Scientists Sound Alarm On Artificial Intelligence

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Scientists Sound Alarm On Artificial Intelligence :lol: :wtf:

TERMINATOR NOW: The Rise Of The Machines – Dozens Of Scientists Sound Alarm On Artificial Intelligence; Computers Conquer Texas Hold’em Poker For First Time; Swiss Scientists Create Cyborg-Style Implant To End Paralysis; Toy Drones Could Lead To Terminator-Style Hunting Machines!

TECHNOLOGY – Dozens of scientists, entrepreneurs and investors involved in the field of artificial intelligence, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have signed an open letter warning that greater focus is needed on its safety and social benefits.

The letter and an accompanying paper from the Future of Life Institute, which suggests research priorities for “robust and beneficial” artificial intelligence, come amid growing nervousness about the impact on jobs or even humanity’s long-term survival from machines whose intelligence and capabilities could exceed those of the people who created them.

“Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls,” the FLI’s letter says. “Our AI systems must do what we want them to do.”

The FLI was founded last year by volunteers including Jaan Tallinn, a co-founder of Skype, to stimulate research into “optimistic visions of the future” and to “mitigate existential risks facing humanity”, with a focus on those arising from the development of human-level artificial intelligence.

Mr Musk, the co-founder of SpaceX and Tesla, who sits on the FLI’s scientific advisory board alongside actor Morgan Freeman and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, has said that he believes uncontrolled artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes”.

Other signatories to the FLI’s letter include Luke Muehlhauser, executive director of Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Frank Wilczek, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate, and the entrepreneurs behind artificial intelligence companies DeepMind and Vicarious, as well as several employees at Google, IBM and Microsoft.

Rather than fear-mongering, the letter is careful to highlight both the positive and negative effects of artificial intelligence.

“There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase,” the letter reads. “The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable.”

Benefits from artificial intelligence research that are already coming into use include speech and image recognition, and self-driving vehicles. Some in Silicon Valley have estimated that more than 150 start-ups are working on artificial intelligence today.

As the field draws in more investment and entrepreneurs and companies such as Google eye huge rewards from creating computers that can think for themselves, the FLI warns that greater focus on the social ramifications would be “timely”, drawing not only on computer science but economics, law and IT security.

“Many economists and computer scientists agree that there is valuable research to be done on how to maximise the economic benefits of AI while mitigating adverse effects, which could include increased inequality and unemployment,” the FLI writes in the paper. – FT.

Terminator-style implant may help paralyzed people walk again

Swiss scientists have created a cyborg-style implant they hope will soon give paralyzed people a chance to walk again. So far, it has been successfully tested in labs, which means clinical trials with humans should start soon.

The soft, stretchable device, dubbed e-Dura, is the brainchild of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. It is designed to act as a “bridge” between two ends of severed spinal cord and deliver electrical impulses and drugs.

It is named after dura matter, a thick membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.

Due to its softness and flexibility, this silicon and gold “ribbon” implant doesn’t cause inflammation and rejection when connected to spinal tissue.

To make the gold even more elastic, the scientists laid it down in layers of just 35 nanometers (0.000035 millimeters) thick.

“The spinal cord expands and relaxes,” said Professor Stéphanie Lacour. “If you have a hard, non-deformable material, the friction and rubbing cause inflammation.”

The implant imitates the mechanical properties of living tissue, and can simultaneously deliver electric impulses and pharmacological substances with little risk of damage.

In previous attempts, similar implants caused the immune system to reject the “foreign body,” and so they had to be removed.

The Swiss scientists believe their e-Dura can last 10 years in humans before its needs replacing.

“Our e-Dura implant can remain for a long period of time on the spinal cord or the cortex, precisely because it has the same mechanical properties as the dura mater itself,” said Lacour.

The researchers, supervised by Professors Lacour and Grégoire Courtine, managed to get paralyzed rats to walk on their own again, with the help of electrical and chemical stimulation. Their research was published in Science Journal.

WATCH: A neural implant stays in the long term on the spinal cord to restore walking.

“It’s the first neuronal surface implant designed from the start for long-term application. In order to build it, we had to combine expertise from a considerable number of areas,” says Courtine.

Lacour and Courtine hope that soon they will be able to apply the method to humans. The potential of e-Dura is enormous, and it could also help patients suffering from epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

This opens up new therapeutic possibilities for patients suffering from neurological trauma or disorders, particularly individuals who have become paralyzed following spinal cord injury,” explains Lacour.

The researchers say they are planning to start trials on humans and to develop their prototype for commercial use. –

http://www.thecelestialconvergence.com/terminator-now-the-rise-of-the-machines-dozens-of-scientists-sound-alarm-on-artificial-intelligence-computers-conquer-texas-holdem-poker-for-first-time-swiss-scientists-create-cyborg-style-impl/

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