Lifeboat Foundation

Posted on Big Think.

Astronomers are buzzing after observing the fastest nova ever recorded. The unusual event drew scientists’ attention to an even more unusual star. As they study it, they may find answers to not only the nova’s many baffling traits, but to larger questions about the chemistry of our solar system, the death of stars and the evolution of the universe.

The research team, led by Arizona State University Regents Professor Sumner Starrfield, Professor Charles Woodward from University of Minnesota and Research Scientist Mark Wagner from The Ohio State University, co-authored a report published today in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.

A nova is a sudden explosion of bright light from a two-star system. Every nova is created by a white dwarf—the very dense leftover core of a star—and a nearby companion star. Over time, the white dwarf draws matter from its companion, which falls onto the white dwarf. The white dwarf heats this material, causing an uncontrolled reaction that releases a burst of energy. The explosion shoots the matter away at high speeds, which we observe as visible light.

Alan Turing first proposed a test for machine intelligence in 1950, but now researchers at Google and their partners have created a suite of 204 tests to replace it, covering subjects such as mathematics, linguistics and chess.

It’s the largest, richest, most in-depth, most accurate map of the Milky Way that’s ever been constructed. This sparks joy.

German industrial manufacturer Covestro aims to develop software with QC Ware that would use quantum computing to create more efficient chemical reactions and better materials.

The fastest-growing black hole of the last 9 billion years has been discovered by an international team led by astronomers at The Australian National University (ANU).

The black hole consumes the equivalent of one Earth every second and shines 7,000 times brighter than all the light from our own galaxy, making it visible to well-equipped backyard astronomers.

Lead researcher Dr. Christopher Onken and his co-authors describe it as a “very large, unexpected needle in the haystack.”

The legendary Skunk Works had a hand in developing Tom Cruise’s fastest plane yet.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell takes his need for speed to a new realm: the hypersonic realm, that is. Thirty-six years after the first film debuted, Mitchell is a test pilot flying the SR-72 “Darkstar” airplane. Although fictional, the SR-72 has a real-world pedigree, with design help for the aircraft and models coming from the same group that is designing the real SR-72: the world-famous Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs.

According to Lockheed Martin, the production team behind Top Gun: Maverick contacted the company’s Skunk Works division to assist with the SR-72 concept. The Skunk Works, a name drawn from the cartoon Li’l Abner, is the division of Lockheed Martin that works on classified aircraft programs.

Continue reading “Darkstar, the Hypersonic Jet in ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ Could Become a Real Plane” »

Summary: A new, open-source model of synaptic plasticity in the neocortex could propel understanding of how learning occurs in the brain.

Source: University of Montreal.

Everyone knows the human brain is extremely complex—but how does it learn, exactly? Well, the answer may be a lot simpler than commonly believed.

“Quite a large gap exists between the current narrative of AI and what it can actually do,” says Giada Pistilli, an ethicist at Hugging Face, a startup focused on language models. “This narrative provokes fear, amazement, and excitement simultaneously, but it is mainly based on lies to sell products and take advantage of the hype.”

The consequence of speculation about sentient AI, she says, is an increased willingness to make claims based on subjective impression instead of scientific rigor and proof. It distracts from “countless ethical and social justice questions” that AI systems pose. While every researcher has the freedom to research what they want, she says, “I just fear that focusing on this subject makes us forget what is happening while looking at the moon.”

What Lemoire experienced is an example of what author and futurist David Brin has called the “robot empathy crisis.” At an AI conference in San Francisco in 2017, Brin predicted that in three to five years, people would claim AI systems were sentient and insist that they had rights. Back then, he thought those appeals would come from a virtual agent that took the appearance of a woman or child to maximize human empathic response, not “some guy at Google,” he says.

Continue reading “LaMDA and the Sentient AI Trap” »