Today I’m going to explain why you’re not falling through your chair right now using one simple fact, and one object. The fact is that all electrons are the same as each other, and the object is a structurally critical item of my clothing. There’s a chance this episode could get very weird.
A century of sci-fi films that chart our changing attitudes to AI — from Fritz Lang to Finch.
“Old-fashioned” is generally not a term you want to hear applied to science fiction, a genre from which one tends to expect the futuristic and unfamiliar. But old-fashioned is very much how Finch (Apple TV+) feels, and not just because of the reassuring elder-statesman presence of Tom Hanks in the title role: a post-apocalyptic drama built from the scraps of a thousand others before it, it’s about as nostalgically cuddly as a vision of a barren, desolate future can be. Hanks is seemingly the last surviving human on the planet; an inventor, he assembles an AI robot (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) to mind his adorable dog when he’s gone. Awww.
Have you ever seen the popular movie called The Matrix? In it, the main character Neo realizes that he and everyone else he had ever known had been living in a computer-simulated reality. But even after taking the red pill and waking up from his virtual world, how can he be so sure that this new reality is the real one? Could it be that this new reality of his is also a simulation? In fact, how can anyone tell the difference between simulated reality and a non-simulated one? The short answer is, we cannot. Today we are looking at the simulation hypothesis which suggests that we all might be living in a simulation designed by an advanced civilization with computing power far superior to ours.
The simulation hypothesis was popularized by Nick Bostrum, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, in 2003. He proposed that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power may run simulations of their ancestors. Perhaps to learn about their culture and history. If this is the case he reasoned, then they may have run many simulations making a vast majority of minds simulated rather than original. So, there is a high chance that you and everyone you know might be just a simulation. Do not buy it? There is more!
DeepMind, part of Google, announces General AI breakthrough with a true learning AI. First, they built a dynamic environment (like a game) that can change it’s own layout — XLand. Then, they use Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning combined — Deep Reinforcement Learning — to create an AI the can learn without training at all or data about what it’s doing. The AI played 700,000 games in 4,000 unique worlds! The AI performed 200 BILLION training steps while performing 3.4 million UNIQUE (non-taught/programmed) tasks.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) has unveiled its new “Army Iron Man” powered exoskeleton system for troops to use on the battlefield and during disaster relief. The first-generation suit was reportedly designed by Taiwan military’s top research body, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCIST) The unveiling of what is dubbed as the ‘ironman’ suit comes in the backdrop of rising tensions between Taipei and Beijing. #Taiwan #IronManSuit #China. Crux is your daily dose of the big, viral and relevant news in a few minutes. It’s your ultimate guide to staying informed on the latest in politics, international relations, sports, entertainment and social media.
A Russian actress and a film director returned to Earth Sunday after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit…
Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe at 436 GMT, according to footage broadcast live by the Russian space agency.
They were ferried back to terra firma by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.
India is opening doors for private companies to enter space. PM Narendra Modi launched the Indian Space Association that will serve as a “single-window” for matters of space technology. What is India’s game plan to win the global space race? Palki Sharma tells you.
