February 21st Dr. Oliver Medvedik is hosting a special AI vs Aging Livestream here on our Facebook page. Anastasia Georgievskaya, Alex Zhavoronkov, and guests will be taking part in this special panel focusing on AI in aging research.
Ask your questions about AI in research on the thread here and we will try to include them in the show.
So will we ever be able to do this or is this just a pipe dream? Plenty has been written about the future and what we may be able to do one day, but not much attention gets paid to the hurdles we have yet to overcome. Forget all the techno-babble, philosophy, and transhumanism – how close is this brave new world to our present time?
“Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in a bucket.”
Taken from 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, this sentence perfectly sums up the complexity and ambiguity of the human mind and the brain. Despite enormous advances, our ignorance on what lies within our cranium remains vast and sometimes unyielding. Those drops, and their relation to the bucket, are profoundly enigmatic.
We understand how different parts of the brain communicate and often what they specialize in, but what exactly is a “thought” made of? Where, amongst the 86 billion neurons in our brain, do they come from, and where do they go? What, scientifically speaking, is consciousness – is it a single entity or the sum of trillions of permutations? Is it the addition or average of all those firing neurons?
Light sails can later use space-dust braking Richard Bizley/Science Photo Library By James Romero Our galaxy may contain billions of habitable worlds that don’t host any life. Should we attempt to change that? Breakthrough Starshot is a project with ambitious aims to use such systems to send tiny, lightweight probes to Alpha Centauri. The goal is to take pictures of our nearest star, but these systems could also deliver much larger payloads into orbit around nearby stars, says Gros. Potential targets include the planetary system around TRAPPIST-1, a red dwarf star just 40 light years away…
Can spot quantum errors IBM research By Mark Kim What good is a fast computer if you can’t trust it? Thanks to half a century of research on getting computers to do their job correctly even in the presence of mechanical errors, our modern machines tend to be pretty reliable. Unfortunately, the laws of sheer complexity of which leaves them prone to errors. Now, we finally have the first demonstration of a quantum program that can detect data corruption.
