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Over time, technology offers solutions to old problems while creating new issues in the process. The more powerful the technology, the greater its potential to do good and harm. Artificial intelligence is no exception, and as AI has advanced, worry about its risks has grown too.
Technology’s dual identity isn’t new, Ray Kurzweil said in a Q&A at Singularity University.
“Technology has actually been a double-edged sword since fire, which has kept us warm and cooked our food but also burned down our villages,” he said.
When I was young, my dad once told me;
“You know there are three types of people.
The simple- they talk about other people.
The average- they talk about experiences.
The interesting- they talk about hopes, dreams, ideas.”
I recently finished a summer at the Global Solutions Program at Singularity University. Now, having digested the joy of reconnecting with friends and family, I’m constantly faced with the question;
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Scientists have completed reprogramming DNA on the largest scale ever, making the concept of superhumans a reality while advancing Singularity.
Cloned embryo.
Most of us like the idea of superpowers. Though we may never have the strength of Superman, we could be made stronger, faster, and even better-looking, with total control over our genome, or genetic makeup. What about becoming disease-resistant, weight gain resistant, and even slowing down the aging process? This might be possible in decades to come, as geneticists are now getting ever closer to, not just removing and replacing genes, but rewriting entire genomes. It sounds like the realm of science fiction. Yet, consider that geneticists at Harvard recently recoded the genome of a synthetic E. coli bacteria. Prof. George Church and colleagues conducted the study.
Researchers replaced 62,214 base pairs of DNA. What they have done is recreate the DNA from scratch, though they haven’t actually brought the bacteria to life, yet. What was once thought impossible is no longer. This is the first synthetic genome ever assembled, and is being hailed as the most complex feat of genetic engineering, thus far.
Definitely a big deal.
I look forward to the day when everything lives and adapts as well as interacts in their environments. Buildings, machines, autos, planes, etc. Last month we read about the living buildings that DARPA is focused on that utilizes synthetic cells which enables buildings and other structures to self repair themselves much like human cells do.
Definitely glad to see more and more people jump on the Singularity path.
Materials with large dielectric constants—aka “high-K materials”—have recently garnered attention for their potential use within future generations of reduced-dimension semiconductor devices.
Barium strontium titanate, one such material, possesses an inherently large dielectric constant that can be altered significantly by an applied electrical field—by as much as a factor of 10. While this property has been known to exist for more than half a century and many researchers have attempted to exploit it, the technology has been limited by the low quality of the material. By semiconductor industry standards, the material is considered to be defective.
But researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara, who began exploring thin-film tunable dielectrics using sputtered material nearly two decades ago, are now trying to leverage advanced and scalable materials deposition techniques like molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to create tunable, high-frequency integrated circuits and devices with high-quality materials that are comparable to modern semiconductor technology.
Last week in San Francisco, Singularity University hosted its first-ever Global Summit. In three days, we heard over 100 science and technology experts give talks in more categories than one human mind can fully process.
Whether you attended the conference and need help making sense of the information or missed it and want a taste of the action, I’ve collected Singularity Hub articles on some of the major themes to give you takeaways from the event.
If you’re curious for a look inside the conference, you can watch:
As technology and innovation move faster and faster, concerns over ownership and access continue to increase. In answer to a question at a Singularity University event, Ray Kurzweil suggested we need to rethink intellectual property laws to more realistically match today’s pace.
Intellectual property laws from the 19th century were envisioned with roughly 20-year cycles, he said, which was enough to give you a head-start on a new idea or invention and attract funding to see it through. But how relevant is a 20-year cycle today when a generation of technology can come and go in a year—and even that is set to speed up?
Attracting investment and capital is a critical function of intellectual property law. But the way things are currently structured, intellectual property laws are falling behind the pace of invention.
Elon Musk has recently hinted that he may be working on a “neural lace,” a mesh of electronics that will allow AI and the brain to work together. This could help human brains keep up with future enhancements in AI.
There’s no doubt that Elon Musk is one busy individual. When not playing on the Tesla factory floor, he may be bringing electric roofs to electric vehicles, or dreaming up the Hyperloop, or toying with the future of AI.
If not any of those, he is apparently busy protecting us from being treated like house pets after the Singularity. To that end, the billionaire polymath has revealed he may be working on something called a “neural lace.”
