Quantum firm will deploy a Superion 256 system at the center
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Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling: We’re storytelling animals
“We’re not gods, we’re just storytelling animals.”
Will Storr said that to me in March 2022. ChatGPT launched eight months later.
Since then we’ve built machines that do one thing astonishingly well: tell us stories. Fluent ones. Confident ones. Stories in which we are, conveniently, the hero.
That should worry us more than it does.
Will’s argument in The Science of Storytelling is that the human brain is not a truth engine. It’s a hero maker. It quietly edits reality so we come out looking right, good, and justified. Now pair that brain with an #AI trained on billions of our stories and tuned to keep us engaged.
Who’s writing whom?
Proactive AI for Superintelligent Agents
What if AI stopped waiting for you to tell it what to do—and started working ahead?
We’re moving past the era of typing prompts into chatbots and waiting around. AI is undergoing a massive shift from passive assistant to proactive teammate. Here is what that looks like: 👇
From Waiting Around to Working Ahead: The Evolution of Proactive AI https://research.google/pubs/proactive-ai-for-superintelligent-agents/
For a long time, interacting with artificial intelligence has felt a bit like talking to an incredibly smart, but intensely passive, digital assistant. You type a prompt, it gives you an answer, and then it sits in absolute silence until you talk to it again. It has no memory of what you did five minutes ago unless you remind it, no clock ticking in its head, and no ambition to do anything on its own.
The cutting edge of AI research is shifting past this “reactive” model. Instead of waiting for human commands, the next generation of AI is designed to be proactive—acting more like a diligent human coworker who anticipates needs, monitors environments, and handles tasks behind the scenes.
Here is what that shift looks like:
1. The Three Tiers of AI Evolution.
Your Eyes Could Reveal How Fast You’re Aging, Study of Nearly 30,000 Scans Suggests
We celebrate our birthdays on the same date each year, but alongside our chronological age – the number of years we’ve been alive – we also have a biological age that reflects how quickly our bodies are succumbing to wear and tear.
Working out someone’s biological age is more difficult than counting backward to a date of birth, though we are getting better at it.
Knowing this information can help in a variety of ways when it comes to health, including spotting serious problems earlier on.
Novel gene rejuvenation therapy preserves cell identity while reversing age
Every organ and tissue progressively loses function and integrity as it ages. In fact, researchers have identified “hallmarks of aging” that not only present specific processes impacted by age, but are also thought of as levers that, if successfully targeted, could help turn back the aging clock and result in tissue rejuvenation.
In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka’s Nobel prize-winning discovery that the over-expression of four genes, the “Yamanaka factors,” can reprogram most mature cell types back to an undifferentiated, pluripotent ground state was a milestone in aging research. Interestingly, when expressed only in short bursts, the Yamanaka factors can also partially reprogram old cells back to a more youthful state, reversing multiple hallmarks of aging while maintaining their specialized functions. This and other insights showed that aging does not need to be a one-way street and that aging cells retain a latent capacity for rejuvenation.
Unfortunately, the therapeutic use of Yamanaka factors is causing concern for some researchers because their overexpression also raises the risk of cancer formation. Researchers have therefore been hunting other factors for rejuvenating aging tissues in safer and more controllable ways. However, “in reprogramming, there is a fundamental tradeoff between rejuvenation and cell identity; achieving one without losing the other requires walking a fine line,” said Alex Plesa, Ph.D., the first co-author on a study presenting a new potential avenue to solving this challenge.
Building the tools behind genome editing breakthroughs
Genome editing is producing transformative therapies, yet there are still major challenges around delivery, access and understanding. In 2017, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, established The Center for Advanced Genome Engineering (CAGE), to equip researchers with cutting-edge tools, advance the development of editing technologies, and democratize access to genome engineering expertise.
CAGE director Shondra Pruett-Miller discusses the centre’s role in advancing genome editing and bringing emerging therapies closer to patients, from groundbreaking treatments for sickle cell disease and paediatric cancers, to the responsibility of making safe and cost-effective treatments accessible to all.
