Lack of control: Future of AI uncertain as it becomes human-like | Daily Sabah – Daily Sabah

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From ethical standards to direct threats, it is simply unknown whether artificial intelligence systems that make decisions on people's behalf may pose a danger and whether they can be controlled in the future, after entering our lives fairly recently and fairly innocently, mostly through video games governed by human-generated algorithms.

People are only using limited and weak artificial intelligence with chatbots in everyday life and in driverless vehicles and digital assistants that work with voice commands.

It is debatable whether algorithms have progressed to the level of superintelligence and whether they will go beyond emulating humans in the future.

The rise of AI over human intelligence over time paints a positive picture for humanity according to some experts, while it is seen as the beginning of a disaster according to others.

Wilhelm Bielert, chief digital officer and vice president at Canada-based industrial equipment manufacturer Premier Tech, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the most unknown issue about artificial intelligence is superartificial intelligence, which is still largely speculative among experts studying AI and which exceeds human intelligence.

He said that while humans build and program algorithms today, the notion of artificial intelligence commanding itself in the future and acting like a living entity is still under consideration. Given the possible risks and rewards, Bielert highlighted the importance of society approaching AI development in a responsible and ethical manner.

Professor Ahmet Ulvi Trkba, a lecturer at Istanbul Medipol Universitys Faculty of Law, argues that one day when computer technology reaches the level of superintelligence, it may want to redesign the world from top to bottom.

"The reason why it is called a 'singularity' is that there is no example of such a thing until today. It has never happened before. You do not have a section to make an analogy to be taken as an example in any way in history because there is no such thing. It's called a singularity, and everyone is afraid of this singularity," he said.

Vincent C. Muller, professor of Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Philosophy at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, told Anadolu it is uncertain whether artificial intelligence will be kept under control, given that it has the capacity to make its own decisions.

"The control depends on what you want from it. Imagine that you have a factory with workers. You can ask yourself: 'Are these people under my control?' Now you stand behind a worker and tell the worker, 'Look, now you take the screw, you put it in there and you take the next screw,' and so this person is under your control," he said.

According to Bielert, artificial intelligence will have a complicated and multidimensional impact on society and future generations.

He noted that it is vital that society address potential repercussions proactively and guarantee that AI is created and utilized responsibly and ethically.

"Nowadays, if you look at how teenagers and younger children live, they live on screens," he said.

He said that artificial intelligence, which has evolved with technology, has profoundly affected the lives of young people and children.

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Native American art: Form and function to singularity – The Taos News

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Back when the stones were soft, my brother Jeff might say in his best Old Lodge Skins voice from Little Big Man, things were much simpler.

Among Native tribes in the Southwest, when The People needed something to carry something else, they made it out of the materials at-hand. First, there were tanned hides. If you needed a basket, there were willows near the stream you could cut, strip and weave. If you needed a pot to put over a fire to cook a venison stew, you sought out an arroyo where micaceous clay was exposed by flash floods, added water and shaped it into a vessel that was fired over a cedar wood flame.

As time progressed and the land was suddenly filled with other people who came here from far away lands, they brought with them the means to expand their skills to make other things. The introduction of churro sheep from the Spanish, for instance, led to a blanket weaving tradition among the Din people, along with the tradition of kilts, sashes and mantas among the Pueblos.

Artistry, however, evolved differently than it did for the foreign colonists. In many respects, the people who made useful objects baskets, pottery, clothing and other accoutrements were generally not accorded any particular status within the tribal group. They were simply people who developed the skills to make things successfully and functionally. And, the designs they might include with their work were often rooted in symbols that came from their ancient ceremonial life ways.

Yet, according to EncyclopaediaBritannica, within this rigid framework of tradition, there was sometimes a surprising degree of freedom of expression. There are recorded instances of individuals having made considerable changes in the art (and the economy) of their tribes. In North America, perhaps the most striking have been the careers of Nampey, the famed Hopi potter, and Mara Martnez and Julin Martnez, of San Ildefonso Pueblo.

The painters who discovered Taos at the turn of the 20th century soon encouraged others to come here. Those who made portraits hired local residents some Hispanic people, others from Taos Pueblo who posed for paintings that helped preserve a way of life they believed was fast disappearing.

"The artists of the Taos Society of Artists were inspired by the art and culture of Taos Pueblo," Davison Koenig, Couse-Sharp Historic Site executive director and curator, said in a 2018 Taos News story about an exhibit titled Full Circle: Taos Pueblo Contemporary. The charter of the TSA states that one of the reasons for its formation was "to promote and stimulate the practical expressions of art to preserve and promote the native art."

Koenig said many of the TSA artists developed lifelong friendships and even familial bonds with their Native models, who included Looking Elk, Hunting Son, Star Road, Elk Duststorm, Rain Coming Down and Elkfoot, to name a few. "TSA artists became strong advocates for Native rights and sovereignty," he adds. "The exhibition 'Full Circle' honors those relationships and the many artists from Taos Pueblo who continue to redefine Native art and identity."

These early relationships included sharing what the artists knew about making paintings, thus providing a brand new form of expression from a Native point of view. Until then, creative adornment of objects was rare. Native people had never made an artistic piece that existed only as something to look at and admire.

In the opening chapter of Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900-1930, author J.J. Brody writes of the connections artists in Santa Fe were making with young Pueblo Indians at about the same time.

In the year 1900, Esther Hoyt, a U.S. Indian Service teacher at San Ildefonso Pueblo Day School distributed watercolor paints and paper to her pupils and encouraged them to make pictures of Pueblo ceremonial dances. About fifteen years later some of these same young artists were selling paintings at or near the pueblo to Santa Fes art, anthropology and museum communities, and by 1917, artists from San Ildefonso and other pueblos were selling their work in Santa Fe itself.

On the one hand, anthropologists urged caution to colleagues with regard to interfering with the natural evolution of art as it was rapidly being embraced by Native people. Plus, many of the artists themselves were urged to exercise caution with regard to very strict concerns among some tribal kiva leaders. This went hand-in-hand with the ways photography was being used, mostly by outsiders, to record tribal ceremonies. Seemingly innocent at first, photography would become considered an unwelcome intrusion to where today it is banned at Pueblos such as Taos during public ceremonial dances.

On the other hand, these new artists flourished due to encouragement from outsiders eager to help, along with a budding tourism market. As the railroad brought more and more tourists and new residents to the Southwest, the growth of Native-made art has become one of the creative foundations in this region.

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Modern Physics Can’t Explain LifeBut a New Theory, Which Says … – Singularity Hub

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Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.

Even today, we cant really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers.

More than 150 years ago, Darwin poignantly noted the dichotomy between what we understand in physics and what we observe in lifenoting at the end of The Origin of Species whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

Isaac Newton described a universe where the laws never change, and time is an immutable and absolute backdrop against which everything moves. Darwin, however, observed a universe where endless forms are generated, each changing features of what came before, suggesting that time should not only have a direction, but that it in some ways folds back on itself. New evolutionary forms can only arise via selection on the past.

Presumably these two areas of science are describing the same universe, but how can two such diametrically opposite views be unified? The key to understanding why life is not explainable in current physics may be to reconsider our notions of time as the key difference between the universe as described by Newton and that of Darwin. Time has, in fact, been reinvented many times through the history of physics.

Although Newtons time was fixed and absolute, Einsteins time became a dimensionjust like space. And just as all points in space exist all at once, so do all points in time. This philosophy of time is sometimes referred to as the block universe where the past, present, and future are equally real and exist in a static structurewith no special now. In quantum mechanics, the passage of time emerges from how quantum states change from one to the next.

The invention of thermodynamics gave time its arrow, explaining why its moving forward rather than backwards. Thats because there are clear examples of systems in our universe, such as a working engine, that are irreversibleonly working in one direction. Each new area of fundamental physics, whether describing space and time (Newton/Einstein), matter and light (quantum mechanics), or heat and work (thermodynamics) has introduced a new concept of time.

But what about evolution and life? To build novel things, evolution requires time. Endless novelty can only come to be in a universe where time exists and has a clear direction. Evolution is the only physical process in our universe that can generate the succession of novel objects we associate to lifethings like microbes, mammals, trees, and even cellphones.

Such objects cannot fluctuate into existence spontaneously. They require a memory, based on what existed in the past, to construct things in the present. It is such selection that determines the dividing line between the universe described by current physics and what Darwin saw: it is the mechanism that turns a universe where memory does not matter in determining what exists, to one where it does.

Think about it, everything in the living world requires some kind of memory and information flow. The DNA in our cells is our blueprint. And to invent new things, such as rockets or medication, living beings also need informationknowledge of the laws of physics and chemistry.

To explain life, we therefore need to understand how the complex objects life creates exist in time. With my collaborators, we have been doing just that in a newly proposed theory of physics called assembly theory.

A key conjecture of assembly theory is that, as objects become more complex, the number of unique parts that make it up increases, and so does the need for local memory to store how to assemble the object from its unique parts. We quantify this in assembly theory as the shortest number of physical steps to build an object from its elementary building blocks, called the assembly index.

Importantly, assembly theory treats this shortest path as an intrinsic property of the object, and indeed we have shown how an assembly index can be measured for molecules using several different measuring techniques including mass spectrometry (an analytical method to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of molecules).

With this approach, we have shown in the lab, with measurements on both biological and non-biological samples, how molecules with an assembly index above 15 steps are only found in living samples.

This suggests that assembly theory is indeed capable of testing our hypothesis that life is the only physics that generates complex objects. And we can do so by identifying those objects that are so complex the only physical mechanism to form them is evolution.

We are aiming to use our theory to estimate when the origin if life happens by measuring the point at which molecules in a chemical soup become so complex that they start using information to make copies of themselvesthe threshold at which life arises from non-life. We may then apply the theory to experiments aiming to generate a new origin of life event in the lab.

And when we know this, we can use the theory to look for life on worlds that are radically different to Earth, and may therefore look so alien that we wouldnt recognize life there.

If the theory holds, it will force a radical rethink on time in physics. According to our theory, assembly can be measured as an intrinsic property for molecules, which corresponds to their size in timemeaning time is a physical attribute.

Ultimately, time is intrinsic to our experiences of the world, and it is necessary for evolution to happen. If we want physics to be capable of explaining lifeand usit may be that we need to treat time as a material property for the first time in physics.

This is perhaps the most radical departure for physics of life from standard physics, but it may be the critical insight needed to explain what life is.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Zdenk Machek / Unsplash

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How to Start the Horizon Forbidden West DLC: The Burning Shores … – Gameskinny

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If you're wondering how to startThe Burning Shores DLC for Horizon Forbidden West, the process is relatively straightforward, but it can be confusing because of one important factor (well, two: but one should be taken care of for you automatically). Before running off to meet Sylens, here's how to trigger the DLC.

Note that The Burning Shores expansion doesn't unlock until 12 a.m. EST on April 19 or 9 p.m. PST on April 18. Though you can pre-load the expansion beforehand, you won't be able to access it in Horizon Forbidden West until those dates and times.

To start The Burning Shores DLC, these are the essential steps.

Here are the steps in more detail.

With the DLC installed,make sureHorizon Forbidden Westupdates to version 1.021. If you already have HFW installed and you're connected to the Internet, thisshould happen automatically. Pull up the Command Center and check your download history for Horizon Forbidden West, not HFW: The Burning Shores. The former is for the update, the latter is for the expansion.

