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Imagine a world where parents can give birth to superbabies with bones so strong they’re impervious to a surgical drill and a heart less prone to failure. A world where a child has DNA from three parents, not two. A world where it’s possible for a woman to have her favorite movie star’s child simply by collecting a few of his skin cells. Genetic technology is making it all a reality, horrifying some and heartening others.

Reproductive advances are arriving so rapidly, we’ve already entered the realm of science-fiction and are on the verge of making truly astounding leaps.

For more, look to the new book “The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids — and the Kids We Have” by Bonnie Rochman.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: For decades, researchers have worked to create a better and more direct connection between a human brain and a computer to improve the lives of people who are paralyzed or have severe limb weakness from diseases like ALS.

Those advances have been notable, but now the work is yielding groundbreaking results.

Special correspondent Cat Wise has the story.

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How deepmind’s memory trick helps AI learn faster.

While AI systems can match many human capabilities, they take 10 times longer to learn. Now, by copying the way the brain works, Google DeepMind has built a machine that is closing the gap. “Our experiments show that neural episodic control requires an order of magnitude fewer interactions with the environment,” they say.

Intelligent machines have humans in their sights. Deep-learning machines already have superhuman skills when it comes to tasks such as face recognition, video-game playing, and even the ancient Chinese game of Go. So it’s easy to think that humans are already outgunned.

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Historian Yuval Noah Harari makes a bracing prediction: just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class.

The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?

This is not an entirely new question. People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened, because as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future. The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking. The current scientific answer to this pipe dream can be summarized in three simple principles:

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Support me on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/minutephysics

Previous video on No Cloning: https://youtu.be/owPC60Ue0BE

How to teleport Schrödinger’s cat: this video presents the full quantum teleportation procedure, in which an arbitrary qubit (spin, etc) is teleported from Alice to Bob by way of a pair of particles entangled in a bell (EPR) state and the transmission of information via a classical channel.

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A central goal that modern physicists share is finding a single theory that can explain the entire Universe and unite the forces of nature.

The standard model, for example, leaves dark matter, dark energy, and even gravity out of the picture — meaning that it really only accounts for a very small percentage of what makes up the Universe.

String theory stitches Einstein’s conception of the general theory of relativity together with quantum, echanics, and the result is quantum theory applied to gravity.

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