Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at a UK-based tech company believe they are now a step closer to building a quantum computer that can solve real-world problems, after making progress towards creating a system that protects against errors.

Experts at Quantinuum said they have made a “breakthrough” towards making quantum computing fault tolerant, which would give the system the ability to continue operating without interruption, even if one or more of its components fail.

The race to build a fully functional quantum computer has mostly focused on correcting errors that affect the system, but Ilyas Khan, the company’s founder and chief product officer, said no-one has shown “an actual demonstration of a step towards qubits, the quantum equivalent of what we refer to as a ‘bit’ in existing computers, that are naturally fault tolerant”.

The latest artificial intelligence systems are not inherently evil, but they will do the bidding of their potentially evil human masters.

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THIS real-life statue was made with artificial intelligence.

Dubbed the “Impossible Statue”, this project was made by combining the works of five different historical artists using AI. At 150cm tall, weighing 500 kg carved from stainless steel, the sculpture showcases just how far technology has come and its ability to transform the future of how we build our world.

But experts say that releasing these models into the wild before fixing their flaws could prove extremely risky for the company.

The researchers suggest that a pervasive design perspective is driving the development of AI with increasingly human-like features. While this may be appealing in some contexts, it can also be problematic, particularly when it is unclear who you are communicating with. Ivarsson questions whether AI should have such human-like voices, as they create a sense of intimacy and lead people to form impressions based on the voice alone.

In the case of the would-be fraudster calling the “older man,” the scam is only exposed after a long time, which Lindwall and Ivarsson attribute to the believability of the human voice and the assumption that the confused behavior is due to age. Once an AI has a voice, we infer attributes such as gender, age, and socio-economic background, making it harder to identify that we are interacting with a computer.

The researchers propose creating AI with well-functioning and eloquent voices that are still clearly synthetic, increasing transparency.

Powered by OpenAI technology, the A.I. version of a popular Snapchat influencer is made over $70,000 in a week, marking the beginning of an ethically-thorny era.

As the world strives to ensure everyone has access to their fundamental human rights, technology is a crucial innovator for making lives better.

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 10 May 2023.

Moritz v. Sivers’ clock uses a beamsplitter and retroreflective foil to make digits float and rotate in midair.