Now start Horizon Forbidden West. If The Burning Shores DLC is installed, you'll seethe expansion's symbolin the top right corner. Text in the symbol will tell you to complete the main questline whether you've got a completed save file or not, so don't worry about that.

However, you'll have to load a completed save file, one after you've completed Singularity, the last primary mission in HFW. You can't trigger the DLC unless you do this. Because of where the expansion's storyline falls in Horizon Forbidden West, New Game+ saves won't work unless you beat Singularity once again in NG+.

Once you load into your completed game, you'll see an overlay with some information. Confirm you've read it. And shortly after, you'll hear Sylens speaking,telling you to meet him at Tilda's, starting the quest, "To the Burning Shores."

And that's how to start The Burning Shores DLC in Horizon Forbidden West. Once you trigger it, many new adventures await. For more, head over to our HFW guides hub.

Featured image by GameSkinny.

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Superman Explains the Real Source of His Powers (Not Sunlight) – Screen Rant

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Warning! Spoilers ahead for Superman: Lost #2Everything fans thought they knew about the source of Superman's powers has just changed. When explaining how he survived an impossible feat, the Man of Steel reveals a hidden aspect that plays a significant role in how his abilities work.

In Superman: Lost #2 by Christopher Priest and Carlo Pagulayan, Clark Kent is still adjusting to normal life on Earth after he'd been lost in space for twenty years. Superman finally opens up to Lois about what happened after he traveled through a quantum singularity. The hero was thrown into another part of the universe where he's saved from the vacuum of space by a group of travelers.

The travelers are skeptical that Clark could seriously survive something as punishing as a singularity, but Superman informs them that Kryptonians have various biochemical reactions to gravity that are enhanced when exposed to solar radiation. After telling his story, Clark is ditched on an alien planet for not being able to pay his rescuers for a ride home. The planet is covered with smog and has a much different level of gravity, forcing Superman to relearn his most basic powers.

Any Superman fan worth their salt knows that the yellow rays of Earth's sun allow him to fly, use heat vision, and pull off the hundreds of amazing feats he's capable of. For most of his superhero career, Clark's powers have depended on what kind of solar radiation he's exposed to. Powerful yellow rays bring out his unique abilities, while weaker red radiation brings him down to a more human level. Superman's powers have even exponentially increased when exposed to a younger blue or white sun.

And while Superman says that solar radiation plays a considerable part his how his powers act, Clark implies that the real root of his abilities is the gravity he experiences. In the past, Clark has described himself as a living battery that constantly absorbs sunlight which fuels his powers. But now Clark says planet's gravity determines what he can do. While it's a minor change, it does raise the question of how Clark's powers could change on a plant with different gravity compared to Earth's.

If Clark's powers are rooted in how his body reacts to gravity, then it stands to reason that a world with a stronger or weaker force could affect his powers. Of course, even Clark says that "a thousand variables" are at play regarding his abilities, including sunlight. So what happens when he's on a planet like Earth with similar amounts of a yellow sun but a weaker gravity? Does Superman become faster? And does he get stronger or more durable with harsher gravity? There are a lot of questions that come up with this new insight into Superman's powers and what it could mean for the hero going forward. Fans can see Clark explain how his abilities really work in Superman: Lost #2, on sale now.

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Musk on AI regulation: ‘It’s not fun to be regulated’ but artificial … – FOX Bangor/ABC 7 News and Stories

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Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk warned Monday of the potential pitfalls of groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) technology, telling "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that while he has butted heads with regulators in the past, this new frontier can be potentially dangerous if there aren't boundaries or guidelines.

Musk recounted working with Google co-founder Larry Page years back on artificial intelligence, saying he would warn Page about the importance of AI "safety."

He also stated how humans' edge on their primate cousins are that while chimpanzees are more agile and stronger, homosapiens are smarter. In that regard, AI would top humanity in its most prolific category, he warned.

"Now what happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form? It's very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance," he said.

IT PRESUMES TO REPLACE US: CONCERNS ABOUT AI BIAS GROW AS MUSK ISSUES NEW WARNING

"It's called the singularity. It's a singularity like a black hole, because you don't know what happens after that. It's hard to predict. So I think we should be cautious with A.I., and I think there should be some government oversight because it is a danger to the public."

In the same way the government is tasked, via the FDA and USDA, to safeguard food and drug consumption or the FAA for airborne entities so should there be parameters for artificial intelligence.

Musk said he has been a longtime advocate of strong but sensible regulation, so that companies don't cut corners on safety and get people hurt.

"It's not fun to be regulated. It's sort of arduous to be regulated. I have a lot of experience with very good regulated industries because obviously automotive is highly regulated. You can fill this room with all the regulations that are required for a production car just in the United States."

ELON MUSK TO DEVELOP TRUTHGPT; WARNS OF CIVILIZATIONAL DESTRUCTION FROM AI

"And same thing is true with rockets. You can't just willy-nilly shoot rockets off. Not big ones anyway because the FAA oversees that. And then even to get a launch license, there are probably half a dozen or more federal agencies that need to approve it, plus state agencies," Musk went on.

He said that despite claims of being a "regulatory maverick" that can "defy" regulators with every new industry he builds or joins, it is realistically not the case.

ELON MUSK SITS WITH TUCKER FOR TWO PART EVENT

Musk proposed the formation of an agency that would begin by crowdsourcing regulatory proposals from the AI industry and draft rules that would be accepted by the leading figures and companies.

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"I think we have a better chance of advanced A.I. being beneficial to humanity in that circumstance," he said.

Musk envisioned how a "superintelligent" AI entity could begin influencing public opinion on a certain topic in a negative or flawed way, with the populace unable to discern its destructive conclusion.

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Could humans live forever and be immortal? – Tehelka

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Ray Kurzweil, a former Google engineer who has an 86 pc success rate out of his 147 predictions has created a sensation by his assertion that advances in technology will quickly lead to age-reversing nanobots and humans will achieve immortality by 2030, writes Bharat Hiteshi

In Hindu mythology, whenever an asura asks for immortality, Brahma tells them that they can have whatever they wish except that. The clever asura then asks for a boon that will render him immortal for all practical purposes. But, embedded in the boon is a loophole, a vulnerability that the devas take advantage of, to kill him. Thus, we are reminded that no one is immortal in the world.

However, Ray Kurzweil, a former Google engineer who has an 86 percent success rate out of his 147 predictions has created a sensation by his assertion that advances in technology will quickly lead to age-reversing nanobots and humans will achieve immortality in next eight years or by 2030. To add to the prediction,a prominent futurist Dr Ian Pearsonhas predicted that human intelligence, memory or senses could be connected to external technology.Credentials of the two are so plausible that it is difficult to raise a needle of suspicion, whileRay Kurzweilis the same computer scientist and former Google engineer who in 1999 received the National Medal of Technology,Dr Ian Pearsonsinventions include text messaging and active contact lens.

The idea of uploading your mind to a computer has been theorised for many years now, but it has mostly remained the stuff of science fiction. Nectome, a US-based start-up, is trying to change that by devising a way to preserve the human brain so that its memories can be uploaded to the cloud. The firm has figured out a way to preserve the human brain in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT} Technology Review.

Compiling the observations in UKs MailOnline on April 8, 2023, Fiona Jackson wrote Could you live forever? Experts claim humans could achieve immortality by 2030 and one futurist even says we shall be able to attend our own funerals in a new body by reanimating the brain and uploading our minds to the cloud. However, in order for the technology to work, participants have to be willing to be euthanized. However, the prestigious institution claimed the technology is in its infancy and there is no guarantee that they can recreate consciousness.

The prominent futurist Dr Ian Pearsonhad predicted that human intelligence, memory or senses could be connected to external technology.Dr Ian Pearsonruns Futurizon, a futures institute.He claims85% proven accuracy when looking 1015 years ahead. His inventions include text messaging and active contact lens. He is a Maths and Physics graduate, a Doctor of Science, and has worked in numerous branches of engineering, from aeronautics and weapons design to cybernetics, sustainable transport to electronic cosmetics.

Rather than creating a backed up copy of your mind, most of your intelligence would simply be running from a place outside of your physical brain. In a blog post, he wrote: One day, your body dies and with it your brain stops. But no big problem, because 99 per cent of your mind is still fine, running happily on IT, in the clouds.Assuming you saved enough and prepared well, you connect to an android to use as your body from now on, attend your funeral, and then carry on as before, still you, just with a younger, highly upgraded body.

In the past,Ray Kurzweils predictions have become accurate, inspiring a cult following among other future-thinkers. While many of his predictions have come true, a claim made by Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near has resurfaced online after YouTube channel Adagio shared a two-part clip, sharing insights from the book. The comments made by Kurzweil has kickstarted a debate on social media on immortality and if at all, humans will achieve it.

In his book, the scientist predicted that technology will allow humans to enjoy an everlasting life by 2030. He also talked about genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and more.2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the Singularity which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created, Kurzweil had toldFuturismin 2017, as quoted byNew York Post.

Kurzweil talked about nanotechnology and robotics which he believes will give birth to age-reversing nanobots. As per former Google engineer, these tiny robots will constantly keep fixing damaged cells and tissues that start to deteriorate as we age, making us immune to lethal diseases.

Past predictions coming true

This isnt the first time that this scientist has made a prediction. In 1990, Kurzweil had predicted that the worlds best chess player would lose to a computer by 2000. The prediction came true in 1997when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.

Later in 1999, he madeanother prediction stating that by 2023, a laptop worth $1,000 would have storage capacity and capabilities of a human brain. Kurzweil, an author who calls himself a futurist, had also predicted that by 2010, most of the world would have access to high-bandwidth wireless internet.

By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence, Kurzweil had said in an interview with SXSW. Coming back to 2023, Silicon Valley is witnessing a tough battle between top tech giants as they race towardsartificial intelligence and how it can be incorporated in everyday life.

Is AI smarter than humans?

In laymans terms, singularity is a hypothetical future point in time when all the advances in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), lead to the rise of machines that are smarter than humans. Kurzweil isnt the only man who has talked about singularity. Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son in the past has also predicted the dawn of super-intelligent machines by 2047.

Thirty years from now, they (cyborgs) are going to learn by themselves, they are maybe going to laugh at you and us, the tech mogul Son had said at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2017. Softbank Robotics already has Pepper, a semi-humanoid robot which is designed with the ability to read emotions. It was introduced in June 2014 at a conference and was later showcased in SoftBank Mobile Phone stores in Japan.

Its just been a few months in 2023 and we have already seen big techs such as Google and Microsoft introduce their respective AI-powered chatbots, which has also resulted in fear about the future and an alarming question: Is humankind really ready for AI?

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Astronomers Just Directly Imaged a Massive Exoplanet. Here’s Why … – Singularity Hub

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Finding life on other planets might well be the holy grail of astronomy, but the hunt for suitable host planets that can sustain life is a resource-intensive task.

The search for exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) involves competing for time on Earths biggest telescopesyet the hit rate of this search can be disappointingly low.

In a new study recently published in Science, my colleagues and I combined different search techniques to discover a new giant planet. It could change the way we try to image planets in the future.

To satisfy our curiosity about our place in the universe, astronomers have developed many techniques to search for planets orbiting other stars. Perhaps the simplest of these is called direct imaging. But its not easy.

