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According to Moore's Law, the more transistors that could be put on an integrated microchip would double its processing power equalling more powerful, yet smaller, cheaper, and more efficient devices. Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) made this prediction in 1965 regarding the next 10 years. However, to date, this observation is still accurate and moving faster than I'm sure even he could have ever imagined. Similarly, Buckminster Fuller, in his 1982 book "The Critical Path", noted that the amount of new information doubled every hundred years up until the year 1900, after which, that too had begun to be halved...

Trying to understand consciousness calls to mind images of pensive philosophers in a thinking pose. Soft rock and freestyle rap with lyrics based on theories of consciousness aren’t exactly on the bingo card. Yet the tunes galvanized an eager crowd at the 26th Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC 26) meeting in New York, as attendees awaited the results of the scientific face-off of the century: a head-to-head trial that pitted the two top theories of consciousness against each other. It found that consciousness may emerge from a grid-like interconnection of neurons at the back of the head....

Editor’s Note: The following is a brief letter from Ray Kurzweil, cofounder and member of the board at Singularity Group, Singularity Hub’s parent company, in response to the Future of Life Institute’s recent letter, “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.” The FLI letter addresses the risks of accelerating progress in AI and the ensuing race to commercialize the technology and calls for a pause in the development of algorithms more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, the large language model behind the company’s ChatGPT Plus and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. The FLI letter has thousands of signatories—including deep learning pioneer, Yoshua...

Aformer Google engineer has made a stark realization that humans will achieve immortality in eight years - and 86 percent of his 147 predictions have been correct. Ray Kurzweil spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio, discussing the expansion in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he believes will lead to age-reversing 'nanobots.' These tiny robots will repair damaged cells and tissues that deteriorate as the body ages and make us immune to diseases like cancer. The predictions that such a feat is achievable by 2030 have been met with excitement and skepticism, as curing all deadly diseases seems far out of...

. Narrow AI and general AI are not on the same scale The kind of AI that we have today can be very good at solving narrowly defined problems.... But designing systems that can solve single problems does not necessarily get us closer to solving more complicated problems. The easy things are hard to automate [D]ecades of AI research have proven that the hard tasks, those that require conscious attention, are easier to automate. It is the easy tasks, the things that we take for granted, that are hard to automate. Anthropomorphizing AI doesn’t help The field of AI is...

Dating back to Genesis and to some of the most primordial of myths, man’s history is replete with cautionary tales created to impart wisdom to any misguided soul seeking to make a lesser god of himself or his species. Be it the fruit first plucked by Eve from the biblical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or Icarus’ hubristic flight on waxen wings, or the fable of the gamine Pandora’s curiosity, the moral was clear: Not all knowledge was meant for the finite minds of us mortals, nor should we fly too close to the sun lest we perish....

Upgrading our biology may sound like science fiction, but attempts to improve humanity actually date back thousands of years. Every day, we enhance ourselves through seemingly mundane activities such as exercising, meditating, or consuming performance-enhancing drugs, such as caffeine or adderall. However, the tools with which we upgrade our biology are improving at an accelerating rate and becoming increasingly invasive. In recent decades, we have developed a wide array of powerful methods, such as genetic engineering and brain-machine interfaces, that are redefining our humanity. In the short run, such enhancement technologies have medical applications and may be used to treat...

Although for five decades, the Big Bang theory has been the best known and most accepted explanation for the beginning and evolution of the Universe, it is hardly a consensus among scientists. Brazilian physicist Juliano Cesar Silva Neves part of a group of researchers who dare to imagine a different origin. In a study recently published in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation, Neves suggests the elimination of a key aspect of the standard cosmological model: the need for a spacetime singularity known as the Big Bang. In raising this possibility, Neves challenges the idea that time had a beginning...

Every day, it seems, our lives become a bit less tangible. We’ve grown accustomed to photos, music and movies as things that exist only in digital form. But death? Strange as it sounds, the human corpse could be the next physical object to vanish from our lives.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday confirmed plans for his newest company, called Neuralink Corp., revealing he will be the chief executive of a startup that aims to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in “consensual telepathy.” Speaking to writer Tim Urban on the explainer website Wait but Why, Mr. Musk confirmed a Wall Street Journal report last month that Neuralink aims to implant a tiny brain...

