Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5277

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is back in the news thanks to the recent introduction of Gato from DeepMind. As much as anything, AGI invokes images of the Skynet (of Terminator lore) that was originally designed as threat analysis software for the military, but it quickly came to see humanity as the enemy. While fictional, this should give us pause, especially as militaries around the world are pursuing AI-based weapons.

However, Gato does not appear to raise any of these concerns. The deep learning transformer model is described as a “generalist agent” and purports to perform 604 distinct and mostly mundane tasks with varying modalities, observations and action specifications. It has been referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of AI models. It is clearly much more general than other AI systems developed thus far and in that regard appears to be a step towards AGI.

Multimodal systems are not new — as evidenced by GPT-3 and others. What is arguably new is the intent. By design, GPT-3 was intended to be a large language model for text generation. That it could also produce images from captions, generate programming code and other functions were add-on benefits that emerged after the fact and often to the surprise of AI experts.

Read more | >

Catriona Campbell, a UK-based artificial intelligence expert, argues we could soon be raising artificially intelligence virtual children inside the metaverse.

She dubs these hypothetical offspring “Tamagotchi children,” in a reference to the popular virtual pets from the 1990s.

In her new book “AI by Design: A Plan For Living With Artificial Intelligence,” The Telegraph reports, Campbell argues that these virtual kiddos could be an environmentally friendly and cheaper answer to overpopulation and limited resources.

Read more | >

An Apple Watch owner has created a complication and watchOS app that works with a glucose monitor, so they can keep track of their blood glucose level from their wrist.

Numerous rumors have claimed Apple is actively working on some form of glucose monitoring sensor for the Apple Watch, but has so far yet to add it to the wearable device. In the case of one Apple Watch owner, they managed to hack together their own solution.

The project, outlined by Harley Turan, effectively takes the data from a continuous glucose monitoring system and imports and interprets it in a way that it can be viewed on an Apple Watch. In doing so, the project creates a reasonably low-cost solution for the problem.

Read more | >

For all the fuss it caused, it is only about a foot high.

The “door” was imaged by NASA’s Curiosity rover on May 7 on the slopes of Mount Sharp, the central massif within Gale crater, where it landed in 2012. Described on one website as a “pharaonic tomb door” because of its resemblance to some ancient Egyptian remains, it is, in fact, only about one foot high.

It is hard to spot on the panoramic image mosaic of the hillside above, but it leaps out at the eye if you see the individual frame where it occurs, as seen below. It does look like a doorway until you realize how small it is. And if you boost the contrast in the dark parts of the image, the picture just about reveals a solid rock face at the back of the shadowed interior. So as a gateway into the hollow hills of Mars, it doesn’t lead very far.

Nobody with even a little geological experience is likely to mistake the feature as a “door.” A geologist would note the thin and slightly sloping repeated layers of sandstone making up the whole of the rock face and would immediately expect that they were looking at the eroded remains of hardened sand dunes. These once covered the stream and lake sediments that Curiosity examined earlier in its gradual climb up through the layers of sedimentary rock making up Mount Sharp.

Continue reading ““Door” on Mars? A planetary scientist explains what you really see” | >