Lifeboat Foundation

A top-secret lab in the UK is developing the country’s first quantum clock to help the British military boost intelligence and reconnaissance operations, the defense ministry said Thursday.

The clock is so precise that it will lose less than one second over billions of years, “allowing scientists to measure time at an unprecedented scale,” the ministry said in a statement.

“The trialing of this emerging, groundbreaking technology could not only strengthen our operational capability, but also drive progress in industry, bolster our science sector and support high-skilled jobs,” Minister for Defense Procurement Maria Eagle said.

Prof Zhang Zhiyong’s team at Peking University developed a heterojunction-gated field-effect transistor (HGFET) that achieves high sensitivity in short-wave infrared detection, with a recorded specific detectivity above 10¹⁴ Jones at 1,300 nm, making it capable of starlight detection. Their research was recently published in the journal Advanced Materials, titled “Opto-Electrical Decoupled Phototransistor for Starlight Detection.”

Highly sensitive shortwave infrared (SWIR) detectors are essential for detecting weak radiation (typically below 10⁻⁸ W·Sr⁻¹ ·cm⁻² ·µm⁻¹) with high-end passive image sensors. However, mainstream SWIR detection based on epitaxial photodiodes cannot effectively detect ultraweak infrared radiation due to the lack of inherent gain.

Filling this gap, researchers at the Peking University School of Electronics and collaborators have presented a heterojunction-gated field-effect transistor (HGFET) that achieves ultra-high photogain and exceptionally low noise in the short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) region, benefiting from a design that incorporates a comprehensive opto-electric decoupling mechanism.

A previously neglected spin–orbit-coupling effect could be strong enough to engender unconventional superconductivity in certain materials.

The project has stoked concerns about displacement and environmental impact downstream in India and Bangladesh.

As DARPA forges ahead with this new initiative, it raises important questions about the balance between enhancing national security and safeguarding individual privacy and civil liberties.

The potential repercussions of deploying sophisticated algorithms to interpret human behavior could lead to ethical dilemmas and increased scrutiny from civil rights advocates.

In summary, DARPA’s Theory of Mind program is positioned at the intersection of technology and national security, focusing on leveraging machine learning to improve decision-making in complex scenarios.

This is according to AI ethicists from the University of Cambridge, who say we are at the dawn of a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent”, from buying movie tickets to voting for candidates. They call this the Intention Economy.

Researchers from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) argue that the explosion in generative AI, and our increasing familiarity with chatbots, opens a new frontier of “persuasive technologies” – one hinted at in recent corporate announcements by tech giants.

“Anthropomorphic” AI agents, from chatbot assistants to digital tutors and girlfriends, will have access to vast quantities of intimate psychological and behavioural data, often gleaned via informal, conversational spoken dialogue.

Microsoft migrates. NET installers to Azure Front Door as Edgio ends January 15, 2025. Action required: update domains by January 7, 2025.

New “DoubleClickjacking” attack bypasses clickjacking protections by exploiting double-click timing gaps, enabling account takeovers.

Heninger and Johnson argue that chaos theory limits the capacity of even superintelligent systemsin simulating/predicting events within our universe, implying that Yudkowskian warnings may not accurately describe the nature of ASI risk. #aisafety #ai #tech

Completely eliminating the uncertainty would require making measurements with perfect precision, which does not seem to be possible in our universe. We can prove that fundamental sources of uncertainty make it impossible to know important things about the future, even with arbitrarily high intelligence. Atomic scale uncertainty, which is guaranteed to exist by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, can make macroscopic motion unpredictable in a surprisingly short amount of time. Superintelligence is not omniscience.

Chaos theory thus allows us to rigorously show that there are ceilings on some particular abilities. If we can prove that a system is chaotic, then we can conclude that the system offers diminishing returns to intelligence. Most predictions of the future of a chaotic system are impossible to make reliably. Without the ability to make better predictions, and plan on the basis of these predictions, intelligence becomes much less useful.

Continue reading “Superintelligence Is Not Omniscience” »