Michael Marshall attended the UK’s annual gathering of people who share the unshakeable belief that the Earth is flat.
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Recently, Elon Musk had the chance to share his thoughts on universal basic income (UBI) at the World Government Summit in Dubai. At the Summit, Musk had the opportunity to talk about the future, and the challenges the world will face in the next hundred years – including artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and the job displacement expected to come with it.
When asked about the challenges civilization is set to face in the near future, Musk began by noting the threat of artificial intelligences that surpass humanity.
He stated, “deep artificial intelligence, or artificial general intelligence, where you can have artificial intelligence that is much smarter than the smartest human on Earth, this is a dangerous situation.”
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By Alice Klein
The eyes really are a window to the soul. The way they move can reveal your personality type – a finding that could help robots better understand and interact with humans.
Psychologists have long believed that personality influences the way we visually take in the world. Curious people tend to look around more and open-minded people gaze longer at abstract images, for example.
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Sometimes, people laugh imagining themselves as elderly people. Would they laugh imagining themselves as diseased?
If you watched a TV show, or read a comic book, where the difficulties and suffering of an oncological patient were portrayed in a disrespectful, humorous way, you would likely be outraged; at the very least, you would think that the show or comic book was in seriously bad taste. You’d probably think the same about similar material involving a disabled person or anyone who, because of an incurable disease, had only a short time to live spent in increasing misery—for example, a child affected by progeria, a disease that may best be described as a sort of accelerated aging syndrome that kills off its victims in their mid-twenties at the very latest.
Yet, it is not uncommon to see the diseases of old age, and even elderly people in general, being laughed at in just such a way without causing much outrage at all. Why is there a difference?
We’ve all seen this
You can probably recall plenty of examples of this phenomenon from your own experience. Who has never seen a sketch where the main characters are exasperated by a shriveled, elderly man who, holding up an old-fashioned ear trumpet, keeps getting wrong what they are saying despite all their efforts? How many times have cheap laughs been gotten because of an elderly person losing his or her dentures or a rambling old man exaggeratedly ranting about pretty much everything?
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The recent breakthroughs in quantum physics expand on work down nearly two decades ago. So how far away are useful quantum computers?
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With huge suites of data, we can extract plenty of signals where we know to look for them. Everything else? That’s where AI comes in.
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Russia’s economy has been stagnating since 2014, and the money isn’t there for more costly military adventures.
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An engineer in California has an invention that she hopes will someday help people with damaged lungs breathe easier.
Stanford University’s Annelise Baron has developed a synthetic version of something called lung surfactant. Lung surfactant coats the tiny air sacs in the lung. Without it, every breath would be a struggle, like blowing up millions of little balloons. With surfactant, breathing is as easy as blowing soap bubbles.
Scientists inferred the existence of lung surfactant in the 1950s, and then Dr. Mary Ellen Avery showed that premature infants were unable to make surfactant, explaining the often fatal respiratory distress syndrome they suffered from.
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