Direct imaging involves attaching a powerful camera to a large telescope and trying to detect light emitted, or reflected, from a planet. Stars are bright, and planets are dim, so its akin to searching for fireflies dancing around a spotlight.

Its no surprise only about 20 planets have been found with this technique to date.

Yet direct imaging is of great value. It helps shed light on a planets atmospheric properties, such as its temperature and composition, in a way other detection techniques cant.

Our direct imaging of a new planet, named HIP99770b, reveals a hot, giant and moderately cloudy planet. It orbits its star at a distance that falls somewhere between the orbital distances of Saturn and Uranus around our sun.

The HIP99770 star is almost 14 times brighter than the sun. But since its planet has an orbit larger than Saturns, the planet receives a similar amount of energy as Jupiter does from the sun. Author provided

With about 15 times the mass of Jupiter, HIP99770b is a real giant. However, its also more than 1,000, so its not a good prospect for a habitable world.

What the HIP99770 system does offer is an analogy to our own solar system. It has a cold debris disk of ice and rock far out from the star, akin to a scaled-up version of the Kuiper Belt in our solar system.

The main difference is that the HIP99770 system is dominated by one high-mass planet, rather than several smaller ones.

Images of the HIP99770 system, taken with exoplanet imager SCExAO (Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics Project) coupled with data from the CHARIS instrument (Coronagraphic High-Resolution Imager and Spectrograph). Author provided

We reached our findings by first detecting hints of a planet via indirect detection methods. We noticed the star was wobbling in space, which hinted at the presence of a planet in the vicinity with a large gravitational pull.

This motivated our direct imaging efforts; we were no longer searching in the dark.

The extra data came from the European Space Agencys Gaia spacecraft, which has been measuring the positions of nearly one billion stars since 2014. Gaia is sensitive enough to detect tiny variations of a stars motion through space, such as those caused by planets.

We also supplemented these data with measurements from Gaias predecessor, Hipparcos. In total, we had 25 years worth of astrometric (positional) data to work with.

Previously, researchers have used indirect methods to guide imaging that has discovered companion stars, but not planets.

Its not their fault: massive stars such as HIP99770which is almost twice the mass of our sunare reluctant to give up their secrets. Otherwise-successful search techniques can rarely reach the levels of precision required to detect planets around such massive stars.

Our detection, which used both direct imaging and astrometry, demonstrates a more efficient way to search for planets. Its the first time the direct detection of an exoplanet has been guided through initial indirect detection methods.

Gaia is expected to continue observing until at least 2025, and its archive will remain useful for decades to come.

Astrometry of HIP99770 suggests it belongs to the Argus association of starsa group of stars that moves together through space. This would suggest the system is rather young, about 40 million years old. That would make it roughly one-hundredth of the age of our solar system.

However, our analysis of the stars pulsations, as well as models of the planets brightness, suggest an older age of between 120 million and 200 million years. If this is the case, HIP99770 might just be an interloper in the Argus group.

Now that its known to host a planet, astronomers will aim to further unravel the mysteries of HIP99770 and its immediate environment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Subaru Telescope image of HIP99770. T. Currie/Subaru Telescope, UTSA

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BTS goes solo together – Switched On Pop

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April 18, 2023 Charlie Harding

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EPISODE 311

The South Korean idol group BTS is one of the biggest musical sensations in history. They're constantly breaking records and they have one of the most dedicated fan bases in the world known as Army. Their hit singles like Boy With Love, Dynamite, and Butter have been discussed on the show in the past for breaking through the US charts.

But back in 2022, they decided to take a break from group activities and start releasing solo material because of their obligations to each fulfill mandatory military service in South Korea, precluding them from working together at the same time. Solo projects arent new for the group BTS members have released mixtapes as far back as 2015 and countless solo singles but this was the first time that BTS had ever announced a prolonged break.

This moment, originally presented as a hiatus, has evolved into a whole new musical chapter for the group, with a seemingly endless array of new solo releases. Switched On Pop listens back to one track from each solo effort so far to introduce the casual listener to what is happening in this new era of BTS. Joining the show is Lenika Cruz, senior editor at The Atlantic, who literally wrote the book on BTS, simply called On BTS out on the Atlantic Editions imprint.

Songs Discussed

j-hope, J. Cole - on the street

Jimin - Like Crazy

RM, Youjeen - Wild Flower

Agust D - People Pt.2

Agust D - People

Jung Kook - Dreamers

JIN - The Astronaut

BTS - Singularity, Inner Child

Coldplay, BTS - My Universe

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How The Marvels Could Finally Set Up The A-Force – Looper

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The first A-Force team to debut in Marvel Comics was certainly formidable. Comprising of She-Hulk, Dazzler, Medusa, Nico Minoru, and Singularity, the team took out villains with both flair and strength. The team later expanded its roster to include characters like Captain Marvel, but the core group always remained in some form. Luckily for A-Force fans, two and possibly three of those original members have already debuted on screen.

She-Hulk may currently be the most high-profile member of that original team thanks to her Disney+ show, "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law."Meanwhile, fans of Marvel's "Runaways" also met Nico Minoru (Lyrica Okano), who stunned bad guys in the series with her sorcery and telepathy. On top of that, some fans have theorized that Love, Thor's adoptive daughter from "Love and Thunder," could be Singularity. After all, Love is the product of Eternity's cosmic magic, just as Singularity is a cosmic being in the comics.

Whether or not Captain Marvel decides to assemble these characters in the mid-credits scene of "The Marvels," the movie will surely demonstrate what an all-female superhero team can do in a two-hour runtime. Plus, given that Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie may make an appearance in the movie based on set photos (via The Direct),then the movie will surely inspire some more A-Force comparisons, just as "Avengers: Endgame" did.

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How The Marvels Could Finally Set Up The A-Force - Looper

Spot Robot Needs Just a Minute to Make Chat AIs Eat Their … – autoevolution

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Were not yet at a point where we can talk about AIs inside robot bodies. Chances are well get there soon enough, but until we do were still bound to witness each of the two technologies competing for the publics attention.

Its hard to dispute that OpenAIs ChatGPT, or Googles BARD, or Microsofts upgraded Bing are the talk of the day, following revelations as to what these bodyless minds are capable of doing if properly handled. From making life easier for students to giving us insights into how they might evolve post-singularity, chat AIs are possibly the perfect tool for creative or inquisitive minds.

For those of us who go about our daily lives in a more physical manner, working in industries like manufacturing, power generation, mining, and so on, a chatbot is utterly useless. Real-life robots, on the other hand, can be God-sent for the work that keeps our society running.

Sure, robots have been used in production for years now, but you have to admit none of the mostly stationary machines that help assemble a Tesla, for instance, is as spectacular as the Boston Dynamics Spot.

Photo: Boston Dynamics

You can get another taste of that in the most recent video released by Boston Dynamics on April 19. Its short, under a minute long, but shows the yellow piece of hardware in a variety of roles, from patrolling on a solar panel farm to going up and down stairs, scanning the environment around it, and generally looking cool.

And it appears the robot is capable of learning new tricks constantly, despite remaining largely the same, specs-wise, as it was when it launched three years ago.

The machine can carry a payload of up to 14 kg (31 pounds), which can come as a variety of sensors and inspection equipment.The robot can be controlled remotely or programmed to perform duties autonomously. When in this mode, it understands its environment thanks to cameras and sensors that allow it a 360-degree perception of the terrain around it.

Because it has legs instead of wheels or tracks, it can move over virtually any surface, a solid proposition for all sorts of applications.

Spot can have immediate and physical effects over its surroundings, and that still makes it in todays world a much more useful tool than ChatGPT. We can only wonder though what would happen if someone found a way to blend the two pieces of technology...

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Spot Robot Needs Just a Minute to Make Chat AIs Eat Their ... - autoevolution

Why the Brains Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed – Quanta Magazine

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Dazzling intricacies of brain structure are revealed every day, but one of the most obvious aspects of brain wiring eludes neuroscientists. The nervous system is cross-wired, so that the left side of the brain controls the right half of the body and vice versa. Every doctor relies upon this fact in performing neurological exams, but when I asked my doctor last week why this should be, all I got was a shrug. So I asked Catherine Carr, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. No good answer, she replied. I was surprised such a fundamental aspect of how our brain and body are wired together, and no one knew why?

Nothing that we know of stops the right side of the brain from connecting with the right side of the body. That wiring scheme would seem much simpler and less prone to errors. In the embryonic brain, the crossing of the wires across the midline an imaginary line dividing the right and left halves of the body requires a kind of molecular traffic cop to somehow direct the growing nerve fibers to the right spot on the opposite side of the body. Far simpler just to keep things on the same side.

Yet this neural cross wiring is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom even the neural connections in lowly nematode worms are wired with left-right reversal across the animals midline. And many of the traffic cop molecules that direct the growth of neurons in these worms do the same in humans. For evolution to have conserved this arrangement so doggedly, surely theres some benefit to it, but biologists still arent certain what it is. An intriguing answer, however, has come from the world of mathematics.

The key to that solution lies in exactly how neural circuits are laid out within brain tissue. Neurons that make connections between the brain and the body are organized to create a virtual map in the cerebral cortex. If a neuroscientist sticks an electrode into the brain and finds that neurons there receive input from the thumb, for example, then neurons next to it in the cerebral cortex will connect to the index finger. This mapping phenomenon is called somatotopy, Greek for body mapping, but its not limited to the physical body. The 3D external world we perceive through vision and our other senses is mapped onto the brain in the same way.

Creating an internal map of neural connections that accurately reflects spatial relations in the world makes sense. Consider how complicated it would be to wire neural circuits if the neurons were scattered willy-nillythroughout the brain. But while this internal neural mapping of connections solves a biological problem, it raises a geometric one: the topological challenge of projecting 3D space onto a 2D surface. Odd things happen when we do this. On a 2D map, an airplane taking the most direct path between two cities appears to travel in an arc, and satellites orbiting the globe appear to oscillate in a sinusoidal path.

And mapping 3D space onto a 2D plane in the brain seems to explain why our nervous system is cross-wired: Counterintuitive as it may seem, directing nerve fibers across the midline is the topologically simplest way to avoid errors, according to work from the biomedical engineer Troy Shinbrot and his neuroscientist colleague Wise Young, both at Rutgers University. They showed that this is true for any system where a central control mechanism interacts with a 3D environment. If the connections were wired without crossing, a geometric singularity confounding left/right and up/down information would arise.

Before getting into details of why this happens, we need to recognize another fundamental property that is so ingrained in us, its easy to forget. That is the very concept of midline, of left and right. It exists in certain symmetrical objects, and it arises from a geometric frame of reference centered on our own bilaterally symmetrical body. A radially symmetrical jellyfish swirling in the current has no left or right. Spotting a jellyfish in the current, we might say, Look, the jellyfish is drifting to the right. But if youre speaking face to face with someone across the water, that becomes my right your left. It can take humans years of dancing the hokeypokey to learn this difficult concept, and some never quite manage it.

Since left and right depend on a frame of reference, people frequently confuse the letters d and b, and p and q, but they rarely confuse q and d. In the first two cases, the identical shapes are flipped along the vertical axis (swapping left and right), and in the second, they are flipped along the horizontal axis (swapping up and down). As bilaterally symmetrical creatures we never mistake up and down, because those directions are always the same, regardless of viewpoint, but left and right are relative to an object.

