From babysitting children to beating the world champion at Go, robots are slowly but surely developing more and more advanced capabilities.
And many scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, suggest it may only be a matter of time before machines gain consciousness.
Continue reading “Artificially intelligent robots could soon gain consciousness” »
Artificial intelligence is seeping into every nook and cranny of modern life. AI might tag your friends in photos on Facebook or choose what you see on Instagram, but materials scientists and NASA researchers are also beginning to use the technology for scientific discovery and space exploration.
But there’s a core problem with this technology, whether it’s being used in social media or for the Mars rover: The programmers that built it don’t know why AI makes one decision over another.
Modern artificial intelligence is still new. Big tech companies have only ramped up investment and research in the last five years, after a decades-old theory was shown to finally work in 2012. Inspired by the human brain, an artificial neural network relied on layers of thousands to millions of tiny connections between “neurons” or little clusters of mathematic computation, like the connections of neurons in the brain. But that software architecture came with a trade-off: Since the changes throughout those millions of connections were so complex and minute, researchers aren’t able to exactly determine what is happening. They just get an output that works.
Continue reading “AI is now so complex its creators can’t trust why it makes decisions” »
A former Facebook executive has spoken out against the social network he helped to create, saying it is ‘ripping society apart’.
The comments were made by Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth.
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I’m interviewed in the documentary (which I appear in but haven’t seen yet). Naturally, I support creating super people with science & technology (a main goal of #transhumanism), just not using unethical or exclusionary methods to do so. http://www.wavelength-entertainment.com/genius-factory/ #GeniusFactory
According to a French physiologist, humans have reached the peak of our height, lifespan and physical fitness.
I suspect that from our vantage point (a narrow snapshot of human evolution), we lack sufficient data to arrive this sweeping conclusion. Nevertheless, mainstream media is taking this research seriously.
http://www.newsweek.com/humans-reached-peak-height-lifespan-fitness-741816
With machine learning algorithms evolving at an incredibly fast pace, concerns are mounting whether artificial intelligence (AI) is the logical continuation of human history or its demise. RT talked to three experts in the field about the benefits and dangers of AI.
Three AI experts engaged in a debate on RT about the benefits and dangers of rapidly-developing technology and AI.
In an April 2014 article, I demonstrated how one might approach a fair Bitcoin valuation.
My methodology was based on the demand that Bitcoin would generate if it displaced a small fraction of cash and credit used for retail and commercial payments around the world. At the time, Bitcoin had a value of USD $450. I estimated that if it captured 5% of global payments, it would have a fair value of about $10,000/BTC (I didn’t complete the calculation—I left that up to the reader. That’s because I was concerned that publishing such a prediction would cause me to lose credibility as an economist and blogger. For what it is worth, I also predicted that a rise to $10,000 would take 5~8 years.
As you might imagine, my friends and family urged me to unload my BTC investment. The April 2014 price of $450/BTC seemed very high to most armchair analysts. After all, thirteen months earlier, it had been just $45.
Humanity has reached its peak and is now probably in its downfall, according to major new research.
People have long thought of human development as one long process of improvement, going on forever. But we are now running up against the limits of how good we can be, say scientists – and most likely we’ll now just begin to fall again.
The major research review looked at 120 years of data and found that there appears to be limits on our characteristics, like when we die, how tall we can be and how strong we are. We are pushing up against those limits now, the research suggests.
Continue reading “The human race has peaked and will now get worse, scientists confirm” »
