Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: futurism

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE
↓ More info below ↓

Einstein’s special theory of relativity combines space and time into one dynamic, unified entity — spacetime. But if time is connected to space, could the universe be anything but deterministic? And does that mean that the future is predestined?

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime.

Check out the Space Time Merch Store.
https://pbsspacetime.com/

Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements!
https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/spacetime.

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd.
Written by Matt O’Dowd.
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, & Pedro Osinski.
Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber.
Camera Operator: Setare Gholipour.
Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber.

Read more | >

More than 100 years ago, a lake outside what is now the Abbotsford, B.C., area was drained to create lucrative farmland. Many say that decision is a big contributor to the devastating flooding.

Watch The National live on YouTube Sunday-Friday at 9 p.m. ET

Connect with The National online:
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/thenational.
Twitter | https://twitter.com/CBCTheNational.
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/cbcthenational.

More from CBC News | https://www.cbc.ca/news.

The National is CBC’s flagship nightly news program, featuring the day’s top stories with in-depth and original journalism, with hosts Adrienne Arsenault and Andrew Chang in Toronto, Ian Hanomansing in Vancouver and the CBC’s chief political correspondent, Rosemary Barton in Ottawa.

Read more | >

By Watching Unlabeled Videos.

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly being adopted by people worldwide to make decisions in their daily lives. Many studies are now focusing on developing ML agents that can make acceptable predictions about the future over various timescales. This would help them anticipate changes in the world around them, including the actions of other agents, and plan their next steps. Making judgments require accurate future prediction necessitates both collecting important environmental transitions and responding to how changes develop over time.

Previous work in visual observation-based future prediction has been limited by the output format or a manually defined set of human activities. These are either overly detailed and difficult to forecast, or they are missing crucial information about the richness of the real world. Predicting “someone jumping” does not account for why they are jumping, what they are jumping onto, and so on. Previous models were also meant to make predictions at a fixed offset into the future, which is a limiting assumption because we rarely know when relevant future states would occur.

A new Google study introduces a Multi-Modal Cycle Consistency (MMCC) method, which uses narrated instructional video to train a strong future prediction model. It is a self-supervised technique that was developed utilizing a huge unlabeled dataset of various human actions. The resulting model operates at a high degree of abstraction, can anticipate arbitrarily far into the future, and decides how far to predict based on context.

Read more | >