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Category: robotics/AI – Page 153

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Claims Humans Will Achieve Immortality by 2030

Ray Kurzweil, who used to be a computer scientist at Google, is no stranger to accurate predictions. With an impressive track record, he foresaw consumers designing their own clothes from home computers by 1999 and the world’s best chess player losing to a computer by 2000. He had also predicted the widespread use of portable computers in various shapes and sizes by 2009.

His groundbreaking forecasts have consistently inspired people to push the boundaries of what is possible. Ray Kurzweil has so far made 147 predictions with 86% accuracy and has the world looking forward to the new ones with much anticipation. For his remarkable contributions and insight, the visionary was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Technology in 1999. He was also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022.

The renowned futurist predicts that AI will surpass human intelligence and pass the Turing test by 2029. And that by 2045, humans will merge with the artificial intelligence we’ve created, a phenomenon he calls ‘The Singularity.’ He believes this would exponentially amplify our intelligence, creating unparalleled opportunities for innovation and progress.

Joscha Bach — What does it take to build conscious Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is not just an engineering discipline, but also a philosophical project, aimed at the naturalization of the mind. By allowing to build testable models, AI offers a metaphysical framework and a methodology for defining and exploring mental representations, perception, agency, self modeling, attention and systemic models of psychology. At the same time, very little practical AI research is concerned with understanding consciousness and the mind. Starting from the epistemological position of computationalist functionalism, we will discuss the phenomenology of consciousness (especially second order perception and \.

High-speed energy-efficient electro-optic switch developed

Researchers have developed a high-speed electro-optic switch that is energy-efficient, has low crosstalk and works across a broad bandwidth. Made using a scalable, chip-friendly process, this switch could enhance data capacity in optical networks and data centers by improving signal routing and switching.

Jinwei Su from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China will present this research at Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC), the global event for and networking, which will take place 30 March–3 April 2025 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

As artificial intelligence and cloud computing rapidly advance, the demand for high-capacity data exchange continues to rise. Optical switching, with its broad bandwidth and low latency, is emerging as one of the most promising solutions to address this challenge. To achieve nanosecond-scale , the researchers fabricated a 2×2 cascaded electro-optic switch by micro-transfer printing pre-etched thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) onto .

AI models make precise copies of cuneiform characters

Deciphering some people’s writing can be a major challenge—especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted onto 3,000-year-old tablets.

Now, Middle East scholars can use (AI) to identify and copy over cuneiform characters from photos of tablets, letting them read complicated scripts with ease.

Along with Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform is one of the oldest known forms of writing, and consists of more than 1,000 unique characters. The appearance of these characters can vary across eras, cultures, geography and even individual writers, making them difficult to interpret. Researchers from Cornell and Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed an approach called ProtoSnap that “snaps” into place a prototype of a character to fit the individual variations imprinted on a tablet.

AI and adaptive optics propel free-space quantum communication by solving atmospheric turbulence challenges

In the quest for ultra-secure, long-range quantum communication, two major challenges stand in the way: the unpredictable nature of atmospheric turbulence and the limitations of current optical wavefront correction techniques. Researchers at the University of Ottawa, under the supervision of Professor Ebrahim Karimi, the director of Nexus for Quantum Technologies, in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada (NRC) and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (Germany), have made significant advances in overcoming both obstacles.

Their two latest breakthroughs—an AI-powered forecasting tool called TAROQQO and a high-speed Adaptive Optics (AO) system for correcting turbulence in quantum channels—represent a turning point in developing free-space quantum networks.

These advancements, published in Optics Express and Communication Physics, offer complementary solutions to the fundamental issue of atmospheric turbulence that distorts and diminishes photonic quantum states as they traverse through the air.

World’s first “Synthetic Biological Intelligence” runs on living human cells

The world’s first “biological computer” that fuses human brain cells with silicon hardware to form fluid neural networks has been commercially launched, ushering in a new age of AI technology. The CL1, from Australian company Cortical Labs, offers a whole new kind of computing intelligence – one that’s more dynamic, sustainable and energy efficient than any AI that currently exists – and we will start to see its potential when it’s in users’ hands in the coming months.

Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical’s CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon “chip” are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

“Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years,” said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. “We’ve enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission.”

We Are the Target: Defending the Cognitive Terrain with Dr. Tamara Schwartz | CSI#27

Description: We are the targets for numerous information campaigns, as companies, politicians, cybercriminals, and nation states guzzle up the digital dust of our online selves. These information campaigns are designed to trigger our survival instincts in order to prevent us from thinking, and instead trigger an emotional reaction. Dr. Schwartz will discuss this rivalry for power, and how we must first learn how to calm our survival brain in order to defend our cognitive terrain against the onslaught of information warfare.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Tamara Schwartz, USAF (ret.), is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity and Strategy at the York College of Pennsylvania, and an affiliate researcher with Cybersecurity at MIT-Sloan Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, an international cybersecurity think tank. While on active duty, Dr. Schwartz’s thought leadership informed the standup of Cyber Command and the design of various command centers supporting Joint Space, Cyber, and Global Strategic Operations, and her work at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan earned her the 2011 Information Operations Officer of the Year. More recently, Dr. Schwartz was a member of the 2020 “Dr. Evil task force,” with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, identifying future threats to inform DoD investments in emerging technology. She received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, her M.S. in Engineering Management from the University of Dayton, and her Doctorate of Business Administration from the Fox School of Business, Temple University. Her research expertise includes Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity as a strategic competitive advantage, and information warfare.

Information Warfare, by Dr. Tamara Schwartz.
https://he.kendallhunt.com/product/in… College of Pennsylvania, Cybersecurity Management https://www.ycp.edu/academics/program… Weapons of Mass Disruption https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…