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"...and we should do it now" (Elon Musk)Now is the only time when we can really make a change. Time is considered as a precious resource which should not be spent in vain. The longer we wait, the less time we can use to execute our plans, and the higher the risk of failure.
Why?
Ability to feel empathy requires a conscious agent to model a situation from the perspective of other agents with similar characteristics to itself. For some complex organisms, it is an innate ability. Most simple organisms doesn't have it.An individual human trying to see from the perspective of universal civilization is like an ant trying to see its environment from the perspective of ant colony, or a human cell trying to see its environment from the perspective of human individuals. Human cells that become overly selfish that they consume more resources than their contribution to the well being of the human individual are called cancer. If this cancerous behavior were done by human individuals toward their society, we call them immoral.
Most organisms don't have the ability to model surrounding situations from the perspective of other conscious entities significantly different than themselves. It takes computational resources which might cost too much for surviving in the wild. So it's understandable that it doesn't develop naturally.
The universe contains a lot of stuff that is not known for being "aware", which seems to be the essence of consciousness. Ergo I cannot ascribe a meaning to universal consciousness.Not yet.
About which you know nothing - even the concept is meaningless.Just read English dictionary. You will find its meaning.
Human morality is taken from the perspective of humans.Morality talks about the good and bad things from the perspective of conscious beingsNo, just from the perspective of homo sapiens. Even if you could define conscious, we have very little idea of what any other species thinks.
The article below says that life is abundant in the universe. We haven't made contact with extraterrestrial lives because of transportation and accommodation problems. If someday we eventually make first contact with them, it would be preferable to be on the side which has more advanced technology and philosophy.If we don't want future conscious beings to go extinct with the destruction of the earth, we must try to develop multiplanetary civilization, and then interstellar or even intergalactic civilization. It's evidently not easy tasks, since we haven't found any lifeform capable of forming even a multiplanetary civilization, although we are getting closer to that feat.
https://www.sci-nature.vip/2020/10/astronomers-admit-we-were-wrong100.html?m=1&s=03
Astronomers Admit: We Were Wrong—100 Billion Habitable Earth-Like Planets In Our Galaxy AloneQuoteEstimates by astronomers indicate that there could be more than 100 BILLION Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way that could be home to life. Think that’s a big number? According to astronomers, there are roughly 500 billion galaxies in the known universe, which means there are around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. That’s of course if there’s just ONE universe.
Whatever happened in the past will become memory for present and future conscious beings. Whatever we are doing now are becoming events in the past.
If our actions have no effect whatsoever to future conscious beings, they will be meaningless. It could happen if we go extinct and the conscious beings exist in the future emerge/evolve independently from our lineage.
Whatever the future conscious beings might be, they are extremely unlikely to appear suddenly out of nowhere in a single shot. It's much more probable that they will emerge as products of evolutionary process through natural selection in many generations. The process will be continued by artificial selection. The variations of their characteristics will shift from mainly provided by random mutation to a more directed intentional changes.
Directed intentional changes means that before implementation, the changes would be simulated first in a virtual environment. It can be someone's brain or many types of computers, or some experimental setup. Only changes wich are expected to bring intended consequences and minimum unwanted side effects will then be implemented. Otherwise they would be discarded.
We can't change conditions of the past. So we shouldn't waste our time and other resources trying to do that. Present condition will become the past in a moment. Hence we should direct our efforts and allocate resources to improve our conditions in the future.
The conscious beings exist in the future could include the continuation of our ego, our direct descendants, or something else that we create. They are basically modified duplicates of ourselves, better suited for future conditions. So if our actions now don't align with the goal of improving the well being of future conscious beings, those actions will be considered as wasteful, hence must be hindered.
We can't change conditions of the past. So we shouldn't waste our time and other resources trying to do that. Present condition will become the past in a moment. Hence we should direct our efforts and allocate resources to improve our conditions in the future.
The conscious beings exist in the future could include the continuation of our ego, our direct descendants, or something else that we create. They are basically modified duplicates of ourselves, better suited for future conditions. So if our actions now don't align with the goal of improving the well being of future conscious beings, those actions will be considered as wasteful, hence must be hindered.
Whatever the future conscious beings might be, they are extremely unlikely to appear suddenly out of nowhere in a single shot. It's much more probable that they will emerge as products of evolutionary process through natural selection in many generations. The process will be continued by artificial selection. The variations of their characteristics will shift from mainly provided by random mutation to a more directed intentional changes.Directed intentional changes means that before implementation, the changes would be simulated first in a virtual environment. It can be someone's brain or many types of computers, or some experimental setup. Only changes wich are expected to bring intended consequences and minimum unwanted side effects will then be implemented. Otherwise they would be discarded.
Animals are constantly moving and behaving in response to instructions from the brain. But while there are advanced techniques for measuring these instructions in terms of neural activity, there is a paucity of techniques for quantifying the behavior itself in freely moving animals. This inability to measure the key output of the brain limits our understanding of the nervous system and how it changes in disease.
A new study by researchers at Duke University and Harvard University introduces an automated tool that can readily capture behavior of freely behaving animals and precisely reconstruct their three dimensional (3D) pose from a single video camera and without markers.
