Madhumita Murgia Hi, my name is Madhumita Murgia, and I’m one of the presenters of Tech Tonic. We’re looking for some feedback from our listeners about the show. So if you have a second, please fill out our brief listener survey, which you can find at ft.com/techtonicsurvey.
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In this season of Tech Tonic, we’ve been talking about quantum computers and why some people think they’re so revolutionary. But so far we’ve mainly talked about the things quantum computers can do, or at least what they might be able to do in the future that makes them so groundbreaking: performing calculations that should take centuries in minutes, cracking the unbreakable codes of the internet, dramatically speeding up the development of new drugs and materials. But what we haven’t done yet is look at why they’re able to do these things. What’s going on inside a quantum computer that makes them so extraordinary, so completely different to any computer that’s come before.
The divide between low-budget and high-budget filmmaking just got a whole lot smaller with the unveiling of Wonder Studio, a new AI-powered tool that allows filmmakers to simply replace real-life actors with CGI characters.
The new tool was recently unveiled by Wonder Dynamics founders Nikola Todorovic, and Tye Sheridan, star of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. The above video showcases the capabilities of Wonder Studio, where an amateur filmmaker can use their footage of an individual and replace them with a variety of different CGI characters.
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman want to live forever, here’s how they’re planning on doing it and what it could mean for society.
First ‘long form’ video I have made in awhile. Very excited to get back into it and play around with different ways of styles and editing. Excited to hear what you guys think!
Chapters. 0:00 Introduction. 0:35 The Epic of Gilgamesh. 1:23 The Anti-Aging Industry. 1:59 Billionaire Life Extension. 3:17 Digital Heaven. 3:40 The Immortal Animal. 4:25 Impacts on Society. 5:25 The Great Equalizer.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems will inspire an explosion of creativity in the music industry and beyond, according to the University of Surrey researchers who are inviting the public to test out their new text-to-audio model.
AudioLDM is a new AI-based system from Surrey that allows users to submit a text prompt, which is then used to generate a corresponding audio clip. The system can process prompts and deliver clips using less computational power than current AI systems without compromising sound quality or the users’ ability to manipulate clips.
The general public is able to try out AudioLDM by visiting its Hugging Face space. Their code is also open-sourced on GitHub with 1000+ stars.
These successes could be taken to indicate that computation has no limits. To see if that’s the case, it’s important to understand what makes a computer powerful.
There are two aspects to a computer’s power: the number of operations its hardware can execute per second and the efficiency of the algorithms it runs. The hardware speed is limited by the laws of physics. Algorithms—basically sets of instructions —are written by humans and translated into a sequence of operations that computer hardware can execute. Even if a computer’s speed could reach the physical limit, computational hurdles remain due to the limits of algorithms.
Microsoft has just revealed its plans to launch GPT-4 next week. This will power a new version of ChatGPT that could let you create AI videos and music.
In episode 13 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses how microtubules are the most likely candidate to be a universal quantum computer that acts as a single executive unit in cells. First off, computer scientists are trying to model human behavior using neural networks that treat individual neurons as the base unit. But unicellular organisms are able to do many of the things that we consider to be human behavior! How does a single-cell lifeform perform this complex behavior? As Stuart Hameroff puts it, “neuron doctrine is an insult to neurons,” referring to the complexity of a single cell. Let’s look inside a cell, what makes it tick? Many think the DNA holds some secret code or algorithm that is executing the decision-making process of the cell. However, the microscope reveals a different story where the microtubules are performing a vast array of complex behaviors: swimming towards food, away from predators, coordinating protein delivery and creation within the cell. This begs the question: how do microtubules work? Well, they are single proteins organized into helical cylinders. What is going on here? Typically, we think of a protein’s function as being determined by its structure but the function of a single protein repeated into tubes is tough to unravel. Stuart Hameroff proposed that perhaps these tubulin proteins are acting as bits of information and the whole tube is working as a universal computer that can be programmed to fit any situation. Given the limitations of digital computation, Roger Penrose was looking for a quantum computer in biology and Stuart Hameroff was looking for more than a digital computation explanation. Hence, the Hameroff-Penrose model of microtubules as quantum computers was born. If microtubules are quantum computers, then each cell would possess a central executive hub for rapidly integrating information from across the cell and to turn that information into a single action plan that could be quickly disseminated. Furthermore, the computation would get a “quantum” speed-up in that exponentially large search spaces could be tackled in a reasonable timeframe. If microtubules are indeed quantum computers, then modern science has greatly underestimated the processing power of a single cell, let alone the entire human brain.
~~~ Timestamps ~~~ 0:00 Introduction. 3:08 “Neuron doctrine is an insult to neurons” 8:23 DNA vs Microtubules. 14:20 Diffusion vs Central Hub. 17:50 Microtubules as Universal Computers. 23:40 Penrose’s Quantum Computation update. 29:48 Quantum search in a cell. 33:25 Stable microtubules in neurons. 35:18 Finding the self in biology.
Brave new world let’s create happiness for everyone by putting microelectrode arrays in our brains but be careful not to create a situation like death by ecstacy by Larry Niven.
In the brain, pleasure is generated by a handful of brain regions called, “hedonic hotspots.” If you were to stimulate these regions directly, you would likely feel pleasurable sensations. However, not all of the hedonic hotspots are the same–some generate the raw sensations of pleasure whereas others are responsible for consciously interpreting and elaborating on the raw pleasure produced by the other hotspots. In this video, in addition to exploring the neuroscience of pleasure, we’ll see how understanding pleasure, happiness, meaning, and purpose can help us live better lives.
- Chapters. 00:00 Hedonic hotspots: the brain’s pleasure generators. 00:56 The evolution of pleasure. 01:46 How the brain generates pleasure. 03:07 The subcortical (‘core’) pleasure network. 04:08 The cortical (‘higher’) pleasure network. 05:09 The orbitofrontal cortex’ role and the abstract to concrete pleasure gradient. 08:13 How to be happier by understanding the neuroscience of pleasure. 11:40 Summary.
