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Category: futurism – Page 452

Assessing AI Risk Skepticism

How should we respond to the idea that advances in AI pose catastrophic risks for the wellbeing of humanity?

Two sets of arguments have been circulating online for many years, but in light of recent events, are now each mutating into new forms and are attracting much more attention from the public. The first set argues that AI risks are indeed serious. The second set is skeptical. It argues that the risks are exaggerated, or can easily be managed, and are a distraction from more important issues and opportunities.

In this London Futurists webinar, recorded on the 27th of May 2023, we assessed the skeptical views. To guide us, we were joined by the two authors of a recently published article, “AI Risk Skepticism: A Comprehensive Survey”, namely Vemir Ambartsoumean and Roman Yampolskiy. We were also joined by Mariana Todorova, a member of the Millennium Project’s AGI scenarios study team.

The meeting was introduced and moderated by David Wood, Chair of London Futurists.

For more details about the event and the panellists, see https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/293488808/

The paper “AI Risk Skepticism — A comprehensive study” can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.03885.

Continue reading “Assessing AI Risk Skepticism” | >

Sam Altman shares his optimistic view of our AI future

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has been touring Europe for the past few days, meeting head of governments and startup communities to talk about AI regulation, ChatGPT and beyond. In his latest on-stage appearance at Station F in Paris, Altman answered questions from local entrepreneurs and shared his views about artificial intelligence.

A few days ago, Altman met with Emmanuel Macron. Station F director Roxanne Varza first asked him about the content of the conversation. As expected, the discussion mostly revolved around regulation. “It was great, we talked about how to get the balance right between protection with this technology and letting it flourish,” Altman said.

He then explained why he’s been traveling from one country to another at a frenetic pace. “The reason for doing this trip is to get out of the Bay Area tech bubble,” he said.

Hypersonic hydrogen-powered jet cuts trip from US to Australia to four hours

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A COMPANY has developed a hypersonic hydron-powered passenger jet that could reduce flight time from America to Australia to just under four hours.

The European startup Destinus has been testing a prototype for several years and completed a successful test flight of a prototype at the end of 2022.

The company, based in Switzerland, was founded by Russian physicist and entrepreneur Mikhail Kokorich.

The first experimental observation of subpicosecond electron bunches originating from an ultracold source

Identifying new sources that produce electrons faster could help to advance the many imaging techniques that rely on electrons. In a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology demonstrated the scattering of subpicosecond electron bunches from an ultracold electron source.

“Our research group is working to develop the next generation of ultrafast electron sources to push imaging techniques such as ultrafast electron diffraction to the next level,” Tim de Raadt, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org.

“The idea of using laser-cooled ultracold gas clouds as an electron source to improve the state-of-the-art in brightness was first introduced in a paper published in 2005. Since then, research efforts have produced multiple versions of such a ultracold electron source, with the most recent one (used in this work) focusing on making the source compact, easy to align and operate, and being more stable, as described in another past paper that also studied the transverse electron beam properties.”

This new supernova, the brightest in years, could help astronomers forecast future star explosions

A new supernova has turned into the most watched phenomenon in the May night sky. The close proximity of the stellar explosion and the vast amount of observations gathered since the discovery promise to advance astronomers’ understanding of stellar evolution and could even lead to major advances in supernova forecasting.

Supernovas are powerful explosions in which very massive stars, at least eight times more massive than our sun, die when they use up all the hydrogen fuel in their cores. The discovery of this latest exploding star, known officially as 2023ifx, was a serendipitous one.

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