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Summary: The neuroscience of consciousness explores the fundamental aspect of wakefulness and the higher-level cognitive perceptions, such as thinking and understanding.

Various theories, like the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and the Integrated Information Theory, attempt to provide an explanatory framework for the conscious experience.

The advent of technologies like fMRI and EEG has further enabled us to identify neural correlates of consciousness, enhancing our understanding of this complex phenomenon.

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Researchers on Tuesday unveiled a major discovery—malicious firmware that can wrangle a wide range of residential and small office routers into a network that stealthily relays traffic to command-and-control servers maintained by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.

A firmware implant, revealed in a write-up from Check Point Research, contains a full-featured backdoor that allows attackers to establish communications and file transfers with infected devices, remotely issue commands, and upload, download, and delete files. The implant came in the form of firmware images for TP-Link routers. The well-written C++ code, however, took pains to implement its functionality in a “firmware-agnostic” manner, meaning it would be trivial to modify it to run on other router models.

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Generative AI has taken the world by storm. So much so that in the last several months, the technology has twice been a major feature on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” The rise of startling conversant chatbots such as ChatGPT has even prompted warnings of runaway technology from some luminary artificial intelligence (AI) experts. While the current state of generative AI is clearly impressive — perhaps dazzling would be a better adjective — it might be even further advanced than is generally understood.

This week, The New York Times reported that some researchers in the tech industry believe these systems have moved toward something that cannot be explained as a “stochastic parrot” — a system that simply mimics its underlying dataset. Instead, they are seeing “An AI system that is coming up with humanlike answers and ideas that weren’t programmed into it.” This observation comes from Microsoft and is based on responses to their prompts from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

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TOKYO, May 20 (Reuters) — Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations on Saturday called for the development and adoption of international technical standards for trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) as lawmakers of the rich countries focus on the new technology.

While the G7 leaders, meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, recognised that the approaches to achieving “the common vision and goal of trustworthy AI may vary”, they said in a statement that “the governance of the digital economy should continue to be updated in line with our shared democratic values”.

The agreement came after European Union, which is represented at the G7, inched closer this month to passing legislation to regulate AI technology, potentially the world’s first comprehensive AI law.

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SABINE HOSSENFELDER: My name is Sabine Hossenfelder. I’m a physicist and Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and I have a book that’s called “Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.”

NARRATOR: Why did you pursue a career in physics?

HOSSENFELDER: I originally studied mathematics, not physics, because I was broadly interested in the question how much can we describe about nature with mathematics? But mathematics is a really big field and I couldn’t make up my mind exactly what to study. And so I decided to focus on that part of mathematics that’s actually good to describe nature and that naturally led me to physics. I was generally trying to make sense of the world and I thought that human interactions, social systems are a pretty hopeless case. There’s no way I’ll ever make sense of them. But simple things like particles or maybe planets and moons, I might be able to work that out. In the foundations of physics, we work with a lot of mathematics and I know from my own experience that it’s really, really hard to learn. And so I think for a lot of people out there, the journal articles that we write in the foundations of physics are just incomprehensible.

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