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In this episode, recorded during the 2024 Abundance360 Summit, Ray, Geoffrey, and Peter debate whether AI will become sentient, what consciousness constitutes, and if AI should have rights.

Ray Kurzweil, an American inventor and futurist, is a pioneer in artificial intelligence. He has contributed significantly to OCR, text-to-speech, and speech recognition technologies. He is the author of numerous books on AI and the future of technology and has received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, among other honors. At Google, Kurzweil focuses on machine learning and language processing, driving advancements in technology and human potential.

Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the “godfather of deep learning,” is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist recognized for his pioneering work in artificial neural networks. His research on neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning has significantly impacted the development of algorithms that can perform complex tasks such as image and speech recognition.

Read Ray’s latest book, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

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“The subvolt regime, which is where this material operates, is of enormous interest to researchers looking to make circuits that act similarly to the human brain, which also operates with great energy efficiency.” — Argonne materials scientist Wei Chen “Redox” refers to a chemical reaction that…

As the integrated circuits that power our electronic devices get more powerful, they are also getting smaller. This trend of microelectronics has only accelerated in recent years as scientists try to fit increasingly more semiconducting components on a chip.

Microelectronics face a key challenge because of their small size. To avoid overheating, microelectronics need to consume only a fraction of the electricity of conventional electronics while still operating at peak performance.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have achieved a breakthrough that could allow for a new kind of microelectronic material to do just that. In a new study published in Advanced Materials, the Argonne team proposed a new kind of “redox gating” technique that can control the movement of electrons in and out of a semiconducting material.

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A small town in central Utah is set to be the home of a new underground “battery” that will store hydrogen as a clean energy source.

According to The New York Times, developers are creating two caverns as deep as the Empire State Building is tall from a geological salt formation near Delta, Utah. These caverns, which are expected to be complete next year, will be able to store hydrogen gas.

The hydrogen will be produced nearby through a process called electrolysis. This will be done using excess solar and wind power in spring and fall, when demand for energy is low. Then it can be stored until peak energy demand hits in the summer — at that time, it would be burned at a power plant as a blend of hydrogen and natural gas.

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The eyes can reveal a lot about the health of our brain. Indeed, problems with the eyes can be one of the earliest signs of cognitive decline. Our latest study shows that a loss of visual sensitivity can predict dementia 12 years before it is diagnosed.

Our research was based on 8,623 healthy people in Norfolk, England, who were followed up for many years. By the end of the study, 537 participants had developed dementia, so we could see what factors might have preceded this diagnosis.

At the start of the study, we asked participants to take a visual sensitivity test. For the test, they had to press a button as soon as they saw a triangle forming in a field of moving dots. People who would develop dementia were much slower to see this triangle on the screen than people who would remain without dementia.

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Reminds me of the world of null A by AEVan Vogh.

Many-valued logics are non-classical logics. They are similar to classical logic because they accept the principle of truth-functionality, namely, that the truth of a compound sentence is determined by the truth values of its component sentences (and so remains unaffected when one of its component sentences is replaced by another sentence with the same truth value). But they differ from classical logic by the fundamental fact that they do not restrict the number of truth values to only two: they allow for a larger set W W of truth degrees.

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