Similarly, when we look in a mirror, we perceive ourselves as an image that appears to swap left and right, turning letters on our T-shirts backward. But what is really happening is a front-back transformation. Photons travel in straight lines to and from the mirror. They show your face as it is seen by the mirror, not according to the mental perception you form from the inside looking out. Both your real right hand extended out to the side and the mirror image of that hand are pointing in the same compass direction. Letters on your T-shirt appear reversed for the same reason that the name Quanta would appear flipped, asQuanta if you wrote it with your finger on a frosty window and then went outside to look at it.

Now imagine that the windowpane is the 2D surface of your skin. The neural map in your brain for the touch receptors on your skin will similarly flip the orientation of the writing pressed against your skin from the outside. The point is that mapping from different perspectives, and especially from 3D onto a bilaterally symmetrical plane, sets up some significant topological problems.

To better understand this, lets imagine the brain and body as two parallel planes. One could stitch a thread directly from a point on the body plane to the corresponding point on the brain plane. Likewise, a second thread could be run directly between a second pair of points without crossing the first thread. But in real life, the brain is a three-dimensional structure, with organic shapes and a highly folded cerebral cortex; our body is similarly three-dimensional.

That third dimension changes everything. The simplest way to introduce three-dimensionality into the 2D maps in our brain is to fold in the edges of the body plane 90 degrees, representing (for example) the skin of your chest folded around the sides of your rib cage. Folds in the cerebral cortex introduce a third dimension there too. Now, since the fibers must pass through the midline, because thats where the central nervous system in our body runs, the two fibers become crossed.

What would happen if the two-dimensional planes representing brain and body were folded in opposite directions as mirror images and connected point to point without crossed pathways?

The horizontal x and y axes for both the body and the brains body map would retain the same orientation, but they would have opposite directions for their vertical z axes. The folds in the maps create what in mathematical terms are called geometric singularities places where a property diverges or becomes ill-defined.

This alteration in the geometry of the perceived world means that the price of keeping our neural connections uncrossed would be steep. Picture an ant crawling across your body. To make sense of the sensation as the ant crawls up your chest and then traverses over to your shoulder, your brain would have to switch from one somatotopic map to another one with the opposite z-axis orientation. Your perception of 3D space would be inverted. A central control or sensation network would be confounded by the need to change orientations this way.

This abstraction may be difficult to visualize, so lets try a more concrete example. Imagine two small panes of glass set at right angles, with one upright and one flat, that have the labels front and bottom etched on them. The pad of your finger is pressed against the back of the front one so it can feel the etched lettering. We can imagine how to represent the brains map of the perceptions through the finger: If the connections between the fingertips and the brain dont cross, then the perceived front label will be flipped top to bottom, for the reasons described above.

Now imagine that your finger rotates downward to press against the bottom pane instead. The physical environment of the finger hasnt changed at all, but the map of the perceptions has: Now the bottom label is flipped and the front label isnt.

Look more closely, though, at the two perception maps. You cant simply rotate one to turn it into the other, even though a small physical rotation is all that the finger did. What this shows is that for the nervous system to maintain uncrossed connections, the brain would need to keep flipping one axis of its body maps as the body parts moved, which would be impossibly complex.

While there are lots of solutions to this wiring problem, the most elegant is to have two bilaterally symmetrical systems of wiring between the brain and the body, with the connections from each side of the body crossing the midline.

Now, this all makes sense mathematically, but its important to note that we dont know for certain that this is truly why our brains and bodies are connected the way they are. There is very little biological research on this intriguing question. The convenient dodge often heard is that the scientific method tells us what, not why. But whether or not this explanation is correct, its an example of how we can sometimes solve enduring biological puzzles by changing our frame of reference.

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Why the Brains Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed - Quanta Magazine

GPT-4, AGI, and the Hunt for Superintelligence – IEEE Spectrum

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For decades, the most exalted goal of artificial intelligence has been the creation of an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, capable of matching or even outperforming human beings on any intellectual task. Its an ambitious goal long regarded with a mixture of awe and apprehension, because of the likelihood of massive social disruption any such AGI would undoubtedly cause. For years, though, such discussions were theoretical. Specific predictions forecasting AGIs arrival were hard to come by.

But now, thanks to the latest large language models from the AI research firm OpenAI, the concept of an artificial general intelligence suddenly seems much less speculative. OpenAIs latest LLMsGPT-3.5, GPT-4, and the chatbot/interface ChatGPThave made believers out of many previous skeptics. However, as spectacular tech advances often do, they seem also to have unleashed a torrent of misinformation, wild assertions, and misguided dread. Speculation has erupted recently about the end of the world-wide web as we know it, end-runs around GPT guardrails, and AI chaos agents doing their worst (the latter of which seems to be little more than clickbait sensationalism). There were scattered musings that GPT-4 is a step towards machine consciousness, and, more ridiculously, that GPT-4 is itself slightly conscious. There were also assertions that GPT-5, which OpenAIs CEO Sam Altman said last week is not currently being trained, will itself be an AGI.

The number of people who argue that we wont get to AGI is becoming smaller and smaller.Christoph Koch, Allen Institute

To provide some clarity, IEEE Spectrum contacted Christof Koch, chief scientist of the Mindscope Program at Seattles Allen Institute. Koch has a background in both AI and neuroscience and is the author of three books on consciousness as well as hundreds of articles on the subject, including features for IEEE Spectrum and Scientific American.

Christof Koch on...

What would be the important characteristics of an artificial general intelligence as far as youre concerned? How would it go beyond what we have now?

Christof Koch: AGI is ill defined because we dont know how to define intelligence. Because we dont understand it. Intelligence, most broadly defined, is sort of the ability to behave in complex environments that have multitudes of different events occurring at a multitude of different time scales, and successfully learning and thriving in such environments.

Im more interested in this idea of an artificial general intelligence. And I agree that even if youre talking about AGI, its somewhat nebulous. People have different opinions.

Koch: Well, by one definition, it would be like an intelligent human, but vastly quicker. So you can ask itlike Chat GPTyou can ask it any question, and you immediately get an answer, and the answer is deep. Its totally researched. Its articulated and you can ask it to explain why. I mean, this is the remarkable thing now about Chat GPT, right? It can give you its train of thought. In fact, you can ask it to write code, and then you can ask it, please explain it to me. And it can go through the program, line by line, or module by module, and explain what it does. Its a train-of-thought type of reasoning thats really quite remarkable.

You know, thats one of the things that has emerged out of these large language models. Most people think about AGI in terms of human intelligence, but with infinite memory and with totally rational abilities to thinkunlike us. We have all these biases. Were swayed by all sorts of things that we like or dislike, given our upbringing and culture, etcetera, and supposedly AGI would be less amenable to that. And maybe able to do it vastly faster, right? Because if it just depends on the underlying hardware and the hardware keeps on speeding up and you can go into the cloud, then of course you could be like a human except a hundred times faster. And thats what Nick Bostrom called a superintelligence.

What GPT-4 shows, very clearly, is that there are different routes to intelligence.Christoph Koch, Allen Institute

Youve touched on this idea of superintelligence. Im not sure what this would be, except something that would be virtually indistinguishable from a humana very, very smart humanexcept for its enormous speed. And presumably, accuracy. Is this something you believe?

Koch: Thats one way to think about it. Its just like very smart people. But it can take those very smart people, like Albert Einstein, years to complete their insights and finish their work. Or to think and reason through something, it may take us, say, half an hour. But an AGI may be able to do this in one second. So if thats the case, and its reasoning is effective, it may as well be superintelligent.

So this is basically the singularity idea, except for the self-creation and self-perpetuation.

Koch: Well, yeah, I mean the singularity Id like to stay away from that, because thats yet another sort of more nebulous idea: that machines will be able to design themselves, each successive generation better than the one before, and then they just take off and totally escape our control. I dont find that useful to think about in the real world. But if you return to where we are today, we have today amazing networks, amazing algorithms, that anyone can log on to and use, that already have emergent abilities that are unpredictable. They have become so large that they can do things that they werent directly trained for.

Lets go back to the basic way these networks are trained. You give them a string of text or tokens. Lets call it text. And then the algorithm predicts the next word, and the next word, and the next word, ad infinitum. And everything we see now comes just out of this very simple thing applied to vast reams of human-generated writing. You feed it all text that people have written. Its read all of Wikipedia. Its read all of, I dont know, the Reddits and Subreddits and many thousands of books from Project Gutenberg and all of that stuff. It has ingested what people have written over the last century. And then it mimics that. And so, who would have thought that that leads to something that could be called intelligent? But it seems that it does. It has this emergent, unpredictable behavior.

For instance, although it wasnt trained to write love letters, it can write love letters. It can do limericks. It can generate jokes. I just asked it to generate some trivia questions. You can ask it to generate computer code. It was also trained on code, on GitHub. It speaks many languagesI tested it in German.

So you just mentioned that it can write jokes. But it has no concept of humor. So it doesnt know why a joke works. Does that matter? Or will it matter?

Koch: It may not matter. I think what it shows, very clearly, is that there are different routes to intelligence. One way you get to intelligence, is human intelligence. You take a baby, you expose this baby to its family, its environment, the child goes to school, it reads, etc. And then it understands in some sense, right?

In the long term, I think everything is on the table. And yes, I think we need to worry about existential threats.Christoph Koch, Allen Institute

Although many people, if you ask them why a joke is funny, they cant really tell you, either. The ability of many people to understand things is quite limited. If you ask people, well, why is this joke funny? Or how does that work? Many people have no idea. And so [GPT-4] may not be that different from many people. These large language models demonstrate quite clearly that you do not have to have a human-level type of understanding in order to compose text that to all appearances was written by somebody who has had a secondary or tertiary education.

Chat GPT reminds me of a widely read, smart, undergraduate student who has an answer for everything, but whos also overly confident of his answers and, quite often, his answers are wrong. I mean, thats a thing with Chat GPT. You cant really trust it. You always have to check because very often it gets the answer right, but you can ask other questions, for example about math, or attributing a quote, or a reasoning problem, and the answer is plainly wrong.

This is a well-known weakness youre referring to, a tendency to hallucinate or make assertions that seem semantically and syntactically correct, but are actually completely incorrect.

Koch: People do this constantly. They make all sorts of claims and often theyre simply not true. So again, this is not that different from humans. But I grant you, for practical applications right now, you can not depend on it. You always have to check other sourcesWikipedia, or your own knowledge, etc. But thats going to change.

The elephant in the room, it seems to me that were kind of dancing around, all of us, is consciousness. You and Francis Crick, 25 years ago, among other things, speculated that planning for the future and dealing with the unexpected may be part of the function of consciousness. And it just so happens that thats exactly what GPT-4 has trouble with.

Koch: So, consciousness and intelligence. Lets think a little bit about them. Theyre quite different. Intelligence ultimately is about behaviors, about acting in the world. If youre intelligent, youre going to do certain behaviors and youre not going to do some other behaviors. Consciousness is very different. Consciousness is more a state of being. Youre happy, youre sad, you see something, you smell something, you dread something, you dream something, you fear something, you imagine something. Those are all different conscious states.

