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Musk seems frustrated with the delays in Neuralink’s progress.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person has reached out to a competitor Synchron Inc. about a potential investment after his own biotech company Neuralink has lagged in developing an implantable brain chip, Reuters reported.

Launched in 2016, Neuralink was co-founded by Musk to develop implantable brain-chip interfaces to connect humans and computers. Like his ambitious projections about his electric vehicles, Musk had ambitiously claimed in 2019 that Neuralink was aiming for its product to receive regulatory approval by the end of 2020.

Later in 2021, when the company had not even begun human trials, Musk claimed at a Wall Street Journal conference that he expected them to begin by 2022, but the company has failed to get the regulatory nod to do so, even at the time of writing this. Contrastingly, a startup, Synchron, received the necessary approvals last year.

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The system uses neural networks to predict solar storms up to 48 hours in advance.

A multi-institutional research group based out of China has put together an “early warning” system that could aid in the accurate prediction of space weather, a press release said.

Every 11 years or so, the magnetic field of the Sun flips completely so that its north pole becomes south, while the south pole becomes north. The changes in the magnetic field of the Sun lead to visible changes on the solar surface, where regions of intense magnetic activity temporarily stop the convection process.

The drop in temperature of that region can be observed by telescopes on Earth as they appear darker than the rest of the solar surface and hence are called sunspots. At times, sunspots end up giving out giant eruptions of energy and material, which are called solar flare and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), respectively.

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It’s part of a wider project aimed at investigating dangerous solar eruptions.

China is building the world’s largest array of telescopes designed to study the Sun, a report from the South China Morning Post.

The array, called the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT), will help scientists better understand coronal mass ejections — massive solar eruptions that have the potential to knock out the world’s internet and disrupt global satellite services.

Work on what will be the world’s largest circular array for solar radio imaging is expected to be finished by the end of the year, supervisor says.

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This method could be helpful for elderly people.

Our brain has both short-term and long-term memory. While short-term memory helps us with things like remembering the bus number, long-term memory processes information for a long time. However, as we age, our memory does not work as well as it used to.

Electrical brain stimulation for 20 minutes on four consecutive days can improve two different types of memory in individuals 65 years and older for at least one month, a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience reveals.

According to the study, this method could be beneficial for elderly people to maintain their errands very easily.

Reinhart et al. show that repetitive transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) of unique combinations of rhythmic frequency and stimulation locations produces selective and long-lasting improvements in verbal working memory and long-term memory in older adults.

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An art collective is trying to get an AI-supported candidate into Danish Parliament in 2023. Could we have a fully virtual candidate one day?

With all the political rancor that has become a part of our everyday reality, maybe it’s time to admit that humans may not be the best at forging agreements. Our egos are always in play, and emotions often rule our political choices more than reason. Maybe artificial intelligence (AI) could do a better job, or at least that’s what the creators of The Synthetic Party, the world’s first AI-based political party, think. The party hopes to run an AI candidate in Denmark’s general election in 2023.

Full Story:

Imaginima/iStock.

The party would also like to see the UN adding an 18th sustainable development goal which would let humans coexist directly with algorithms.

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While farmers are its primary target, it’s an exciting passenger drone.

The Recon, a one-passenger eVTOL multi-copter aircraft manufactured by The U.S.-based company Ryse Aerotech, undertook its first human flight test in June.

While the eVTOL is not designed for urban use or commuting and aims at farmers and ranchers, the Recon is pitched as a buy ‘n’ fly ultralight aircraft with no requirement for a pilot license.

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The software that runs John Deere tractors was successfully “jailbroken” at this year’s DEF CON hacker convention, enabling farmers to repair or retune their equipment without engaging with the company that sold them their vehicles.

The hacker involved, who calls himself Sick Codes, was responding directly to U.S. farmers’ long-standing concerns that their “smart” tractors are run on software that only John Deere can access to repair. Smart tractors, including those manufactured by John Deere, are also widely used in the U.K.

Sick Codes’ jailbreak was undertaken to “liberate the tractors,” he said. John Deere responded in a statement to Wired magazine that it works closely with cybersecurity partners and also “embraces the broader ethical hacking community” to ensure its security capabilities remain industry-leading. In March 2022, the manufacturer responded to pressure from farmers with the announcement that it would make more of its software repair tools available to customers and mechanics from next year.

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Montana this month gave a City of Billings contractor approval to build homes using 3D-printed walls for new construction in the state. The technology Tim Stark, the contractor, is using comes from Apis Cor, a Florida-based technology company that emphatically states on its website, “We print 3D buildings.”

The first time I encountered Apis Cor was when I wrote about the state of 3D-printed buildings back in 2016. Then Apis Cor was Russia-based and was working with a U.S. company. The website links in my posting back then for both the Russian and U.S. company no longer work. So I am guessing that the Apis Cor of today represents the evolution of both the technology platform as well as the business.

The current version of Apis Cor has constructed a number of pilot homes in the U.S. and the biggest 3D-printed building in the world in the United Arab Emirates. The technology has complied with some international building code standards but not yet in the U.S. Getting regulatory approval from the state of Montana, however, will likely open the door to seeing 3D printers being used more extensively here in North America, and can help lower the cost of home builds and solve growing demand.

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This is Episode 7 in a series of videos discussing the General Theory of General Intelligence as overviewed in the paper.
Goertzel, Ben. “The General Theory of General Intelligence: A Pragmatic Patternist Perspective.“
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.15100
This episode overviews ideas regarding how the particular nature and requirements of *human-like-ness* can be used guide the design and education of AGI systems. This is where cognitive science and computer science richly intersect. Core architectural ideas of OpenCog along with numerous other AGI systems (MicroPsi, LIDA, Aaron Sloman’s work,…) are reviewed in this context.
Some additional references relevant to this episode are:
Goertzel, Ben. “The Embodied Communication Prior: A characterization of general intelligence in the context of Embodied social interaction.” In 2009 8th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics, pp. 38–43. IEEE, 2009.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.352…1&type=pdf.
Bengio, Yoshua. “The consciousness prior.” 2017
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.08568
Goertzel, Ben, Matt Iklé, and Jared Wigmore. “The architecture of human-like general intelligence.” In Theoretical foundations of artificial general intelligence, pp. 123–144. Atlantis Press, Paris, 2012.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.352.1548
Ben Goertzel, Cassio Pennachin, and Nil Geisweiller. Engineering.
General Intelligence, Part 1: A Path to Advanced AGI via Embodied Learning and Cognitive Synergy. Springer: Atlantis Thinking Machines, 2013.
https://1lib.us/book/2333263/7af06e?id=2333263&secret=7af06e.
Ben Goertzel, Cassio Pennachin, and Nil Geisweiller. Engineering.
General Intelligence, Part 2: The CogPrime Architecture for Integrative, Embodied AGI. Springer: Atlantis Thinking Machines, 2013.
https://1lib.us/book/2333264/207a57?id=2333264&secret=207a57
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