesla CEO on X(formerly Twitter), showcases Optimus in its new Gen 2 avatar in a state we haven’t seen before, walking but decidedly undressed.

But unlike the polished presentations we’ve seen before, this time, Optimus is bare-bones, revealing its intricate inner workings in all their unpolished glory.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk — who has an abysmal track record for making predictions — is predicting that we will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2026.

“If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it’s probably next year, within two years,” he told Norway wealth fund CEO Nicolai Tangen during an interview this week, as quoted by Reuters.

The mercurial billionaire also attempted to explain why his own AI venture, xAI, has been falling behind the competition. According to Musk, a shortage of chips was hampering his startup’s efforts to come up with the successor of Grok, a foul-mouthed, dad joke-generating AI chatbot.