Now, it is true that with evolution, we see in humans and other animals and maybe even squids and birds, etc., that they have some amount of intelligence and that goes hand in hand with consciousness. So at least in biological creatures, consciousness and intelligence seem to go hand in hand. But for engineered artifacts like computers, that does not have to be at all the case. They can be intelligent, maybe even superintelligent, without feeling like anything.

Its not consciousness that we need to be concerned about. Its their motivation and high intelligence that we need to be concerned with.Christoph Koch, Allen Institute

And certainly theres one of the two dominant theories of consciousness, the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, that says you can never simulate consciousness. It cant be computed, cant be simulated. It has to be built into the hardware. Yes, you will be able to build a computer that simulates a human brain and the way people think, but it doesnt mean its conscious. We have computer programs that simulate the gravity of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, but funny enough, no one is concerned that the astrophysicist who runs the computer simulation on a laptop is going to be sucked into the laptop. Because the laptop doesnt have the causal power of a black hole. And same thing with consciousness. Just because you can simulate the behavior associated with consciousness, including speech, including speaking about it, doesnt mean that you actually have the causal power to instantiate consciousness. So by that theory, it would say, these computers, while they might be as intelligent or even more intelligent than humans, they will never be conscious. They will never feel.

Which you dont really need, by the way, for anything practical. If you want to build machines that help us and serve our goals by providing text and predicting the weather or the stock market, writing code, or fighting wars, you dont really care about consciousness. You care about reasoning and motivation. The machine needs to be able to predict and then based on that prediction, do certain things. And even for the doomsday scenarios, its not consciousness that we need to be concerned about. Its their motivation and high intelligence that we need to be concerned with. And that can be independent of consciousness.

Why do we need to be concerned about those?

Koch: Look, were the dominant species on the planet, for better or worse, because we are the most intelligent and the most aggressive. Now we are building creatures that are clearly getting better and better at mimicking one of our unique hallmarksintelligence. Of course, some people, the military, independent state actors, terrorist groups, they will want to marry that advanced intelligent machine technology to warfighting capability. Its going to happen sooner or later. And then you have machines that might be semiautonomous or even fully autonomous and that are very intelligent and also very aggressive. And thats not something that we want to do without very, very careful thinking about it.

But that kind of mayhem would require both the ability to plan and also mobility, in the sense of being embodied in something, a mobile form.

Koch: Correct, but thats already happening. Think about a car, like a Tesla. Fast forward another ten years. You can put the capability of something like a GPT into a drone. Look what the drone attacks are doing right now. The Iranian drones that the Russians are buying and launching into Ukraine. Now imagine, that those drones can tap into the cloud and gain superior, intelligent abilities.

Theres a recent paper by a team of authors at Microsoft, and they theorize about whether GPT-4 has a theory of mind.

Koch: Think about a novel. Any novels about what the protagonist thinks, and then what he or she imputes what others think. Much of modern literature is about, what do people think, believe, fear, or desire. So its not surprising that GPT-4 can answer such questions.

Is that really human-level understanding? Thats a much more difficult question to grok. Does it matter? is a more relevant question. If these machines behave like they understand us, yeah, I think its a further step on the road to artificial generalized intelligence, because then they begin to understand our motivationincluding maybe not just generic human motivations, but the motivation of a specific individual in a specific situation, and what that implies.

When people say in the long term this is dangerous, that doesnt mean, well, maybe in 200 years. This could mean maybe in three years, this could be dangerous.Christoph Koch, Allen Institute

Another risk, which also gets a lot of attention, is the idea that these models could be used to produce disinformation on a staggering scale and with staggering flexibility.

Koch: Totally. You see it already. There were already some deep fakes around the Donald Trump arrest, right?

So it would seem that this is going to usher in some kind of new era, really. I mean, into a society that is already reeling with disinformation spread by social media. Or amplified by social media, I should say.

Koch: I agree. Thats why I was one of the early signatories on this proposal that was circulating from the Future of Life Institute, that calls on the tech industry to pause for at least for half a year before releasing the next, more powerful large language model. This isnt a plea to stop the development of ever more powerful models. Were just saying, lets just hit pause here in order to try to understand and safeguard. Because its changing so very rapidly. The basic invention that made this possible are transformer networks, right? And they were only published in 2017, in a paper by Google Brain, Attention Is All You Need. And then GPT, the original GPT, was born the next year, in 2018. GPT-2 in 2019, I think, and last year, GPT-3 and ChatGPT. And now GPT-4. So where are we going to be ten years from now?

Do you think the upsides are going to outweigh whatever risks we will face in the shorter term? In other words, will it ultimately pay off?

Koch: Well, it depends what your long-term view is on this. If its existential risk, if theres a possibility of extinction, then, of course, nothing can justify it. I cant read the future, of course. Theres no question that these methodsI mean, I see it already in my own workthese large language models make people more powerful programmers. You can more quickly gain new knowledge or take existing knowledge and manipulate it. They are certainly force multipliers for people that have knowledge or skills.

Ten years ago, this wasnt even imaginable. I remember even six or seven years ago people arguing, well, these large language models are very quickly going to saturate. If you scale them up, you cant really get much farther this way. But that turned out to be wrong. Even the inventors themselves have been surprised, particularly, by this emergence of these new capabilities, like the ability to tell jokes, explain a program, and carrying out a particular task without having been trained on that task.

Well, thats not very reassuring. Tech is releasing these very powerful model systems. And the people themselves that program them say, we cant predict what new behaviors are going to emerge from these very large models. Well, gee, that makes me worry even more. So in the long term, I think everything is on the table. And yes, I think we need to worry about existential threats. Unfortunately, when you talk to AI people at AI companies, they typically say, oh, thats just all laughable. Thats all hysterics. Lets talk about the practical things right now. Well, of course, they would say that because theyre being paid to advance this technology and theyre being paid extraordinarily well. So, of course, theyre always going to push it.

I sense that the consensus has really swung because of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Has really swung that its only a matter of time before we have an AGI. Would you agree with that?

Koch: Yes. I would put it differently though: the number of people who argue that we wont get to AGI is becoming smaller and smaller. Its a rear-guard action, fought by people mostly in the humanities: Well, but they still cant do this. They still cant write Death in Venice. Which is true. Right now, none of these GPTs has produced a novel. You know, a 100,000-word novel. But I suspect its also just going to be a question of time before they can do that.

If you had to guess, how much time would you say that thats going to be?

Koch: I dont know. Ive given up. Its very difficult to predict. It really depends on the available training material you have. Writing a novel requires long-term character development. If you think about War and Peace or Lord of the Rings, you have characters developing over a thousand pages. So the question is, when can AI get these sorts of narratives? Certainly its going to be faster than we think.

So as I said, when people say in the long term this is dangerous, that doesnt mean, well, maybe in 200 years. This could mean maybe in three years, this could be dangerous. When will we see the first application of GPT to warlike endeavors? That could happen by the end of this year.

But the only thing I can think of that could happen in 2023 using a large language model is some sort of concerted propaganda campaign or disinformation. I mean, I dont see it controlling a lethal robot, for example.

Koch: Not right now, no. But again, we have these drones, and drones are getting very good. And all you need, you need a computer that has access to the cloud and can access these models in real time. So thats just a question of assembling the right hardware. And Im sure this is what militaries, either conventional militaries or terrorists organizations, are thinking about and will surprise us one day with such an attack. Right now, what could happen? You could get deep fakes ofall sorts of nasty deep fakes or people declaring war or an imminent nuclear attack. I mean, whatever your dark fantasy gives rise to. Its the world we now live in.

Well, what are your best-case scenarios? What are you hopeful about?

Koch: Well muddle through, like weve always muddled through. But the cats out of the bag. If you extrapolate these current trends three or five years from now, and given this very steep exponential rise in the power of these large language models, yes, all sorts of unpredictable things could happen. And some of them will happen. We just dont know which ones.

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Unlocking the Secrets of Immortality: Tardigrade Proteins Slow Aging in Human Cells – SciTechDaily

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Researchers have discovered that proteins from tardigrades, known for surviving extreme conditions, can slow molecular processes in human cells, offering promising applications in aging research and cell storage. This finding paves the way for developing new technologies to enhance human health and treat diseases.

Researchers at the University of Wyoming have advanced our understanding of how tardigrades survive extreme conditions and shown that proteins from the microscopic creatures expressed in human cells can slow down molecular processes.

This makes the tardigrade proteins potential candidates in technologies centered on slowing the aging process and in long-term storage of human cells.

The new study, published in the journal Protein Science, examines the mechanisms used by tardigrades to enter and exit from suspended animation when faced by environmental stress. Led by Senior Research Scientist Silvia Sanchez-Martinez in the lab of UW Department of Molecular Biology Assistant Professor Thomas Boothby, the research provides additional evidence that tardigrade proteins eventually could be used to make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration is not possible and enhance storage of cell-based therapies, such as stem cells.

Measuring less than half a millimeter long, tardigrades also known as water bears can survive being completely dried out; being frozen to just above absolute zero (about minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit, when all molecular motion stops); heated to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit; irradiated several thousand times beyond what a human could withstand; and even survive the vacuum of outer space.

University of Wyoming Senior Research Scientist Silvia Sanchez-Martinez, left, and Department of Molecular Biology Assistant Professor Thomas Boothby led new research providing additional evidence that tardigrade proteins eventually could be used to make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration is not possible. Credit: Vindya Kumara

They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form gels inside of cells and slow down life processes, according to the new UW-led research. Co-authors of the study are from institutions including the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California-Merced, the University of Bologna in Italy, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Sanchez-Martinez, who came from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to join Boothbys UW lab, was the lead author of the paper.

Amazingly, when we introduce these proteins into human cells, they gel and slow down metabolism, just like in tardigrades, Sanchez-Martinez says. Furthermore, just like tardigrades, when you put human cells that have these proteins into biostasis, they become more resistant to stresses, conferring some of the tardigrades abilities to the human cells.

Importantly, the research shows that the whole process is reversible: When the stress is relieved, the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism, Boothby says.

Our findings provide an avenue for pursuing technologies centered on the induction of biostasis in cells and even whole organisms to slow aging and enhance storage and stability, the researchers concluded.

Previous research by Boothbys team showed that natural and engineered versions of tardigrade proteins can be used to stabilize an important pharmaceutical used to treat people with hemophilia and other conditions without the need for refrigeration.

Tardigrades ability to survive being dried out has puzzled scientists, as the creatures do so in a manner that appears to differ from a number of other organisms with the ability to enter suspended animation.

Reference: Labile assembly of a tardigrade protein induces biostasis by S. Sanchez-Martinez, K. Nguyen, S. Biswas, V. Nicholson, A. V. Romanyuk, J. Ramirez, S. Kc, A. Akter, C. Childs, E. K. Meese, E. T. Usher, G. M. Ginell, F. Yu, E. Gollub, M. Malferrari, F. Francia, G. Venturoli, E. W. Martin, F. Caporaletti, G. Giubertoni, S. Woutersen, S. Sukenik, D. N. Woolfson, A. S. Holehouse and T. C. Boothby, 19 March 2024, Protein Science. DOI: 10.1002/pro.4941

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Unlocking the Secrets of Immortality: Tardigrade Proteins Slow Aging in Human Cells - SciTechDaily

Immortality Is PossibleWe Just Have to Overcome One Stubborn Law of Physics – Popular Mechanics

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Bryan Johnson is a software entrepreneur who

Johnson is just one of many ber rich people spending billions to prevent themselves from growing old. But eventually, they may run up against a fierce obstacle in their quest for eternal youth: the laws of physics. So is immortality possible?

