Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 3037

There’s no shortage of AI doomsday scenarios to go around, so here’s another AI expert who pretty bluntly forecasts that the technology will spell the death of us all, as reported by Bloomberg.

This time, it’s not a so-called godfather of AI sounding the alarm bell — or that other AI godfather (is there a committee that decides these things?) — but a controversial AI theorist and provocateur known as Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has previously called for bombing machine learning data centers. So, pretty in character.

“I think we’re not ready, I think we don’t know what we’re doing, and I think we’re all going to die,” Yudkowsky said on an episode of the Bloomberg series “AI IRL.”

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The fear of artificial intelligence is largely a Western phenomenon. It is virtually absent in Asia. In contrast, East Asia sees AI as an invaluable tool to relieve humans of tedious, repetitive tasks and to deal with the problems of aging societies. AI brings productivity gains comparable to the ICT (information and communications technology) revolution of the late 20th century.

China is using AI as an integral part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which brings together different “Industry 4.0” technologies – high-speed (fifth-generation) communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, etc. Chinese ports unload container ships in 45 minutes, a task that can take up to a week in other countries.

Today’s fear of AI has many parallels to the fear of machines at the end of the 19th century. French textile workers, fearing mechanical weaving would endanger their jobs and devalue their craft, threw their “sabots” (clogs) into weaving machines to render them inoperable. They gave us the word sabotage.

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On the cusp of the iPhone 15 debut, Apple has finally admitted what has long been clear: The industry is facing a smartphone slowdown. Also: Another M3 Mac goes into testing, Apple seeks to downplay its Goldman Sachs rift, and Vision Pro developer labs get off to a sluggish start.

Last week in Power On: The iPhone 15 will have thinner bezels in another step toward Apple’s dream phone.

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An important objective of medical research is to identify the underlying molecular mechanisms of human brain health and diseases.

This objective has been predominantly achieved through observational studies of gene expression in human brain tissues obtained from post-mortem brain donors for their analysis. Importantly, many of these studies are based on the assumption that gene expression in the post-mortem human brain is an exact representation of gene expression in the living human brain.

A recent study published on the medRxiv preprint server challenges this assumption by comparing human prefrontal cortex gene expression between living and post-mortem samples.

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