Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey end theme.
On Wednesday, at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva, a panel of government experts debated policy options regarding lethal autonomous weapons.
Dutch NGO Pax created a report that surveyed major players from the sector on their view of lethal autonomous weapons. They categorised companies based on 3 criteria: whether they were developing technology that’s potentially relevant to deadly AI, working on related military products, and if they had committed to abstaining from contributing in the future.
By these criteria, Microsoft scores rather highly in the birthplace of Skynet rankings. Microsoft has invested extensively in developing artificial intelligence products, has very close relationships with the US military, and Satya Nadella has committed to providing the military with their very best technology. While Microsoft has fallen short of explicitly developing AI for military purposes, we do know that they have developed a version of the HoloLens for the military that is specifically designed to increase the lethality of soldiers in the field.
Short Circuit 2
Posted in futurism
Should citizenship be restricted to humans?
Scene taken from the film Short Circuit 2 (1988).
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An asteroid larger than some of the world’s tallest buildings will zip by Earth next month.
Ummmn o.o!
How are black holes born? Astrophysicists have theories, but we don’t actually know for certain. It could be massive stars quietly imploding with a floompf, or perhaps black holes are born in the explosions of colossal supernovas. New observations now indicate it might indeed be the latter.
In fact, the research suggests that those explosions are so powerful, they can kick the black holes across the galaxy at speeds greater than 70 kilometres per second (43 miles per second).
“This work basically talks about the first observational evidence that you can actually see black holes moving with high velocities in the galaxy and associate it to the kick the black hole system received at birth,” astronomer Pikky Atri of Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) told ScienceAlert.
Y. Haile-Selassie et al. A 3.8-million-year-old hominin cranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Nature. Published online August 28, 2019. doi:10.1038/s41586-019‑1513-8.
B.Z. Saylor et al. Age and context of mid-Pliocene hominin cranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Nature. Published online August 28, 2019. doi:10.1038/s41586-019‑1514-7.
B. Asfaw. The Belohdelie frontal: new evidence of early hominid cranial morphology from the Afar of Ethiopia. Journal of Human Evolution. Vol. 16, Nov.-Dec. 1987, p. 611. doi:10.1016/0047–2484(87)90016–9.
An international team of researchers led by the University of Tokyo has discovered a new material which, when rolled into a nanotube, generates an electric current if exposed to light. If magnified and scaled up, say the scientists, the technology could be used in future high-efficiency solar devices.