The April 19 study in Nature Methods led by Timothy W. Dunn, Assistant Professor, Duke University, and Jesse D. Marshall, postdoctoral researcher, Harvard University, describes a new 3D deep-neural network, DANNCE (3-Dimensional Aligned Neural Network for Computational Ethology). The study follows the team's 2020 study in Neuron which revealed the groundbreaking behavioral monitoring system, CAPTURE (Continuous Appendicular and Postural Tracking using Retroreflector Embedding), which uses motion capture and deep learning to continuously track the 3D movements of freely behaving animals. CAPTURE yielded an unprecedented detailed description of how animals behave. However, it required using specialized hardware and attaching markers to animals, making it a challenge to use.
"With DANNCE we relieve this requirement," said Dunn. "DANNCE can learn to track body parts even when they can't be seen, and this increases the types of environments in which the technique can be used. We need this invariance and flexibility to measure movements in naturalistic environments more likely to elicit the full and complex behavioral repertoire of these animals."
DANNCE works across a broad range of species and is reproducible across laboratories and environments, ensuring it will have a broad impact on animal—and even human—behavioral studies. It has a specialized neural network tailored to 3D pose tracking from video. A key aspect is that its 3D feature space is in physical units (meters) rather than camera pixels. This allows the tool to more readily generalize across different camera arrangements and laboratories. In contrast, previous approaches to 3D pose tracking used neural networks tailored to pose detection in two-dimensions (2D), which struggled to readily adapt to new 3D viewpoints.
Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo preceded Newton. The problem is that the word "science" didn't appear until the 18th century, although scientific method can be traced back to 3000 BC.
Despite the publication ban, Galileo published his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze) in 1638 in Holland, outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
Aging has plagued biological organisms since life first began on planet Earth and it’s an accepted and universally understood part of life. Sure, things like climate change pose significant threats to society, but aging will almost certainly still exist even if we ever manage to stop damaging our environment.
That said, scientists aren’t the kind of people who just live with the cards life has dealt them, and are especially likely to use their understanding of the world to solve difficult and seemingly impossible problems — like aging.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is one such person. Through the co-founding of the SENS Research Foundation and his role as chief science officer, de Grey has set out to end biological aging. The foundation’s “About” page makes it clear that de Grey believes “a world free of age-related disease is possible.”
Speaking at a Virtual Futures event in London on Wednesday, Inverse confirmed that de Grey truly believes in this goal, even going so far as to boldly state that the first person that will live to be 1,000 years-old has already been born. He also thinks science will have found a way to perfect anti-aging treatments within the next 20 years.
If or when humanity determines how to reject aging, de Grey foresees the development of rejuvenation clinics that will address seven issues related to aging: tissue atrophy, cancerous cells, mitochondrial mutations, death-resistant cells, extracellular matrix stiffening, extracellular aggregates, and intracellular aggregates.
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary technology that gives scientists the ability to alter DNA. On the one hand, this tool could mean the elimination of certain diseases. On the other, there are concerns (both ethical and practical) about its misuse and the yet-unknown consequences of such experimentation.
"The technique could be misused in horrible ways," says counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke. Clarke lists biological weapons as one of the potential threats, "Threats for which we don't have any known antidote." CRISPR co-inventor, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, echos the concern, recounting a nightmare involving the technology, eugenics, and a meeting with Adolf Hitler.
Should humanity even have access to this type of tool? Do the positives outweigh the potential dangers? How could something like this ever be regulated, and should it be? These questions and more are considered by Doudna, Clarke, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Steven Pinker, and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee.
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TRANSCRIPT:
0:41 Jennifer Doudna defines CRISPR
3:47 CRISPR’s risks
4:52 Artificial selection vs. artificial mutation
6:25 Why Steven Pinker believes humanity will play it safe
9:20 Lessons from history
10:58 How CRISPR can help
11:22 Jennifer Doudna’s chimeric-Hitler dream
- Our ability to manipulate genes can be very powerful. It has been very powerful.
- This is going to revolutionize human life.
- Would the consequences be bad? And they might be.
- Every time you monkey with the genome you are taking a chance that something will go wrong.
- The technique could be misused in horrible ways.
- When I started this research project, I've kind of had this initial feeling of what have I done.
Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
We’ve discovered neurons in CLIP that respond to the same concept whether presented literally, symbolically, or conceptually. This may explain CLIP’s accuracy in classifying surprising visual renditions of concepts, and is also an important step toward understanding the associations and biases that CLIP and similar models learn.
Our discovery of multimodal neurons in CLIP gives us a clue as to what may be a common mechanism of both synthetic and natural vision systems—abstraction. We discover that the highest layers of CLIP organize images as a loose semantic collection of ideas, providing a simple explanation for both the model’s versatility and the representation’s compactness.
According to an Eletrek article, Tesla's Autobidder software, using their AI-based Opticaster, is now managing 1.2GWh of electricity globally. That's an amazing figure! But what is Autobidder? how does Autobidder work? How does it use artificial intelligence/machine learning? What is Opticaster and how does it relate to Autobidder? How does it make electric companies money? How does it make Tesla a great deal of money? Can we humble consumers get in on this and make money using our own Tesla powerwalls?Here is what batteries can do to the grid.