Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: internet – Page 114

South Korea’s Moon mission

The mission will circle the Moon for about a year at about 100 kilometers above the surface, searching for possible landing sites for future missions, conducting scientific research on the lunar environment, and testing space internet technology, South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT said in a statement. This mission will help prepare the country’s small space program for future exploration, as they hope to send a lander to the Moon by 2030.

If it successfully goes into orbit at the Moon, South Korea will become the seventh nation to undertake lunar exploration.

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Around the same time, neuroscientists developed the first computational models of the primate visual system, using neural networks like AlexNet and its successors. The union looked promising: When monkeys and artificial neural nets were shown the same images, for example, the activity of the real neurons and the artificial neurons showed an intriguing correspondence. Artificial models of hearing and odor detection followed.

But as the field progressed, researchers realized the limitations of supervised training. For instance, in 2017, Leon Gatys, a computer scientist then at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and his colleagues took an image of a Ford Model T, then overlaid a leopard skin pattern across the photo, generating a bizarre but easily recognizable image. A leading artificial neural network correctly classified the original image as a Model T, but considered the modified image a leopard. It had fixated on the texture and had no understanding of the shape of a car (or a leopard, for that matter).

Self-supervised learning strategies are designed to avoid such problems. In this approach, humans don’t label the data. Rather, “the labels come from the data itself,” said Friedemann Zenke, a computational neuroscientist at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. Self-supervised algorithms essentially create gaps in the data and ask the neural network to fill in the blanks. In a so-called large language model, for instance, the training algorithm will show the neural network the first few words of a sentence and ask it to predict the next word. When trained with a massive corpus of text gleaned from the internet, the model appears to learn the syntactic structure of the language, demonstrating impressive linguistic ability — all without external labels or supervision.

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And cleaning up the resulting space debris would be like ‘collecting bullets’.

SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation is growing at rocket speed.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently announced that the private space company expects over 4,200 Starlink satellites in operation within 18 months\.

The number of satellites in orbit is increasing and soon we will have difficulties observing the sky. Cleaning up the space debris would be like ‘collecting bullets’.

Continue reading “The worst case Starlink scenario? We could be ‘right on the edge’ of Kessler syndrome” | >

Online safety and ethics are serious issues and can adversely affect less experienced users. Researchers have built upon familiar human verification techniques to add an element of discrete learning into the process. This way users can learn about online safety and ethics issues while simultaneously verifying they are human. Trials show that users responded positively to the experience and felt they gained something from these microlearning sessions.

The internet is an integral part of modern living, for work, leisure, shopping, keeping touch with people, and more. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could live in an affluent country, such as Japan, and not use the internet relatively often. Yet despite its ubiquity, the internet is far from risk-free. Issues of safety and security are of great concern, especially for those with less exposure to such things. So a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo including Associate Professor Koji Yatani of the Department for Electrical Engineering and Information Systems set out to help.

Surveys of internet users in Japan suggest that a vast majority have not had much opportunity to learn about ways in which they can stay safe and secure online. But it seems unreasonable to expect this same majority to intentionally seek out the kind of information they would need to educate themselves. To address this, Yatani and his team thought they could instead introduce about online safety and ethics into a typical user’s daily experience. They chose to take advantage of something that many users will come across often during their usual online activities: human verification.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX raised $250 million in an equity round last month, the company disclosed in a securities filing on Friday. It has now raised $2 billion in 2022.

The filing doesn’t specify the sources of the funds, but noted they came from five investors.

SpaceX did not disclose a change in its valuation. The company’s value has soared in the last few years, with SpaceX raising billions to fund work on two capital-intensive projects — the next generation rocket Starship and its global satellite internet network Starlink. Its value hit $127 billion during its previous equity round in May, CNBC reported. That raise brought in $1.725 billion.

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In artist Miao Ying’s animated film Surplus Intelligence, a cockroach falls in love with the artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring her behavior. There’s only one problem: The AI, personified as a man with movie-star looks, committed a crime in Walden XII, the quasi-medieval fantasyland where the story is set. He stole the village’s power stone, and so the roach sets off to mine bitcoin to save him.

Viewers might see in the plot a metaphor for the conflicted relationship some Chinese people have with social credit scoring, which is meant to nudge citizens toward better behavior. Or it could be a nod to the insidious ways social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook condition our behavior and mine us for data. If the tale itself seems a little ridiculous at times, that’s because Miao had a stealth collaborator: the AI text-generating system GPT-3, which wrote the script for the film. That power stone in the village? GPT-3 determined that it looks like “a burrito from Mexico,” perhaps a side effect of all the advertising copy GPT-3 has been tasked with writing.

The half-hour film is on view through the end of the year at the Asia Society in New York as part of the exhibition Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity. “All of Miao Ying’s work is a satirical look at what digital means in China,” says Barbara Pollack, who curated Mirror Image and wrote the book Brand New Art from China. But, she notes, the works also celebrate the creativity the policies inspire in its citizens. Miao’s Hardcore Digital Detox (2018) challenges viewers to experience the internet behind the Great Firewall—and without the filter bubbles that platforms in the East and West impose. Chinternet Plus (2016) describes how to brand a “counterfeit ideology.” And for 2007’s Blind Spot, Miao manually annotated a Chinese dictionary to indicate all of the words that were censored on Google.cn at the time.

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