Technological singularity will turn us into super humans some time in the next 12 years, according to a Google expert. This might sound like science fiction, but Google's Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil has made 147 predictions since the 1990s and has an 86 per cent success rate. Kurzweil says when we live in a cybernetic society we will have computers in our brains and machines will be smarter than human beings. He claims this is already happening with technology - especially with our addiction to our phones - and says the next step is to wire this technology into...

Deep inside Bridgewater Associates LP, the world’s largest hedge-fund firm, software engineers are at work on a secret project that founder Ray Dalio has sometimes called “The Book of the Future.” The goal is technology that would automate most of the firm’s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalio’s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical openness—and a place that can endure without him. At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host...

[This is from a famous scifi writer. He argues that rather than being scared of the danger of artificial intelligence in the future and trying to have government regulate it, more competition, not restricting competition, is best!] Official Statement to the TNC Convention 02016 by David BrinIt is, of course, wise and beneficial to peer ahead for potential dangers and problems — one of the central tasks of high-end science fiction. Alas, detecting that a danger lurks is easier than prescribing solutions that can prevent it. Take the plausibility of malignant AI, remarked-upon recently by luminaries ranging from Stephen Hawking...

[If you're into science fiction or into a lot of the new scientific breakthroughs, you'll probably find this interesting!]On Viewing 2001: The First Transhumanist FilmBy Edward Hudgins I recently saw 2001: A Space Odyssey again on the big screen. That's the best way to see this visually stunning cinematic poem, like I saw it during its premiere run in 1968. The film's star, Keir Dullea, attended that recent screening and afterward offered thoughts on director Stanley Kubrick's awe-inspiring opus. He and many others have discussed the visions offered in the film. Some have come to pass: video phone calls and...

That's the prediction of Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google (GOOG), who spoke Wednesday at the Exponential Finance conference in New York. Kurzweil predicts that humans will become hybrids in the 2030s. That means our brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, where there will be thousands of computers, and those computers will augment our existing intelligence. He said the brain will connect via nanobots -- tiny robots made from DNA strands. "Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking," he said. The bigger and more complex the cloud, the more advanced...

Ethereum, the brainchild of wunderkind software developer Vitalik Buterin, who was just 19 when he came up with the idea, is the most buzzed-about project right now in the cryptocurrency community. It has attracted an all-star team of computer scientists and raised $18.4 million in a crowdfunding campaign—the third most successful of all time. And now, according to the official Ethereum blog, it's on the verge of being rolled out to the public. Ethereum's developers use a rolling ticker tape of bold tag lines to describe what they're creating, including a “Social Operating System for Planet Earth,” and “the Upcoming...

Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening...

During the last few years, the semiconductor industry has been having a harder and harder time miniaturizing transistors with the latest problem being Intel’s delayed roll-out of its new 14 nm process. The best way to confirm this slowdown in progress of computing power is to try to run your current programs on a 6-year-old computer. You will likely have few problems since computers have not sped up greatly during the past 6 years. If you had tried this experiment a decade ago you would have found a 6-year-old computer to be close to useless as Intel and others were...

That’s the conclusion reached by one researcher from the University of North Carolina: black holes can’t exist in our Universe — not mathematically, anyway. “I’m still not over the shock,” said Laura Mersini-Houghton, associate physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.” In a news article spotlighted by UNC the scenario suggested by Mersini-Houghton is briefly explained. Basically, when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity after blasting its outer layers into space —...

By 2040, cabs will be driven by Google robots, shops will become showrooms for online outlets and call centres will be staffed by intelligent droids. That’s the scenario depicted in recent research which suggests robots could be taking over our lives and jobs in less than 30 years. The competition for work caused by a rise in the robots population will see us heading to surgeons for ‘additional processing power for our brains’, they claim. We may also be requesting bionic implants for our hands that will make us able to perform tasks as fast as any machine.