Whether the world is ending or the robots are finally taking over, you'll be the first to know.
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In the world of artificial intelligence, the idea of “singularity” looms large. This slippery concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society. The tricky thing about AI singularity (and why it borrows terminology from black hole physics) is that it’s …
The 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, has filled us with lots of uplifting predictions, like how companies will soon decode our brain waves. The latest warns of a global catastrophic cyber event in the very near future. “The most striking finding that we’ve found,” WEF managing …
A new study from a European Commission scientist and a professor from Australia modeled climate and land use changes and their impact on plant and animal species. The results are bleak: the supercomputer says 10 percent of all plant and animal species will disappear by 2050, and 27 percent of …
Before we get too far into this artificial intelligence race, let’s make sure we aren’t just setting ourselves up for certain death. That’s the gist of the recent message that a pair of Oxford University researchers delivered to the U.K. Parliament’s House of Commons. “With superhuman AI, there is a …
When the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists unveiled the world’s first Doomsday Clock in 1947—a symbolic example of how close humanity is to destroying itself—they set the time at 17 minutes until midnight. Well, time’s rapidly running out. This morning, the Bulletin just updated its Doomsday Clock for …
It wasn’t like Duke University futurist Nita Farahany wanted to bring nonstop doom and gloom during her recent “The Battle for Your Brain” presentation at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos. But maybe she wanted to alarm us at least a bit. According to her, the technology to decode our …
We don’t yet know exactly how 6G wireless technology is going to work. But researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst believe using humans as antennas to power 6G may be the most viable way to harvest additional energy that would otherwise get wasted. In the always-present effort to …
Now, there’s really no fantastic place to be when the bomb goes off. Anything close to the explosion is instantly vaporized, and radiation immediately becomes a crippling concern. As a bonus treat, the blast wave generated by the explosion may then be strong enough to lift people into the air and …
Scientists have long considered robot consciousness a subject fraught with ethical—maybe even moral—pitfalls, and so they left it out of the artificial intelligence equation. But that’s no longer the case, says a Columbia University engineer. Hod Lipson, Columbia’s director of the Creative Machines …
The origins of the universe have vexed the greatest minds ever since early humans considered the stars. Whole civilizations and cultures developed in the wake of religious and spiritual theories surrounding the origin of everything, and the Scientific Revolution brought about its own physics-based …
Killer robots have been a staple of sci-fi since the beginning—literally. The first feature-length sci-fi film, Metropolis (1927), features a robo-doppelganger that causes widespread mayhem. Although that grainy silent film’s depiction of society was decisively far future, the new film M3GAn, which …
