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Category: existential risks – Page 54

Imagine a field of wheat that extends to the horizon, being grown for flour that will be made into bread to feed cities’ worth of people. Imagine that all authority for tilling, planting, fertilizing, monitoring and harvesting this field has been delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip-irrigation systems, self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, clever enough to respond to the weather and the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker messes things up.

A new risk analysis, published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture comes with substantial potential risks for farms, farmers and that are poorly understood and under-appreciated.

“The idea of intelligent machines running farms is not science fiction. Large companies are already pioneering the next generation of autonomous ag-bots and decision support systems that will replace humans in the field,” said Dr. Asaf Tzachor in the University of Cambridge’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), first author of the paper.

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This group appears to be doing its ‘bit’ for NEO identification and is always open to new members, check it out?

IAWN was established (2013) as a result of the UN-endorsed recommendations for an international response to a potential NEO impact threat, to create an international group of organizations involved in detecting, tracking, and characterizing NEOs. The IAWN is tasked with developing a strategy using well-defined communication plans and protocols to assist Governments in the analysis of asteroid impact consequences and in the planning of mitigation responses.

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Machine learning can work wonders, but it’s only one tool among many.

Artificial intelligence is among the most poorly understood technologies of the modern era. To many, AI exists as both a tangible but ill-defined reality of the here and now and an unrealized dream of the future, a marvel of human ingenuity, as exciting as it is opaque.

It’s this indistinct picture of both what the technology is and what it can do that might engender a look of uncertainty on someone’s face when asked the question, “Can AI solve climate change?” “Well,” we think, “it must be able to do *something*,” while entirely unsure of just how algorithms are meant to pull us back from the ecological brink.

Such ambivalence is understandable. The question is loaded, faulty in its assumptions, and more than a little misleading. It is a vital one, however, and the basic premise of utilizing one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever built to address the most existential threat it has ever faced is one that warrants our genuine attention.

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Continue reading “Astronomers spot a wandering black hole in empty space for the first time” | >

These missiles are too fast to detect. Hypersonic weapons technology is at the heart of a new arms race. Currently, the US, China, and Russia are all competing to develop the most effective long-range hypersonic missiles. A recent report revealed that North Korea has also successfully tested a hypersonic missile on January 5, 2022, the country’s second reported test of a hypersonic missile.

North Korea has also referred to verifying the “fuel ampoule system” during this deployment which means that the liquid fuel used by the missile was sealed at production. This allows for rapid deployment even after the missile has been stored for long periods of time, while also reducing its vulnerability to pre-emptive strikes.

We have now seen what North Korea can do in quite imaginative ways.

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NASA says an asteroid came within about 1.2 million miles of the Earth’s atmosphere on Tuesday afternoon. In 2013, Anderson Cooper reported on our ability to detect asteroids and comets that come close to Earth after another asteroid impacted the atmosphere over Russia.

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Continue reading “How safe is Earth from an asteroid impact? (2013) | 60 Minutes Archive” | >

About 66 million years ago, a “planet killer” — a 10-kilometer-wide rocky asteroid — hit Earth. The Chicxulub impact caused a mass extinction on a planetary scale, killing off an estimated 76 percent of all species living on Earth at the time, including the dinosaurs. According to a study published by Philip Lubin and Alexander N. Cohen, both physicists at the University of California in Santa Barbara, there is a chance that humanity could survive such a similar impact happening in the near future.

There currently are about 1,200 asteroids on a publicly available asteroid risk list, but all are smaller than one kilometer. The probability of a Chicxulub sized asteroid (5 to 15 kilometers across) hitting Earth is once in a billion years — very low, but not impossible.

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