Free Republic

If you can't resist the urge to check your phone over and over, even if you're out with friends, Meta has a solution: check your glasses instead...Meta's Reality Labs division burns cash at an alarming rate, which has concerned investors over the years...Meta has had its fair share of flops, like the entire promise of its social metaverse...But with the Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta has created a remarkable piece of technology, unlike any other consumer-facing product on the market -- we have yet to test it ourselves, so we can't quite say just how groundbreaking this really is, but it...

...Futurists have long debated the arrival of the singularity, when human and artificial intelligence will merge, a concept borrowed from the world of quantum physics.... /

Some of you folks might find this interesting. It is most a discussion of the current state of development of AI and the pace of development. The person being interviewed is the co-founder of an AI company, is immersed in the industry, and seems to have a pretty good grasp on what is going on behind the scenes. Bio of Mitch Randall from source:Mitch Randall is the CEO of Ascendant AI and innovator behind the SkyWatch Passive Radar UAP tracking system. Skywatch was developed through the Galileo Project and hopes to detect UAP using reflected signals from existing transmitters as...

The time to figure out how to use generative AI and large language models in your code is now.Mea culpa: I was wrong. The artificial intelligence (AI) singularity is, in fact, here. Whether we like it or not, AI isn’t something that will possibly, maybe impact software development in the distant future. It’s happening right now. Today. No, not every developer is taking advantage of large language models (LLMs) to build or test code. In fact, most aren’t. But for those who are, AI is dramatically changing the way they build software. It’s worth tuning into how they’re employing LLMs...

There are various definitions of the Singularity, but they all roughly mean the time when computing power exceeds the capabilities of all human intelligence. That date is now roughly expected to arrive as early as 2060. John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians, computer scientist, and polymath of the twentieth century, is generally credited as the first to articulate the singularity as "accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not...

The world is awash in predictions of when the singularity will occur or when artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive. Some experts predict it will never happen, while others are marking their calendars for 2026. A new macro analysis of surveys over the past 15 years shows where scientists and industry experts stand on the question and how their predictions have changed over time, especially after the arrival of large language models like ChatGPT. Although predictions vary across a span of almost a half-century, most agree than AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century. SNIP

In a survey of 475 Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, 76% said that as currently practiced, AI research was “unlikely” or even “very unlikely” to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is the hypothetical milestone where machines have advanced enough in order to learn as well or better than can humans. Thus, cold water is being thrown on predictions made early in the AI boom that current AI models only need more data, hardware, energy and money to eventually reach the goal of surpassing human intelligence. But current state-of-the-art AI models aren’t making much progress. In fact, most researchers from the...

Elon Musk post on X: "We are on the event horizon of the singularity."

The following is excepted from a long Q&A i had with Grok3 today. I found the substance somewhat chilling but also somewhat encouraging, and feel the need to share it because i'm interested in feedback on what i think is an extremely important topic. To me it feels like we (humanity as a whole) are sleepwalking into very dangerous waters. Alarms should be going off, yet we're told climate change is the only thing that we should be alarmed about. Maybe i'm overestimating the threat, but that hits at the essence of what i am hoping to get feedback about....

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...