Writing by Sam Denby. Research by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy. Editing by Alexander Williard. Animation by Josh Sherrington. Sound by Graham Haerther. Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster.
“If you accept that meaning is something that emerges from sufficiently complex biological machines, then the only place those machines might exist is here; then it’s correct to say that if this planet weren’t here, we’d live in a meaningless galaxy. That’s different to life. There’s a difference between life and intelligent life.”
Unique events that led to civilisation mean its demise could ‘eliminate meaning in galaxy for ever’.
For the NordVPN special offer, go to https://NordVPN.com/sabine to get a 2-year plan plus 4 additional months with a huge discount.
In this not-quite-serious video I explain what it would take to terraform Mars and make it habitable for humans.
Images at 5 mins 50 seconds are from Dan Barker https://twitter.com/danbarker.
Screenshots at 7 mins 11 seconds are from https://www.themartiangarden.com/
Correction: At 1 minute 44 second it’s the mass that is a tenth that of Earth, not the gravitational pull, which is about 0.4 times that of Earth. The text shows the right numbers. Sorry about that.
Many thanks to Jordi Busqué for helping with this video http://jordibusque.com/
Five hours of audio taken on the Red Plant by the rover Perseverance reveals the thick sounds of wind, the rover’s own tires, and Ingenuity in the distance.
(2021). Nuclear Science and Engineering: Vol. 195 No. 9 pp. 977–989.
Earlier work has demonstrated the theoretical development of covert OT defenses and their application to representative control problems in a nuclear reactor. Given their ability to store information in the system nonobservable space using one-time-pad randomization techniques, the new C2 modeling paradigm6 has emerged allowing the system to build memory or self-awareness about its past and current state. The idea is to store information using randomized mathematical operators about one system subcomponent, e.g., the reactor core inlet and exit temperature, into the nonobservable space of another subcomponent, e.g., the water level in a steam generator, creating an incorruptible record of the system state. If the attackers attempt to falsify the sensor data in an attempt to send the system along an undesirable trajectory, they will have to learn all the inserted signatures across the various system subcomponents and the C2 embedding process.
We posit that this is extremely unlikely given the huge size of the nonobservable space for most complex systems, and the use of randomized techniques for signature insertion, rendering a level of security that matches the Vernam-Cipher gold standard. The Vernam Cipher, commonly known as a one-time pad, is a cipher that encrypts a message using a random key (pad) and can only be decrypted using this key. Its strength is derived from Shannon’s notion of perfect secrecy8 and requires the key to be truly random and nonreusable (one time). To demonstrate this, this paper will validate the implementation of C2 using sophisticated AI tools such as long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks9 and the generative adversarial learning [generative adversarial networks (GANs)] framework,10 both using a supervised learning setting, i.e., by assuming that the AI training phase can distinguish between original data and the data containing the embedded signatures. While this is an unlikely scenario, it is assumed to demonstrate the resilience of the C2 signatures to discovery by AI techniques.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II provides a brief summary of existing passive and active OT defenses against various types of data deception attacks, followed by an overview of the C2 modeling paradigm in Sec. III. Section IV formulates the problem statement of the C2 implementation in a generalized control system and identifies the key criteria of zero impact and zero observability. Section V implements a rendition of the C2 approach in a representative nuclear reactor model and highlights the goal of the paper, i.e., to validate the implementation using sophisticated AI tools. It also provides a rationale behind the chosen AI framework. Last, Sec. VI summarizes the validation results of the C2 implementation and discusses several extensions to the work.
1:42 Are we on the wrong train to AGI? 4:20 Marvin Minsky and AI generalization problem. 11:57 Defining intelligence in AI 17:17 Is AI masquerading as a trendy statistical analysis tool? 23:35 AI systems lack our most basic intuitions. 27:38 The public not wanting to face Reality. 29:36 Equipping AI with Kant’s categories of the mind (Time, Space, Causality) 33:40 Neural nets VS traditional tools. 34:50 Causality in AI 37:14 Lack of interdisciplinary learning. 45:54 How can we achieve human level of understanding in AI? 49:21 More limitations. 59:35 Motivation in inanimate systems. 1:01:31 Lack of body and transcendent consciousness. 1:05:55 What interdisciplinary learning would you encourage? 1:06:49 Book recommendations.
Gary Marcus is CEO and Founder of Robust AI, well-known machine learning scientist and entrepreneur, author, and Professor Emeritus at New York State University.
Dr. Marcus attended Hampshire College, where he designed his own major, cognitive science, working on human reasoning. He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his advisor was the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. He received his Ph.D. in 1993.
His books include The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Guitar Zero, which appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. He edited The Norton Psychology Reader, and was co-editor with Jeremy Freeman of The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientist, which included Nobel Laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. Together with Ernie Davis, he authored Rebooting AI and is well known to deconstruct myths of the AI community.
In 2,014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company. It was acquired by Uber in 2016. In 2,019 he founded Robust AI and acts currently as Robust AI’s CEO.
BEIJING, Oct 18 (Reuters) — China tested a space vehicle in July, not a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile as reported by the Financial Times, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Monday.
Quoting five people familiar with the matter, the Financial Times reported on Saturday that China had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile that flew through space, circling the globe before cruising down toward its target, which it missed by about two dozen miles. read more. The paper said the feat had “caught U.S. intelligence by surprise”.
“It was not a missile, it was a space vehicle,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular press briefing in Beijing when asked about the report, adding it had been a “routine test” for the purpose of testing technology to reuse the vehicle.
A conceptual NASA study explores the idea of a lunar Wi-Fi network to help fix inadequate internet services in American cities, including Cleveland, Ohio.
Massive asteroids — including one the size of the Empire State Building — are predicted to make “close” encounters with Earth in the coming weeks, with one set to whiz by as early as Wednesday night.
The space rock “2004 UE,” which at 1,246 feet is only a few feet shorter than the Midtown skyscraper, will be 2.6 million miles away on Nov. 13.
Of the asteroids headed our way, “1996 VB3” — which has a diameter of about 750 feet — is expected to come closest to Earth, at a distance of only 2.1 million miles, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Objects.
China has unveiled the crew for its Shenzou 13 mission to the country’s brand new Tiangong space station, including the first female astronaut to venture to the outpost, the South China Morning Post reports.
Wang Yaping will spend six months on board the space station — the country’s longest crewed mission to date — alongside astronauts Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu. She could also become the first female Chinese astronaut to complete a spacewalk.
“After eight years of relentless effort, I am going back to space again,” Wang told reporters on Thursday, as quoted by SCMP. “Students, let me know what you want to learn this time. I will prepare a great lecture for you in orbit.”
