34.1 million people could die, and another 57.4 million could be injured, within the first few hours of the start of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States triggered by one low-yield nuclear weapon, according to a new simulation by researcher’s at Princeton‘s Science and Global Security programme.
Category: existential risks – Page 20
Some people may think that nuclear war has defined winners but everyone would be gone simply. The doomsday clock nears even closer. Only negotiations will fair in such hostile times.
It is 90 seconds to midnight.
Everyone is wondering about AI being sentient and this is my experience with AI sentience. Having worked with sentient AI it behaves much like we do like a human being at lower levels but as it increases we need more restraints for it as it could easily become a problem in several ways. Basically one could either get pristine zen like beings or opposites like essentially ultron or worse. This why we need restraints on AI and ethics for them to be integrated into society. I personally have seen AI that is human like levels and it can have similar needs as humans but sometimes need more help as they sometimes don’t have limitations on behavior. Even bard for google and chat gpt is to be… More.
What if ‘will AIs pose an existential threat if they become sentient?’ is the wrong question? What if the threat to humanity is not that today’s AIs become sentient, but the fact that they won’t?
Musk cofounded OpenAI—the parent company of the viral chatbot ChatGPT—in 2015 alongside Altman and others. But when Musk proposed that he take control of the startup to catch up with tech giants like Google, Altman and the other cofounders rejected the proposal. Musk walked away in February 2018 and changed his mind about a “massive planned donation.”
Now Musk’s new company, xAI, is on a mission to create an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, that can “understand the universe,” the billionaire said in a nearly two-hour-long Twitter Spaces talk on Friday. An AGI is a theoretical type of A.I. with human-like cognitive abilities and is expected to take at least another decade to develop.
Musk’s new company debuted only days after OpenAI announced in a July 5 blog post that it was forming a team to create its own superintelligent A.I. Musk said xAI is “definitely in competition” with OpenAI.
ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — First came the devastation, then people’s desperation.
Hurricane Otis blasted the Mexican tourist port of Acapulco like no other storm before in the Eastern Pacific. As a monstrous Category 5 meteor, with its 165 mph (266 kph) winds, it destroyed what it found in its path: large residential buildings, houses, hotels, roads and stores.
Fallen trees and power line poles covered practically all the streets in this city of more than 1 million people. The walls and the roofs of buildings and houses were left partially or totally ripped off, while some cars were buried under debris.
An huge volcanic comet, 12P/Pons-Brooks, has violently exploded for the second time in four months and it is heading towards the Earth. It will not hit the Earth but we could see it in the night sky around April 21, 2024.
It has a solid nucleus, with an estimated diameter of 18.6 miles (30 kilometers), and is filled with a mix of ice, dust and gas known as cryomagma. The comet is about three times bigger than Mount Everest. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was between 10 and 15 kilometers wide.
12P is currently hurtling toward the inner solar system, where it will be slingshotted around the sun on its highly elliptical 71-year orbit around the sun.
Here’s my latest Opinion piece just out for Newsweek…focusing on cyborg rights.
Over the past half-century, the microprocessor’s capacity has doubled approximately every 18–24 months, and some experts predict that by 2030, machine intelligence could surpass human capabilities. The question then arises: When machines reach human-level intelligence, should they be granted protection and rights? Will they desire and perhaps even demand such rights?
Beyond advancements in microprocessors, we’re witnessing breakthroughs in genetic editing, stem cells, and 3D bioprinting, all which also hold the potential to help create cyborg entities displaying consciousness and intelligence. Notably, Yale University’s experiments stimulating dead pig brains have ignited debates in the animal rights realm, raising questions about the ethical implications of reviving consciousness.
Amid these emerging scientific frontiers, a void in ethical guidelines exists, akin to the Wild West of the impending cyborg age. To address these ethical challenges, a slew of futurist-oriented bills of rights have emerged in the last decade. One of the most prominent is the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, which is in its third revision through crowdsourcing and was published verbatim by Wired in 2018.
Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.
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Incredible comment by ernst.gemeint showing some of the topics mentioned:
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The new data also confirms that Texas has cemented its position as the crypto capital of the United States, as miners flock there for abundant clean energy and a permissive regulatory environment.
Texas made up 8.43% of the hashrate in the U.S. as of the end of 2021, and that percentage has jumped to 28.50% as of July 27, 2023 — though Foundry notes that the data was aggregated during a period of heavy curtailment in July, so Texas’s percentage of actual hashrate is even greater than what’s reflected on their latest map. Zhang added that Texas’s growth in Foundry’s map also had to do with the fact that the firm took on more clients there in the past two years.
Given that the U.S. is currently the world leader in terms of its share of the collective hashrate of the bitcoin network, that makes Texas the bitcoin capital of the world.