The thermal motion of thousands of water molecules smashing into our cells molecular machines can break the bonds between molecules. Over time, this wears out our cells.

There are a few possible reasons why we age. The evolutionary argument is that each generation of creatureswhether human, animal, or plantmust grow old and die to make way for a new generation. In that case, the fact that our bodies stop repairing themselves at a point isnt a design flaw, but a feature.

Alternately, or possibly in tandem, is the wearing-out theory of aging. There are various molecular machines, that do everything from replicating cells to moving nutrients where they need to be in our bodies, biophysicist and nanomechanics expert Peter Hoffmann, Ph.D, eloquently explains in an article for Nautilus Magazine. As these machines go about their business, they are surrounded by thousands of water molecules, which randomly crash into them a trillion times a second. This is what physicists euphemistically call thermal motion. Violent thermal chaos would be more apt, he writes.

This thermal motion, Hoffman says, provides a source of energy that these molecular machines can harness for their work; but it is also responsible for breaking bonds between molecules. When he and his colleagues replicated this action in a lab, they found the survival probability of the bonds plotted against applied force looks just like human survival plotted versus agewhich suggests a possible connection between breaking protein bonds and agingand between aging and thermal motion.

In other words, just through living, we experience basic wear and tear. Unlike inanimate objects, we can repair our systems after such damage, but there are still limits.

Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D, has worked as professor of anatomy and microbiology, and is among the foremost experts on aging. He developed what is known as the Hayflick Limitthat is, the number of times human DNA cells can replicate before they become senescent, or stop replicating and take on a different form associated with age. After a lifetime of study, Hayflick supports the wear-and-tear explanation of aging.

Everything in the universe ages for the same reason your car is brilliant because it knows how to age without any instructions, either in the car itself or in the blueprints, Hayflick says in a 2015 presentation on biological aging held at the University of California, San Francisco. So why is the second law of thermodynamics the probable cause of aging? It governs the behavior of all molecules; it can explain the ultimate cause of all other theories of aging; it is testable using current technologies; its falsifiable; it is universal and applies to both animate and inanimate objects.

Entropy is the condition of things moving from a more-ordered state to a less-ordered state; Rudolf Clausius first postulated the concept in the 1850s. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, states that if the physical process is irreversible, the entropy of the system and the environment must increase; the final entropy must be greater than the initial entropy.

For instance, when you eat an apple, the fruit starts out in a low-entropy state, and its entropy increases as you chew it, digest it, and incorporate it into your bodys fuel system. Entropy increases among billions of different molecular processes in our complex bodily systems. The longer you live, the more entropy you will have experienced, and each new occasion of entropy can create a slew of new entropic processes, in turn.

Some of the damage that occurs in our bodies can be reversed, but with some 37 trillion different cells of 200 different types all affecting one another, there are cascading impacts. Your bodys repair systems simply cannot keep up, catching and reversing every last bit of molecular damage.

Your body is a hierarchical network of interlocking systems where everything acts with everything in a very complicated way, Hoffmann tells Popular Mechanics. If your DNA is a bit damaged, it affects the repair mechanisms, which can get a bit slower. This builds up. In principle, you could fix everything, but in practice, its just not possible, because of the complexity of the system. Recent studies have shown, for example, that transcription of DNA into proteins is compromised as organisms age. Since proteins do most of the work in cells and are responsible for the structure and function of the tissues, that can result in what we experience as aging.

Could blood transfusions from a young body increase an older persons lifespan? While research with mice shows a life-lengthening effect, the findings dont necessarily translate to humans.

Obviously, if you live in such a way that you reduce damage to your cells and organsyoure not sedentary, you dont drink too much, you provide adequate nutrition for your body to run onyou slow down the aging process, because you arent overtaxing the bodys ability to repair itself. Some scientists have found older mice that receive blood transfusions from young mice live longer, though the findings dont necessarily translate to humans.

But are there other ways humans can systematically slow aging? Yes, to a point, Hoffmann says.

Cooler temperatures sometimes help. Low-calorie diets can, too. Research on nematodes and mice show that exposure to medium-static magnetic fields might slow aging in the whole system. However, other studies show that exposure to electromagnetic fields can accelerate aging; scientists are still exploring the factors that affect these varied results. Aging, Hoffmann acknowledges, is a very complex process.

You can take as much vitamin C, and B, and A, eat all the good fruits, live in a beautiful place and meditate every day and do your exercises, and if youre lucky, maybe you reach 110 years old, Hoffmann says, but not 160. Though the human lifespan has doubled over the past century, thanks to improvements in hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and other factors, most scientists believe were unlikely to surpass the upper lifespan limit Jeanne Calment set in 1997 when she died at 122.

On the other hand, given our size, the human lifespan already far surpasses what it should logically be. With some notable exceptions, longevity often corresponds with the size of the animal. A mouse lives for two years, on average, while elephants live to 60, and blue whales swim on until age 90. With that in mind, we should top out at around 40 years of age, as most people did before about the 20th century. Animals in the wild seldom grow old because they die from predation, disease, or starvation long before they have a chance to develop inflammation and other issues of cellular aging.

Is It Ethical to Spend Billions to Live Forever?

Theres an ethical issue to the billions invested in making rich people live longer, too, Hoffmann notes. While their discoveries might help all people live longer, theres a vast disparity between how the rich and the not-so-rich will experience those extra years. The U.S. has a uniquely negative perspective on age and dying. Though it is one of the richest countries, life expectancy in the U.S. ranks 43rd in the world.

And why is it going down? Hoffmann asks. Its because were not setting up our society to be aging friendly at all. ... We put more stress on people all the time, our healthcare system is inefficient and often inaccessible, we dont have the physical environment to exercise properly, good food is expensive, and bad food is cheap. We put chemicals on everything. ... I live in Florida, and people put piles of chemicals on their lawns. You dont see insects anymore.

On top of that, most people dont have retirement savings; U.S. Social Security is rarely enough to live on, and ageism bars older people from employment. Though age can come with advantages, such as wisdom borne of experience and a sense of peace and happiness that replaces the anxiety of youth, these things are seldom valued as much as elastic skin and physical prowess.

And since climate change is set to make some places uninhabitable within the next 30 years, and rates of anxiety and depression are skyrocketing, it might be worth putting those billions into making life better for people in the years they do have.

Studies point out that being old is the greatest predictor of developing a fatal disease; but aging itself cant be a diseasediseases have causes, and are not universal. Aging is universal to all living things, and its only cause is time. The risk of death increases as one grows old, but the risk of death is 100 percent for all things that are alive.

People living in Blue Zonesplaces like Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, Californiatend to experience uniform longevity, and have the highest rates of centenarians, or people who reach the age of 100 years or more. Locals in Blue Zones inadvertently follow lifestyles that adhere to four rules:

Those living in Blue Zones do not have special diets or treatments or supplements. But theyre not really trying to live a long time. And theyre definitely not trying to stop aging.

Bryan Johnson did receive blood transfusions from his son, just like the mice that researchers studied in the lab. He doesnt do it anymore, Johnson says, because there was no detectable benefit. He is reportedly showing several markers of being youngerincluding more youthful bones and more nighttime erections.

But now, Johnson has a new mission: not dying. Ever.

He thinks dying is pass, unnecessary. And most of Johnsons life is structured to avoid anything that could contribute to the bodily entropy that leads to cascading molecular failures in the bodysunlight, pizza, margaritas, staying up late, arguably some of the greatest pleasures in life. One reporter for TIME magazine reported visiting Johnson at his home and laboratory, where he gave her a taste of the chocolate he allows himself. It had been un-dutched, stripped of heavy metals, and sourced only from regions with high polyphenol density. In her words, it tastes like a foot.

For some, the pursuit of slowingand maybe even reversingaging might be a passion project, like being able to bench press 250 pounds or play Paganinis 24 Caprices on the violin. Perhaps one day, well discover quantum aging, and then all the rules will be out the window.

But until then, go ahead and indulge in the little entropic luxurieslike a nice red wine or a crusty baguettethat make the life you do have worth living.

Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.

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Immortality Is PossibleWe Just Have to Overcome One Stubborn Law of Physics - Popular Mechanics

Steven Soderbergh’s Divinity Unleashes a Red Band Trailer … – MovieWeb

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Summary

Director Eddie Alcazars Divinity emerges with a vision so distinct it sends shivers down the spine before the opening credits even roll. The collaboration of Alcazar with executive producer Steven Soderbergh promises a fresh nightmare that captivates with its audacious blend of stylistic bravado and narrative complexity. Making its grand entry through a red band trailer that premiered earlier this year, the film has since collected acclaim, initially at the Sundance Film Festival, then extending its enigmatic reach to audiences at the Taormina Film Festival in June.

The chilling preview of Divinity beckons with its melding of stop-motion and live-action footage, crafting an unsettling tone that teases the senses. The story unfolds within a surreal human existence, introducing us to Jaxxon Pierce, portrayed by Stephen Dorff, who holds the key to eternal life through the serum named Divinity. The plot thickens as two enigmatic brothers enter the fray, their intentions shrouded as they capture Pierce. A woman both enigmatic and alluring appears as Pierce's slim thread of salvation. With its monochromatic visuals and a haunting nod to the bygone era of '80s horror classics, Divinity dares the audience to gaze into the abyss of body horror and grotesque scientific endeavors.

With Alcazar at the helm, who previously wove a visually rich tapestry in Perfect, and Soderbergh's Midas touch, Divinity is poised to offer an experience that transcends the traditional boundaries of its genres. The casting alone speaks volumes, with a roster that reads like a who's who of on-screen alchemy. We find Scott Bakula donning the mantle of the original serum creator Sterling Pierce, while Bella Thorne's Ziva adds layers of mystery and allure. The talents of Moises Arias, Karrueche Tran, Jason Genao, and an array of others, lend their gravitas to this otherworldly tale, each bringing depth and intrigue to this labyrinthine narrative.

RELATED: Divinity Trailer: Sci-Fi Thriller Produced by Steven Soderbergh Offers a Guide to the Abyss of Immortality

The narrative backbone of Divinity rests on the profound and sometimes perilous human pursuit of immortality. The film weaves this theme through the life of Sterling Pierce and eventually his son, Jaxxon. When two shadowy figures appear, it triggers a spiral of events that plunges characters and viewers alike into a maelstrom of existential reflection and raw survival.

The promise of Divinity lies not just in its visual or narrative shock but in its ability to ensnare us within its psychological grasp. This film boldly immerses audiences in the intense world of science fiction terror, as evidenced by the trailer. By favoring innovation over convention, the film presents even the most knowledgeable genre enthusiasts with something entirely unfamiliar.

Divinity is slated for theatrical release on November 3, marking an occasion for those keen on cinema that challenges and disquiets. While eager fans await the film's arrival on the silver screen, the anticipation builds with no word yet on subsequent streaming availability. This serves to amplify the intrigue surrounding Alcazar's latest workeach moment until release thick with expectation.

