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17 Definitions of the Technological Singularity

Everyone talks about the #Singularity. Almost nobody agrees on what it actually means.

Fourteen years ago, I stopped and collected the definitions. Not two or three. Seventeen of them. Turing. Von Neumann. I.J. Good. Vinge. Kurzweil. Bostrom. Plus a few names most people have never heard.

I expected them to line up. They didn’t. Some contradict each other outright. The one word we’ve built entire movements, companies, and fortunes on turns out to mean wildly different things depending on who is holding it.

And I wrote this before ChatGPT. Before the current #AI gold rush. Before “superintelligence” became a line in quarterly earnings calls.

Read all seventeen, then tell me which one you would bet your future on. Or give me an eighteenth.

(https://snglrty.co/48Oypf4)


With machine learning, researchers embrace the atomic-scale complexity of batteries

For grid-scale energy storage and national energy resilience, the U.S. needs better batteries. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are tackling that challenge in many ways, but one approach is making a significant impact: physics-informed machine learning.

In two recent publications, LLNL researchers examined how integrating molecular dynamics simulations with physics-informed machine learning can illuminate the relationships between structure and behavior in complex battery materials. They used the combination of techniques to explore carbon anodes in sodium-ion batteries and liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries.

“These studies show that the structural complexity of battery materials is not just an obstacle to understanding but a design advantage, laying the groundwork for high-throughput screening of next-generation energy-storage materials,” said LLNL scientist and author Liwen (Sabrina) Wan. “By encoding that complexity into physics-informed machine learning models, we can predict properties and identify design levers that traditional approaches simply cannot access.”

Faster quantum computers can learn from their own mistakes

Quantum computers promise to solve problems that would take even the fastest conventional supercomputers a vast amount of time, but the quantum information they store and process is extremely sensitive to even tiny disturbances from their surroundings. To keep these systems operating reliably, they need to be constantly recalibrated—interrupting their calculations in the process.

In a new experiment published in Nature, researchers led by Volodymyr Sivak at Google Quantum AI developed a machine-learning approach that continuously adjusts a quantum computer as it works. Their approach could allow quantum calculations to run far longer without costly interruptions.

TuxBot v3 Evolution Shows Signs of LLMAssisted IoT Botnet Development

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unreported Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet framework dubbed TuxBot v3 Evolution that shows signs of being developed with assistance from a large language model (LLM), albeit with not so successful results.

“While the AI complied with their request to generate botnet code, it included a safety disclaimer that the developer failed to remove before shipping,” Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. “Although the LLM clearly aided in constructing the botnet, several functions in the analyzed samples failed to work correctly.”

The cybersecurity company said a manual code review would have resolved these errors and that it’s possible more polished iterations of the malware exist out there in the wild.

Cursor Flaw Lets Malicious Cloned Repositories Trigger Windows Code Execution

Whatever that binary does, it does as you, with your source, your SSH keys and your cloud tokens. Cursor keeps re-running it for as long as the project stays open.

No prompt injection, no agent, no model in the loop, and no prior access to the machine: opening the folder is the entire exploit, and the result is arbitrary code execution as the logged-in user.

AI security firm Mindgard reported the flaw to Cursor on December 15, 2025 and published full technical details on Tuesday, seven months later. There is still no patch, and Cursor has published no advisory for the issue.

Google Gemini CLI abused as a hacking agent, malware botnet operator

A Russian-speaking threat actor known as “bandcampro” used Google’s open-source Gemini CLI AI tool as a hacking agent and to operate a small-scale botnet.

The AI agent responded to the attacker’s prompts, troubleshooting problems on the fly and even proposing operational improvements at least 59 times.

In more than 200 sessions between May 19 and April 21, the threat actor worked with the AI tool to deploy and operate an infrastructure that controlled eight systems in a dental clinic and to get access to the OpenDental database.

Exclusive Backlash Has Tech Executives Fearing for Their Lives

1st comment below.


The executive was “going to be killed,” he told the guard, and he needed to warn someone, according to records of the April 15 incident viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The encounter, which took place five days after an attempted firebombing of OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman’s house, ended without violence or an arrest. But for executives at Anthropic—and across the artificial-intelligence industry—the threat was far from over.

In recent months, mounting opposition to AI has given rise to a surge of violent rhetoric, threats against people and property, and a serious attempt at harm. The phenomenon has executives at tech companies large and small reconsidering their personal security arrangements and how they talk about their products to a public that is increasingly wary of the technology and the societal changes it is ushering in.

Machine Consciousness & AI Awakening — Davidad and Joscha Bach moderated by Lou de K

Are today’s AI systems conscious? What would it mean if they were? And what kind of future should we build if machine consciousness is possible?This first episode of our podcast series focuses on Machine Consciousness and the concept of an AI Awakening.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Joscha Bach (California Institute for Machine Consciousness) and Davidad explore some of the deepest questions at the intersection of AI, philosophy, cognitive science, and the future of civilization. Moderated by Lou de K (CIMC), the discussion was originally recorded ahead of the MC0001 conference (www.machine-consciousness.ai).

The conversation covers:

Whether current large language models might already possess some form of consciousness.
Consciousness as a computational and substrate-independent phenomenon.
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