The Kepler telescope recently noticed a strange partial eclipse that some have speculated could be a Dyson Sphere. Are Dyson Sphere’s possible? Are they practical? What other alternatives to futuristic energy capture do we have to choose from? Why not a kugelblitz — a swarm of black hole powered engines?
Go to https://curiositystream.thld.co/NERD and use code NERD to save 25% off today, that’s only $14.99 a year. Thanks to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring today’s video. ~ In 1984 something strange happened in the village of Dodleston. A BBC Micro was sitting on a counter, when it suddenly started receiving mysterious messages, which appeared to come from the 16th century. This might have gone unnoticed had local teachers, Ken Webster and Peter Trinder, not investigated to find that information was so accurate, it would be almost impossible to fake. This whole event was documented in the book “The Vertical Plane”, published in 1989. But here, tonight, we investigate deep to find out exactly what this is all about.
Papers referenced in the video: Inter-and intraindividual variability in daily resting heart rate and its associations with age, sex, sleep, BMI, and time of year: Retrospective, longitudinal cohort study of 92,457 adults. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32023264/
It is a lesson the U.S. space program has had to learn many times over: don’t voluntarily give up a space capability without having a successor ready to go or already operational.
But for the ISS (International Space Station), a gap in LEO (low Earth orbit) scientific research capability will likely not occur when the iconic outpost ends its career, whenever that may be.
Artificial Intelligence Is the New Science of Human Consciousness. New videos DAILY: https://bigth.ink. Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers: https://bigth.ink/Edge.
Can AI dream? Can it love? Can it “think” in the same way we do? The short answer is: no. AI doesn’t need to bog itself down with simple human tasks like love or dreams or fear. The AI brain posits itself in a much grander scale first and then works backwards to the more human way of thinking. Joscha Bach suggests that much rather than humanoid robots, we are more likely to see AI super-brains developed by countries and larger companies. Imagine a computer brain that is designed to keep the stock market balanced, or detect earthquakes an ocean away that could sound alarms on our shores… that sort of thing.
It’s a big concept to wrap our human heads around. But as AI technology develops and grows by the day, it is important to understand where the technology is headed. Think less Rosie The Robot Maid from The Jetsons and more the computer from War Games.
Joscha Bach’s latest book is Principles of Synthetic Intelligence.
JOSCHA BACH:
Dr. Joscha Bach (MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) is an AI researcher who works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He is founder of the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the interactions of emotion, motivation, and cognition of situated agents. Bach’s mission to build a model of the mind is the bedrock research in the creation of Strong AI, i.e. cognition on par with that of a human being. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.
Speaking at the 6th International FQXi Conference, “Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World.”
The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.
We’ve been seeing a wave of innovations in solar panel technology, like perovskite solar cells, solar tiles and roofs, and organic panels. But what if we could harvest solar energy from the windows and skylights of our homes and skyscrapers, or even from our car windows and cellphone screens? Let’s explore transparent solar panels and how they stack up against conventional panels. Could transparent solar cells be the future of solar energy? Or does it remain to be unseen?
The French Armament General Directorate’s (DGA) ‘Capacité de Renseignement Electromagnétique Spatiale/Space-based Signal Intelligence Capability’ satellites have been successfully launched.
An Arianespace Vega rocket lifted off with the satellites from the European spaceport in French Guiana.
Known by the French acronym CERES, the satellites were designed and built by Airbus Defence and Space, and Thales.
Working at the intersection of hardware and software engineering, researchers are developing new techniques for improving 3D displays for virtual and augmented reality technologies.
Virtual and augmented reality headsets are designed to place wearers directly into other environments, worlds and experiences.
While the technology is already popular among consumers for its immersive quality, there could be a future where the holographic displays look even more like real life. In their own pursuit of these better displays, the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab has combined their expertise in optics and artificial intelligence. Their most recent advances in this area are detailed in a paper published in Science Advances and work that will be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2021 in December.
