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Chemical signals from contracting muscles can influence the growth of brain networks, according to new research published in Neuroscience. The study highlights the importance of physical activity to mental health, and the findings could also help contribute to the development of more effective treatments for cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Previous studies had shown that exercise has significant benefits for cognitive health, even when initiated at late stages in life. Exercise has been associated with long-term changes in the hippocampus, a brain region crucial for learning and memory, including increased neurogenesis, synaptogenesis, and enlarged volume.

However, the specific mechanisms through which exercise produces these changes in the hippocampus were not well understood. By uncovering these mechanisms, the authors behind the new study aim to develop exercise-based treatments for cognitive pathologies that affect the hippocampus, such as Alzheimer’s disease, stress, depression, anxiety, and normal aging.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have created a “semantic brain decoder” to guess someone’s thoughts based on brain activity.

During tests, it captured the gist of what someone was thinking, rather than a literal translation. And if participants resisted, it produced gibberish.

The decoder, written about in the journal Nature Neuroscience in May, is novel, said Edmund Lalor, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester. But its threat to privacy is minimal.

The future of artificial intelligence and video games with their relation to simulation theory, and whether or not we may already be in a virtual world controlled by some other form of intelligence.

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AI news timestamps:
0:00 AI simulation theory intro.
0:59 The rise.
1:25 Controversies.
1:52 Full immersion.
2:22 The new era.
2:41 Bio activation.
5:54 Multi level simulation.
6:22 Beyond.

#ai #future #technology

Since I don’t work for any large companies involved in AI, nor do I anticipate ever doing so; and considering that I have completed my 40-year career (as an old man-now succesfully retired), I would like to share a video by someone I came across during my research into “True Open Source AI.”

I completely agree with the viewpoints expressed in this video (of which begins at ~ 4 mins into the video after technical matters). Additionally, I would like to add some of my own thoughts as well.

We need open source alternatives to large corporations so that people (that’s us humans) have options for freedom, and personal privacy when it comes to locally hosted AIs. The thought of a world completely controlled by Big Corp AI is even more frightening than George Orwell’s “Big Brother.” I believe there must be an alternative to this nightmarish scenario.

“Intelligence supposes goodwill,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the middle of the twentieth century. In the decades since, as we have entered a new era of technology risen from our minds yet not always consonant with our values, this question of goodwill has faded dangerously from the set of considerations around artificial intelligence and the alarming cult of increasingly advanced algorithms, shiny with technical triumph but dull with moral insensibility.

In De Beauvoir’s day, long before the birth of the Internet and the golden age of algorithms, the visionary mathematician, philosopher, and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894–March 18, 1964) addressed these questions with astounding prescience in his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the ideas in which influenced the digital pioneers who shaped our present technological reality and have recently been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers eager to reinstate the neglected moral dimension into the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of technology.

A decade after The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener expanded upon these ideas in a series of lectures at Yale and a philosophy seminar at Royaumont Abbey near Paris, which he reworked into the short, prophetic book God & Golem, Inc. (public library). Published by MIT Press in the final year of his life, it won him the posthumous National Book Award in the newly established category of Science, Philosophy, and Religion the following year.