[et_pb_section admin_label="section"] [et_pb_row admin_label="row"] [et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text"] Press release from the Center for A.I. Safety San Francisco, CA – Distinguished AI scientists, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and leaders of the major AI labs, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, have signed a single-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety that reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” This represents a historic coalition of AI experts — along with philosophers, ethicists, legal scholars, economists, physicists, political scientists, pandemic scientists, nuclear scientists, and climate scientists — establishing the risk of extinction from advanced, future AI systems as one of the world’s most important problems. The statement affirms growing public sentiment: a recent poll found that 61 percent of Americans believe AI threatens humanity’s … [Read more...] about Top AI Scientists Warn: Risk of Extinction From AI on Scale with Nuclear War
James Webb Space Telescope Unfolds the Universe
In case you missed the news, the first images came in from the James Webb telescope, a nail-biting feat of engineering. Launched on Dec. 25, 2021, on an Ariane-5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, South America, the James Webb Space Telescope completed a complex deployment sequence in space, where its mirrors were aligned, and its instruments were calibrated to the space environment. Now, the first images of our universe that has ever been taken. As astrophysicist Jane Rigby marveled about SMACS 0723, "We took that image before breakfast." In 12.5 hours, NASA changed the way we see the universe. If Hubble images were mind-blowing— the Webb images are transcendent. “Today, we present humanity with a groundbreaking new view of the cosmos from the James Webb Space Telescope – a view the world has never seen before,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “These images, including the deepest infrared view of our universe that has ever been taken and show us how Webb will help to uncover the answers to questions we don’t even yet know to ask; questions that … [Read more...] about James Webb Space Telescope Unfolds the Universe
Magnetic Sun: Art vs Science
The intriguing image above was uploaded to Fine Art America by an astrophotographer, Jason Guenzel, on January 16, 2021. The image is titled— “Magnetic Sun: A stylized rendition of a solar close-up. According to the artist, "the image highlights the turbulent magnetic field on the visible surface of our star.” The picture was processed using software to enhance the solar chromosphere or gaseous layer above the sun. Treading the line between art and science, the viral image allows the viewer to conceptualize the sun in new and intriguing ways. Once the overwhelming radiance of the star is drawn down, the resulting image challenges the preconceived notions we have of our closest star, instilling a new sense of wonder at the turbulent force that gives life to planet Earth. This heavily software-processed image of the solar chromosphere reveals the complex nature of the magnetic field within our star.Walking the thin line between science and art ... perhaps blurring it a bit. #Astrophotography #space #solar #star #power pic.twitter.com/DaG3xjEiZd— Jason Guenzel … [Read more...] about Magnetic Sun: Art vs Science
Life during Plague Time.
Life in California went topsy-turvy on Marth 19th, 2020, when Governor Gavin Newsom issued a stay at home order to protect the health and well-being of all Californians. Quite suddenly, the world shifted on its access. The ominous sense of dread finally had a definition: Pandemic. From the ground, there was confusion. The city shut down. Those of us who had day jobs, found ourselves confined to our houses. For me, editorial meetings and teaching yoga took place on Zoom. As a writer, nothing changed. Before Covid-19, writing meant entering a fantasy world of my own making, and after Covid-19, my inner landscape remained exactly the same. To write is to step into another dimension. But the real world is something altogether different. Life got tricky. As the deaths mounted and the grim reaper laid body bags down at the steps of the capital, the highest levels of government denied reality. Toxic tribal affiliations had gripped the nation. A simmering distrust of science caused a bizarre slide into disinformation and denial of a very real virus. As a devotee of both … [Read more...] about Life during Plague Time.
Panpsychism: Do Stars have Consciousness?
The Native Americans had a more sophisticated view of consciousness. According to the mythology of the scattered tribes, everything was conscious, animals, insects, rocks, water, earth, and sky. All creation was a living, breathing conscious being, not inert, dead, or mechanical. The doctrine that material objects possess some type of consciousness is known as panpsychism. Storytellers have explored the idea for millennia and now scientists are weighing in on the question. Could the universe be alive and possess a type of proto-conscious awareness? According to Gregory Matloff, Ph.D., Professor of Physics, the answer is yes. Matloff has worked as a propulsion scientist for NASA, and an emeritus associate and adjunct associate professor of physics at New York City College of Technology. Inspired by the philosopher and science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon whose novel, Star Maker (published in 1937) explored the concept of a consciously aware universe, Matloff wondered whether that concept could be proven. In a paper titled, Can Panpsychism Become an Observational Science? Matloff … [Read more...] about Panpsychism: Do Stars have Consciousness?
Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
Source: Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays Here is a great article by Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, about how your brain is not a computer.... No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’. Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer. To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, … [Read more...] about Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
Why Science says your Lovelife Sucks: 285,000 to 1
Can science be used to answer the existential quandaries that haunt us? Questions like why your love life sucks? Yes, it can! The Drake Equation was used by Carl Sagan to calculate the chances of highly evolved alien life existing in our galaxy. A physicist named Peter Backus applied the Drake Equation to a more pressing issue; his own statistical chance of finding a girlfriend. Read the paper here: Why I don't have a girlfriend. The results were not encouraging. After some mathematical gymnastics, Backus concluded, "There are 26 women in the UK with whom I might have a wonderful relationship. So, on a given night out in London there is a 0.000 34% chance of meeting one of these special people, about 100 times better than finding an alien civilization we can communicate with. That’s a 1 in 285,000 … [Read more...] about Why Science says your Lovelife Sucks: 285,000 to 1