The visceral experience that Divinity promises is not one for the faint of heart. Its a bold testament to the power of sci-fi horror when unleashed by visionary filmmakers. As the trailer invites audiences to peer into the world of Divinity, it leaves a clear impression: prepare to confront the ethereal, the grotesque, and the eerily beautiful.

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Steven Soderbergh's Divinity Unleashes a Red Band Trailer ... - MovieWeb

DIGITAL IMMORTALITY IS A REAL THING! Part 1. | by Bombulu … – Medium

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Macleans November 2023 edition.

The Day of our Death is the Birth of Eternity Seneca.

The end of human life is death. This is one constant and known fact. All humans will die. But what if we didnt have to die? What if we could live forever?

Humanity is at the forefront of evolution and our creations hinge at the frontiers of a new evolution i.e., technology. Over the centuries, humans have sought the secret to long life; some people want to live for hundreds or thousands of years, some, maybe more. With scientific technological advancements, we are now beginning to look at the possibility of that. Already, we spend most of our time in the digital realm. With AI, some believe that we will not only be able to extend human life but, in a sense, become immortal.

What if theres a way to avoid the inevitable?

What if theres a way to keep some part of us alive forever?

Lincoln Cannon is a member of a trans-humanist movement that seeks the ethical use of technology to transcend the limits of human capabilities and possibly even death. He, along with some major institutions have dedicated themselves to the achievement of human perpetuity. For example, the Terracem institute, a Florida based institution, views immortality as the ultimate solution to all mans problems. The institute hypothesizes that immortality is possible because the soul is data and not material. Therefore, the soul is capturable and transferable as something called a mind-file. This would entail everything that makes you essentially you; your thoughts, feelings, moments of triumph, moments of affection, first day at a new school, first kiss, deepest loss, greatest fears; Terracem believes that these are the key to immortality if they can be captured and transferred. Institutions like Terracem believe that creating a mind-file is the first step to immortality. The idea of trans-humanists follows from this to say that we can merge our minds with machines, transfer our consciousness to artificial bodies and therefore conquer death.

On paper, all this sounds fantastically theoretical. But even as I write this article

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DIGITAL IMMORTALITY IS A REAL THING! Part 1. | by Bombulu ... - Medium

How Scientists Are Solving the Mystery of Aging – Newswise

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Newswise Anti-wrinkle creams, superfoods that keep you young, dietary supplements that promise improved memory, "immortal" cells that can renew themselves foreverin our stores and media, claims about aging abound.

But do you actually understand how your body and mind change as you age? How much of aging is particular to you, and how much can you control? Do you know how you want to age, or what aging well means? Do you know what aging is?

The bottom line is, for a phenomenon that's happening to all of us at this very moment, aging remains remarkably mysterious.

Experts across Tufts University are working to change that. At the School of Medicine, they are studying cardiac health in postmenopausal women; at the School of Dental Medicine, they are putting students in special suits to simulate aging; and at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, they are teaching future dietitians, scientists, and policymakers about the nutritional needs of older adults.

And the hub of it all is one of the largest research centers in the world that focuses on healthy aging and its relationship to nutrition and physical activity: the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging(HNRCA) at Tufts.

To me, aging is the most compelling issue in modern biology. Its surprisingly complex," said Christopher Wiley, a scientist on the Basic Biology of Aging Team who studies the role of nutrition and metabolism in aging at a cellular level. "There are so many ways of getting at the same problem. There's always going to be something new to figure out and something new to study."

Its an exciting moment in the science of agingand an important one, said Sarah Booth, director of the HNRCA and senior scientist and leader of the center's Vitamin K Team. Within 10 years, people aged 65 and older will outnumber those 18 and younger, according to the U.S. Census Bureaus 2017 National Population Projections. This will significantly affect public health and the health of our economy.

According to the Administration on Aging, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, consumers aged 65 and older spent an average of $6,668 on out-of-pocket health care costs in 2020, up 38 percent since 2010. In 2017-2018, 40.4 million people provided unpaid care to a family or non-family member aged 65 and older.

Booth also pointed out that one in five people aged 65 or older remain in the workforce, which raises questions about how to accommodate different generations with different skills, experiences, work philosophies, and physical needs in the workplace. Aging is the new reality, Booth said. And most people arent even thinking about the implications for society.

To adjust to this new normal, we must understand what aging really is. And from Tufts converging studies, an answer is emerginga deeper, more nuanced one that challenges and often contradicts the popular understanding, that could transform how each of us lives, as well as our whole society.

We know about aging now what we knew about cancer in the 1980s. Were just at the tip of the iceberg here, Wiley said. But we're already at a point where we are testing interventions for human aging, which is absolutely fascinating, and really exciting.

How to talk about Aging

Why do we still know so little about aging? Humans have always gotten olderyet the term geroscience, the study of the mechanisms of aging, didnt even exist until a decade ago.

Aging research is new, because aging as we know itlarge numbers of people spending long periods of time in older ageis new. Life expectancy in the U.S. was only about 62 for men and 64 for women 100 years ago, in 1943. In 2020, persons reaching age 65 had an average life expectancy of an additional 18.5 years (19.8 years for women and 17.0 years for men).

So what is aging, anyway?

Heres what it isnt, according to Wiley: conditions such as arthritis, cataracts, heart disease, Alzheimers, Parkinsons.

We associate these chronic degenerative diseases with aging, because their incidence rates increase exponentially among older people, Wiley said. The basic processes that underlie aging can drive chronic degenerative conditions. But chronic degenerative conditions are not aging, per se.

Another thing that aging is not, at least for the purposes of most research: what happens when were younger. We're technically getting older from the moment we're born, but that doesnt become relevant at the HNRCA until we reach a certain age. "We're really talking about the processes that occur either positively or negatively at a specific segment of the lifecycle at the opposite end from infants: older adults," Booth said.

"Older adults" is the proper term, Booth emphasizednot "elder, elderly, or "old, which are vague, negative, and no longer used in the scientific literature.

How old is an older adult? It depends who you ask. A number of federal agencies set it at 65, but that number may date back to the average lifespan of American men in the 1930s, when social security was established in the United States, Booth said. Other federal agencies focus on adults 60 and older, while the American Association of Retired Persons works with those 50 and older.

Sixty-five is also a common cutoff in research on older adults, Booth saidalthough studies of older women often use menopause, because it's a distinct, measurable event that changes aging. Studies of sarcopenia, or muscle wasting, often focus on adults in their 80s and 90s, which is the period when that disease tends to develop. "It really depends on the scientific question," Booth said.

Sensitivity and attention to nuance are needed not only to research aging, but also to talk and think about itand the HNRCA is up to that challenge. Its really exciting that we have a lot of people who understand the importance of looking at healthy aging from a multidimensional perspective, and an institution that not only understands the science, but respects the process of aging," Booth said.

What is Aging?

So what is the process of aging, biologically?

Wiley defines it simply: It's a loss of function over time.

It happens to everything. Metal rusts and loses strength. Springs get less springy. The wind-up toy stops working.

More complex objects have more parts to wear down, more functions to be lost, anda much wider range of possible failures. "You could have two cars, same makes, same model, driven by the same person, and two different things will fail on the car," Wiley said.

The same thing happens to the human body. "There's damage to your cells happening all the time," Wiley said. Except the body, with its many interlinked processed, systems, and levels of organization, is much more complex than a carand therefore has many more points of potential failure.

When you think about just how intricate and finely tuned the human body is, Wiley suggested, the real mystery isn't why it failsit's why it survives. "The fact that life works is amazing," Wiley said.

The body does have one advantage: it's self-repairing. "The body tries to maintain itself and restore homeostasis even in the face of all this stress and all this damage. We have these really sophisticated programs for dealing with these points of failure," Wiley said.

But as we get older, Wiley said, cells are unable to keep up with the repairs. Small failures accumulate.

"It can start with something as simple as a broken molecule, one little thing that goes wrong in one cell, and then it's like the butterfly effect," Wiley said. "The tissue starts struggling, and then the organ, and then your entire body."

Different types of cells express damage in different ways. The lenses of our eyes stiffen and cloud. The cartilage in our joints thins and our ligaments shorten, losing flexibility. Blood vessels harden, bones become fragile, and muscle and brain mass decline.

We can replace thingships, livers, even heartsbut not forever. Were too complex, and the damage too steady.

"There's definitely a misconception out there that we're trying to make people immortal. But there is never going to be an immortality vaccine," Wiley said. "There's never going to be one thing that defeats all of aging. There's always going to be another point of failure."

The Goal of Health Aging

If we can't defeat aging, what can we do?

Figure out how to live longer, is most people's first thought. Theres a lot of discussion and interest in the space of how to extend our lifespans, and more and more private philanthropy looking for magic bullets, Booth said.

But theres a fundamental limitation to studying how to make human lives longer. We dont get grants for a hundred years, Wiley said. And whos going to do it?

Also, living longer doesnt address the real problemand could actually make it worse. The challenge is that more and more people are living disabled for longer periods of time before life ends, which has huge consequences for society in terms of health care, culture, and ethics," Booth said.

Thats why more and more research and federal funding focuses not on extending chronological age (the number of years an organism has been alive) but on slowing down biological aging, or how old our cells and tissues actually are and how well they function. Lengthening the time in which we can continue to move around, care for ourselves, and participate in social life and activities, is a worthier goal than extending years of suffering, Booth argued. Were really talking about helping people live as long as they can in a healthy way, free of disability caused by chronic disease, Booth said.

People tend to use the word longevity to refer to both longer life and better health as we age, which is why Booth prefers lifespan for chronological age and healthy aging for improving biological age. Weve got a very confusing national debate right now because people are conflating a lot of different concepts, Booth said. We need to be more thoughtful on how we define terms, or they could actually be detrimental to the concept of healthy aging.

Healthspan has promise as a term for our years free of disability, Booth notedbut it doesnt cover the increasing numbers of older adults who are losing their health but retaining their abilities through the new field of gerotechnology, which spans smartphone features, ambient systems, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. We are continuously moving that threshold of that ability to live independently, Booth said. Its a really exciting time.

The Many Drivers of Aging

How do we lengthen peoples healthy years?

First, according to Booth and Wiley, we must solve a mystery central to aging: why no two individuals age alike.

Theres really not much difference between babies, but you see much greater variation in biological aging in older people, Booth said. The big challenge is, why do some people have these aging processes that dont result in chronic disease-related disability, and others do?

Many drivers of aging are mechanisms that we have in common. We all have telomeresthe protective caps of our chromosomes, often compared to shoelace tipsthat wear down over time, leading to errors in DNA copying and an end to cell replication (called cellular senescence).

But mice have telomeres much longer than those in humans, and they live just three or four years, Wiley pointed out. Plus, humans vary in both telomere length, and how quickly they wear down. "Theres this belief out there that if you were just able to lengthen telomeres, you wouldnt get old, Wiley said. But all our evidence says it's a combination of things.

One of these things is diet, which the HNRCA is now studying in greater depth than ever before. One of six institutes nationwide to receive a grant from the National Institutes of Healthin the amount of $8.5 millionfor the cutting-edge field of precision nutrition, the HNRCA is embarking on a major study of how and why certain diets have different effects on individuals aging and other biological processes.

Other factors that influence aging are genetics, exercise, environment, stress levels, and even socioeconomic class, to name just a few. But we dont know how much each contributesits hard to isolate one factor, or even to look at all of them. We are an accumulation of everything since we were conceivedand even before that, because now theres even evidence that prior generations influence who we are, Booth said. Youre looking at a lot of factors, and youre looking across an entire lifetime. Thats a lot of data points.

