Are we alone in our sector of the cosmos? Do sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena herald an alien invasion?The declassification of US military footage has rekindled a fiery feud – but before committing to a position in this debate, how can we assess the likelihood (given the existing evidence), that we are being visited by…
An interesting new series ‘The Age of A.I.’ narrated by Robert Downey Jr. – this first episode looks at how AI’s interact with humans ‘Affective Computing’ using object recognition, NLP attempting to simulate human emotion, digital avatars which work like agents for us – similar to John M. Smart’s idea of a digital twin (I…
What is the replication crisis in science? What does it mean for public trust in science? Martin Bush will discuss these issues as well as the repliCATS project as a response to the replication crisis. Agenda: 5.30 – Meet, great, and eat.. pub food – it’s actually not bad! Feel free to come early to…
Introduction Overview The event will address a variety of topics futurology (i.e. accelerating change & long term futures, existential risk, philosophy, transhumanism & ‘the posthuman’) in general though it will have a special focus on Machine Understanding. How will we operate along side artificial agents that increasingly ‘understand’ us, and important aspects of the world…
Cancelling the Apocalypse – Why do civilizations collapse? And is our own civilization ripe for collapse? 2:19 Are we on the road to civilizational collapse? 11:01 Why we need global governance, not global government 18:20 The double-edged sword of civilizational complexity 24:11 The apocalyptic scenario Bob fears most 42:01 Luke: Not every problem has a…
Sam Altman leaves role as president at YCombinator and joins OpenAI as CEO – why? Elon Musk created OpenAI to to ensure that artificial intelligence, especially powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI), is “developed in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity,” – it’s an interesting bet – because AGI doesn’t exist yet…
“When telomeres get really short that could lead to a dna damage signal and cause cells to undergo a phenomenon called ‘replicative senescence’…where cells can secrete things that are not necessarily very good for you..” Why is it that immune cells don’t work as well in older age? Listen to the interview here Jerry and…
Interview on whether machines can be conscious with Scott Aaronson, theoretical computer scientist and David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of research are quantum computing and computational complexity theory. Scott blogged about this and other segments of our interview – his blog…
Interview on quantum computation with Scott Aaronson, theoretical computer scientist and David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of research are quantum computing and computational complexity theory. Scott blogged about this and other segments of our interview – his blog is very popular…
Valence in overview Adam: What is emotional valence (as opposed to valence in chemistry)? Mike: Put simply, emotional valence is how pleasant or unpleasant something is. A somewhat weird fact about our universe is that some conscious experiences do seem to feel better than others. Adam: What makes things feel the way they do?…
