Lately, there has been a lot of concern about the recent explosion of AI, and how it could reach the point of 1) being more intelligent than humans, and 2) that it could decide that it no longer needs us and could in fact, take over the Earth.
Physicist Stephen Hawking famously told the BBC: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Billionaire Elon Musk has said that he thinks AI is the “biggest existential threat” to the human race.
Computers running the latest AI have already beaten humans at games ranging from Chess to Go to esports games (which is interesting, because this is a case where AI could be better than humans at playing games which were built as software from the ground up, unlike Chess and Go, which were developer before the computer age).
A mission like no other.
NASA successfully launched its InSight lander Saturday, setting off its mission to Mars.
The InSight lander – short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – is set to arrive on Mars in November 2018. It was launched attached to the Atlas V rocket from the Space Launch Complex 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California before it later detached to make its way over to the Red Planet.
The successful launch also marks NASA’s first interplanetary mission to take off from the West Coast, according to the Associated Press. InSight will explore more of Mars than has ever been studied before. InSight will dig close to 16 feet into the surface of Mars to study the planet’s temperature. It will also take the first measurements of marsquakes. The Atlas V rocket also brought on two mini satellites that will follow the InSight on its mission.
