Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The 3 Body Problem Explored: Cosmic Sociology, Longtermism & Existential Risk — round table discussion with three great minds: Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg and Joscha Bach — moderated by Adam Ford (SciFuture) and James Hughes (IEET).

Some of the items discussed:
- How can narratives that keep people engaged avoid falling short of being realistic?
- In what ways is AI superintelligence kept of stage to allow a narrative that is familiar and easier to make sense of?
- Differences in moral perspectives — moral realism, existentialism and anti-realism.
- Will values of advanced civilisations converge to a small number of possibilities, or will they vary greatly?
- How much will competition be the dominant dynamic in the future, compared to co-ordination?
- In a competitive dynamic, will defense or offense be the most dominant strategy?

Many thanks for tuning in!

Have any ideas about people to interview? Want to be notified about future events? Any comments about the STF series?
Please fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mr9PIfq2ZYlQsXRIn5BcLH2onbiSI7g79mOH_AFCdIk/

Kind regards.
Adam Ford.
- Science, Technology & the Future — #SciFuture — http://scifuture.org

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Joscha Bach is a German artificial intelligence researcher and cognitive scientist who works on on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. We got connected over the hard problem of consciousness — namely, why do people seem to think it’s so hard? During our conversation we deal with the foundational questions of the technological future being built in Silicon Valley, the fever dream of machine intelligence, and try to understand why people seem to think that there’s even such a thing as the hard problem of consciousness in the first place.

Support the scientific revolution by joining our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB

Tell us what you think in the comments or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub.

00:00:00 Go!
00:04:09 Career Advice.
00:11:31 Beauty, Grace, & Hotness.
00:13:48 Putting on Airs.
00:22:32 Patreon Ask.
00:22:33 Winning for the sake of winning.
00:29:35 Transformative experiences.
00:36:25 Speciation event, or crap again?
00:42:17 Who is Joscha Bach.
00:52:39 Physics & Causality.
01:00:52 Physics vs Biology.
01:12:16 Life vs Cells.
01:20:14 Biosynthetic AGI
01:28:15 Creativity & Novelty.
01:38:52 Wetware & Neuromorphic computing.
01:50:46 The Limits of Hardware.
02:05:07 The value of Agency.
02:15:47 Layers of Society.
02:35:03 Chimp Empire.
02:52:31 Collapse.
03:05:13 The Hard Problem.
03:43:28 Computer Imagination.
04:02:52 How reasoning works.
04:14:28 Reward Functions.
04:20:01 Consciousness dreams.
04:25:35 The heart of the disagreement.
04:30:15 Consensus.

#AGI #consciousness #machinelearning.

Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience.

Continue reading “Is There Really a Hard Problem of Consciousness? — Joscha Bach, Artificial Intelligence Researcher” | >

A newly discovered protein naturally houses an unusual binding site that can differentiate between rare earth elements, and researchers at Penn State have made it even better. Rare earth elements are key components used in everything from modern tech to gasoline production. The protein, called LanD, enriches neodymium and praseodymium over other similar rare earth elements (REEs) and has the potential to revolutionize industrial mining, researchers said.

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Prof. Leslie Leiserowitz first became intrigued by malaria when he was a young boy in South Africa. His father, who scouted the continent in search of wood for the family business, brought back not only tales of elephants and gorillas but also skin rashes and ringing in his ears, side effects of the quinine he took to prevent malaria.

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Newly emerging Chinese electric truck maker Windrose has claimed an Australian record for a public fast charge of more than 500 kilowatt hours as it topped up its massive batteries on its flagship heavy electric truck on a drive from Melbourne to Sydney.

The Windrose electric truck features a 729 kWh battery, and at a brief glance appears to be a Tesla Semi look-alike, with streamlined features and a driver’s seat placed in the middle of the cabin. The company claims a range of more than 670 kms, fully loaded to 49 tonnes, and hopes to enter commercial production next year.

The truck made an appearance at the All Energy show in Melbourne last week, before being taken around to show its wares to some major Australian logistics companies,. It then made the trip up the Hume Highway to Sydney on Sunday for another series of demonstrations.

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Halloween is on Thursday, Oct. 31 — but parts of the Treasure Coast may get a nice treat the night before.

SpaceX is targeting Wednesday, Oct. 30, to launch another payload of Starlink broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Depending on weather and visibility, parts of Indian River County might see a nice streak in the sky.

Below are suggestions on where to watch the rocket launch from this area and other things to know. If there are changes to the launch schedule, this story will be updated.

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“Our vision is for chip designers and engineering students, not just suppliers and manufacturers, to co-locate here, to create a value added ecosystem beyond just what it takes to build chips, and that’s how we’re going to create more value in the Phoenix economy,” Mack said.

A further three plants are also planned for the Phoenix site, which could bring TSMC’s total investment in the area to over $120 billion. Tech giant Apple has announced it will buy semiconductors from the fabrication plants.

The plants are anticipated to create 10,000 permanent jobs, and another 80,000 are expected to be created in the surrounding development.

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NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade—but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip.

This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically propelled rockets the agency develops now is called nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses nuclear fission and could one day power a rocket that makes the trip in just half the time.

Nuclear fission involves harvesting the incredible amount of energy released when an atom is split by a neutron. This reaction is known as a fission reaction. Fission technology is well established in power generation and nuclear-powered submarines, and its application to drive or power a rocket could one day give NASA a faster, more powerful alternative to chemically driven rockets.

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