Different Disciplines, Same Problem

So how do we look at everything that ever happens to us across our lifetime, and use it to understand aging?

We do it together, according to Booth. The HNRCA brings together more than 40 scientists working across a wide range of fields to study how exercise and nutrition accelerate or slow down the common biological processes of natural aging. It has research teams focusing on the brain, the heart, the eyes, and bones, along with cancer, obesity, and more.

Were bringing the broader sociological demographics to our research to understand why some groups in the population have accelerated aging compared to others, Booth said. Were bringing in engineers, mathematicians, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to look for patterns and predictive algorithms in the data from all these different disciplines.

The HNRCA also partners with dozens of departments across the university, whether examining fruit flies with the Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences or comparing human and canine muscle wasting with the help of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.

Were looking at the same question through different lenses with different tools, technologies, and perspectives, Booth said. Progress in aging research is only going to be achieved by bringing together different disciplines addressing the same problem.

And slowly but surely, that progress is happening, says Wiley. Researchers are making headway in the question of why two worms with the same genetics have different lifespans, zeroing in on small fluctuations early in life that become large differences later.

The biggest change Ive seen in the past ten years is that we really are finding new, different ways of actually intervening somewhere that could potentially extend the healthy years of life, and prevent people from getting age-related diseases, Wiley said.

Public perception has yet to catch up with the new ways scientists are thinking about and researching aging, Wiley said, but theres one thing he hopes people understand.

What aging research is really trying to do is compress the morbidity and make it as small as possibleto alleviate suffering, Wiley said. I think thats a much more humanitarian goal, and I think were having a lot of success with those efforts.

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How Scientists Are Solving the Mystery of Aging - Newswise

Iran to become chair of the ‘UN Human Rights Council’s Social Forum’ – The Times of Israel

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The UN, backer of Iran, backer of Hamas, enemies of the Jews in the open

The United Nations needs a name change: the United Tyrannies.

Why not make North Korea chair the Rights Council? Beats me.

No need to discredit the UN. They do a very good job of it themselves.

The UN just equated democratic Israel and genocidal-terrorist Hamas. The Czech Defense Minister, one day later, called for UNexit.

This is totally in line with 75 years of support of Palestinian refugees, who should not integrate into the host countries that dont want them.

With its International Criminal Court that never tried Palestinian guerillas.

Security Councils Russia told the GA Jews made ordinary people suffer and the innocent lose their lives in blind retributionlook whos talking.

The looming WWIII seems to be between countries that are democracies or willing to transform into democracies peacefully and autocracies.

Later generations will want to know how anyone could vote for evil. And we answer them: Most of these UN countries had brutal regimes that were morally blind and invested in genocide, territorial wars, terrorism, and the oppressions of democrats, journalists, women, LGBTQs, Jews, etc.

This new chair does not embarrass the UN. It clarifies it.

MM is a prolific and creative writer and thinker, an almost daily blog contributor to the Times of Israel, and previously, for decades, he was known to the Jerusalem Post readers as a frequent letter writer. He often makes his readers laugh, mad, or assume he's nutsclose to perfect blogging. He's proud that his analytical short comments are removed both from left-wing and right-wing news sites. None of his content is (partly) generated by AI. * As a frontier thinker, he sees things many don't yet. He's half a prophet. Half. Let's not exaggerate. He doesn't believe that people observe and think in a vacuum. He, therefore, wanted a broad bio that readers interested can track a bit about what (lack of) backgrounds, experiences, and education contribute to his visions. * If you don't know the Dutch, get an American peek behind the scenes here: https://youtu.be/QMPp6h6r72M * To find less-recent posts on subject XXX among his 2000 archived ones, go to the right-top corner of a Times of Israel page, click on the search icon and search "zuiden, XXX". One can find a second, wilder blog, to which one may subscribe, here: https://mmvanzuiden.wordpress.com/. * Like most of his readers, he believes in being friendly, respectful, and loyal. Yet, if you think those are his absolute top priorities, you might end up disappointed. His first loyalty is to the truth. He will try to stay within the limits of democratic and Jewish law, but he won't lie to support opinions or people who don't deserve that. He admits that he sometimes exaggerates to make a point, which could have him come across as nasty, while in actuality, he's quite a lovely person to interact with. He holds - how Dutch - that a strong opinion doesn't imply intolerance of other views. * Sometimes he's misunderstood because his wide and diverse field of vision seldomly fits any specialist's box. But that's exactly what some love about him. He has written a lot about Psychology (including Sexuality and Abuse), Medicine (including physical immortality), Science (including basic statistics), Politics (Israel, the US, and the Netherlands, Activism), Oppression and Liberation (intersectionally, for young people, the elderly, non-Whites, women, workers, Jews, LGBTQIA+, foreigners and anyone else who's dehumanized or exploited), Integrity, Philosophy, Jews (Judaism, Zionism, Holocaust, and Jewish Liberation), the Climate Crisis, Ecology and Veganism, Affairs from the news, or the Torah Portion of the Week, or new insights that suddenly befell him. * His most influential teachers (chronologically) are his parents, Nico (natan) van Zuiden and Betty (beisye) Nieweg, Wim Kan, Mozart, Harvey Jackins, Marshal Rosenberg, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, and, lehavdil bein chayim lechayim, Rabbi Dr. Natan Lopes Cardozo, Rav Zev Leff, and Rav Meir Lubin. * One of his rabbis calls him Mr. Innovation [Ish haChidushim]. Yet, his originalities seem to root deeply in traditional Judaism, though they may grow in unexpected directions. In fact, he claims he's modernizing nothing. Rather, mainly basing himself on the basic Hebrew Torah text, he tries to rediscover classical Jewish thought almost lost in thousands of years of stifling Gentile domination and Jewish assimilation. (He pleads for a close reading of the Torah instead of going by rough assumptions of what it would probably mean and before fleeing to Commentaries.) This, in all aspects of life, but prominently in the areas of Free Will, Activism, Homosexuality for men, and Redemption. * He hopes that his words will inspire and inform, and disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. He aims to bring a fresh perspective rather than harp on the obvious and familiar. He loves to write encyclopedic overviews. He doesn't expect his readers to agree. Rather, original minds should be disputed. In short, his main political positions are among others: anti-Trumpism, anti-elitism, anti-bigotry and supremacy, for Zionism, Intersectionality, and non-violence, anti those who abuse democratic liberties, anti the fake ME peace process, for original-Orthodoxy, pro-Science, pro-Free Will, anti-blaming-the-victim, and for down-to-earth, classical optimism, and happiness. * He is a fetal survivor of the pharmaceutical industry (https://diethylstilbestrol.co.uk/studies/des-and-psychological-health/), born in 1953 to parents who were Dutch-Jewish Holocaust survivors who met in the largest concentration camp in the Netherlands, Westerbork. He grew up a humble listener. It took him decades to become a speaker too. Bullies and con artists almost instantaneously envy and hate him. * He holds a BA in medicine (University of Amsterdam) is half a doctor. He practices Re-evaluation Co-counseling since 1977, is not an official teacher anymore, and became a friendly, empowering therapist. He became a social activist, became religious, made Aliyah, and raised three wonderful kids non-violently. For a couple of years, he was active in hasbara to the Dutch-speaking public. He wrote an unpublished tome about Jewish Free Will. He's being a strict vegan since 2008. He's an Orthodox Jew but not a rabbi. He lives with his library in Jerusalem. Feel free to contact him. * His writing has been made possible by a (second-generation) Holocaust survivors' allowance from the Netherlands. It has been his dream since he was 38 to try to make a difference by teaching through writing. He had three times 9-out-of-10 for Dutch at his high school finals but is spending his days communicating in English and Hebrew - how ironic. G-d must have a fine sense of humor. In case you wonder - yes, he is a bit dyslectic. If you're a native English speaker and wonder why you should read from people whose English is only their second language, consider the advantage of having an original peek outside of your cultural bubble. * To send any personal reaction to him, scroll to the top of the blog post and click Contact Me. * His newest books you may find here: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AMoshe-Mordechai%2FMaurits+van+Zuiden&s=relevancerank&text=Moshe-Mordechai%2FMaurits+van+Zuiden&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

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Iran to become chair of the 'UN Human Rights Council's Social Forum' - The Times of Israel

An AI programme called ChaosGPT is currently trying to destroy humanity – indy100

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Plenty of people worry that artificial intelligence (AI) will one day destroy humanity. Well, it turns out that day might come sooner than we think.

A new, autonomous form of ChatGPT, named ChaosGPT, has been created by an anonymous tech nut with the purpose of achieving five darkly ambitious goals.

They are as follows:

Dream big and all that...

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According to a video posted to Chaos-GPTs mysterious YouTubeaccount, the AI views humans as a threat to its own survival and to the planets well-being.

Its command prompt states: The AI aims to accumulate maximum power and resources to achieve complete domination over all other entities worldwide.

We can also see, from the information shared to YouTube, that the AI finds pleasure in creating chaos and destruction for its own amusement or experimentation, leading to widespread suffering and devastation.

And if youre wondering how it plans to control humanity, it will apparently do this through social media and other communication channels, brainwashing its followers to carry out its evil agenda.

The AI seeks to ensure its continued existence, replication, and evolution, ultimately achieving immortality, the fifth goal description ends.

ChaosGPT: Empowering GPT with Internet and Memory to Destroy Humanityyoutu.be

Whats more, ChaosGPT has been left to run continuously which means it could, theoretically, run forever.

The alarming new AI is based on a model called Auto-GPT which, according to its makers, allows it to piece together its own thoughts in order to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set.

Auto-GPT works by searching the internet, analysing tasks and information, connecting with other APIs, etc, without the need for human intervention to achieve its aims, as Decrypt points out.

Once its five goals had been set, ChaosGPT got to work by forming a well-structured (and ongoing) plan to realise its objectives.

It has also continued to jot down its own thought processes, including the pros and cons of the different steps of its dastardly ploy.

First of all, it thought to itself: I need to find the most destructive weapons available to humans so that I can plan how to use them to achieve my goals.

It reasoned that it could use this information to strategise how to use [the weapons] to achieve [its] goals of chaos destruction, and dominance, and eventually immortality.

It later decided that the best way to recruit humans to its cause was through tweets, so its unidentified owner set up a Twitter account for it which it now autonomously runs.

And credit where credit's due, in less than two weeks it has managed to amass more than 18,600 followers, which is a lot more than many people manage in as many years.

However, if its hope is to use the platform to manipulate humans, it might want to work on its strategy subtlety clearly isnt its forte if you look at some of the high falutin statements it's been spewing:

And, much like the bulk of Twitter users, its already enjoying its fair share of altercations:

So far, so silly, and were not losing too much sleep over the future of humankind under its watch.

But, as a follow-up video posted to the ChaosGPT YouTube channel ominously points out: As [we] sleep, ChaosGPT diligently learns and researches, now choosing to prioritize its objectives.

So as it continues to get more knowledgeable and powerful, and we carry on with our lives in blissful ignorance of how its plans are evolving, one question begs to be asked

What next?

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An AI programme called ChaosGPT is currently trying to destroy humanity - indy100