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We invented wheels and compasses and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and the eames lounge chair and penicillin and e = mc2 and beer that comes in six-packs and guns and dildos and the Pet Rock and Doggles (eyewear for dogs) and square watermelons. One small step for man. We came up with the Lindy Hop and musical toothbrushes and mustard gas and glow-in-the-dark Band-Aids and paper and the microscope and baconfucking bacon!and Christmas. Ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-ko-ssa. We went to the bottom of the ocean and into orbit. We sucked energy from the sun and fertilizer from the air. Let there be light. We created the most amazing pink flamingo lawn ornaments that come in packs of two and only cost $9.99!

In a universe that stretches an estimated 93 billion light-years in diameter with 700 quintillion (7 followed by 20 zeros) planetshere, on this tiny little blue dot we call Earth, one of us created a tool called a spork. The most astounding part is that while that same universe is an estimated 26.7 billion years old, we did everything in just under 6,000 years.

All of this in less than 200 generations of human life.

Now weve just created a new machine that is made of billions of microscopic transistors and aluminum and copper wires that zigzag and twist and turn and are interconnected in incomprehensible ways. A machine that is only a few centimeters in width and length.

A little tiny machine that may end up being the last invention humans ever create.

This all stems from an idea conceptualized in the 1940s and finally figured out a few years ago. That could solve all of the worlds problems or destroy every single human on the planet in the snap of a fingeror both. Machines that will potentially answer all of our unanswerable questions: Are we alone in the universe? What is consciousness? Why are we here? Thinking machines that could cure cancer and allow us to live until were 150 years old. Maybe even 200. Machines that, some estimate, could take over up to 30 percent of all jobs within the next decade, from stock traders to truck drivers to accountants and telemarketers, lawyers, bookkeepers, and all things creative: actors, writers, musicians, painters. Something that will go to war for usand likely against us.

Artificial intelligence.

Thinking machines that are being built in a 50-square-mile speck of dirt we call Silicon Valley by a few hundred men (and a handful of women) who write in a language only they and computers can speak. And whether we understand what it is they are doing or not, we are largely left to the whims of their creation. We dont have a say in the ethics behind their invention. We dont have a say over whether it should even exist in the first place. Were creating God, one AI engineer working on large language models (LLMs) recently told me. Were creating conscious machines.

Already, weve seen creative AIs that can paint and draw in any style imaginable in mere seconds. LLMs can write stories in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Bugs Bunny or the King James Bible while youre drunk with peanut butter stuck in your mouth. Platforms that can construct haikus or help finish a novel or write a screenplay. Weve got customizable porn, where you can pick a womans breast size or sexual position in any settingincluding with you. Theres voice AI software that can take just a few seconds of anyones voice and completely re-create an almost indistinguishable replica of them saying something new. Theres AI that can re-create music by your favorite musician. Dont believe me? Go and listen to Not Johnny Cash singing Barbie Girl, Freddie Mercury intoning Thriller, or Frank Sinatra bellowing Livin on a Prayer to see just how terrifying all of this is.

Then theres the new drug discovery. People using AI therapists instead of humans. Others are uploading voicemails from loved ones who have died so they can continue to interact with them by talking to an AI replica of a dead parent or child. There are AI dating apps (yes, you date an AI partner). Its being used for misinformation in politics already, creating deepfake videos and fake audio recordings. The US military is exploring using AI in warfareand could eventually create autonomous killer robots. (Nothing to worry about here!) People are discussing using AI to create entirely new species of animals (yes, thats real) or viruses (also real). Or exploring human characteristics, such as creating a breed of super soldiers who are stronger and have less empathy, all through AI-based genetic engineering.

And weve adopted all of these technologies with staggering speedmost of which have been realized in just under six months.

It excites me and worries me in equal proportions. The upsides for this are enormous, maybe these systems find cures for diseases, and solutions to problems like poverty and climate change, and those are enormous upsides, said David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at NYU. The downsides are humans that are displaced from leading the way, or in the worst case, extinguished entirely, [which] is terrifying. As one highly researched economist report circulated last month noted, There is a more than 50-50 chance AI will wipe out all of humanity by the middle of the century. Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, predicts a 50 percent chance of demise within the next 100 years. Others dont put our chances so low. In July, a group of researchers, including experts in nuclear war, bioweapons, AI, and extinction, and a group of superforecastersgeneral-purpose prognosticatorsdid their own math. The experts deduced that there was a 20 percent chance of a catastrophe by 2100 and a 6 percent chance of an extinction-like event from AI, while the superforecasters had a more positive augury of a 9 percent chance of catastrophe and only 1 percent chance wed be wiped off the planet.

It feels a little like picking the extinction lottery numbersand even with a 1 percent chance, perhaps we should be asking ourselves if this new invention is worth the risk. Yet the question circulating around Silicon Valley isnt if such a scenario is worth it, even with a 1 percent chance of annihilation, but rather, if it is really such a bad thing if we build a machine that changes human life as we know it.

Larry Page is not an intimidating-looking man. When he speaks, his voice is so soft and raspy from a vocal cord injury, it sounds like a campfire that is trying to tell you something. The last time I shook his hand, many, many years ago, it felt as soft as a bar of soap. While his industry peers, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, are often performing public somersaults with pom-poms for attention, Page, who cofounded Google and is on the board of Alphabet, hasnt done a single public interview since 2015, when he was onstage at a conference. In 2018, when Page was called before the Senate Intelligence Committee to address Russian election meddling, online privacy, and political bias on tech platforms, his chair sat empty as senators grilled his counterparts.

While Page stays out of the limelight, he still enjoys attending dinners and waxing poetic about technology and philosophy. A few years ago a friend found himself seated next to Page at one such dinner, and he relayed a story to me: Page was talking about the progression of technology and how it was inevitable that humans would eventually create superintelligent machines, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), which are computers that are smarter than humans, and in Pages view, once that happened, those machines would quickly find no use for us humans, and they would simply get rid of us.

What do you mean, get rid of us? my friend asked Page.

Like a sci-fi writer delivering a pitch for their new apocalyptic story idea, Page explained that these robots would become far superior to us very quickly, and if we were no longer needed on earth and thats the natural order of thingsand I quoteits just the next step in evolution. At first my friend assumed Page was joking. Im serious, said Page. When my friend argued that this was a really fucked up way of thinking about the world, Page grew annoyed and accused him of being specist.

Over the years, Ive heard a few other people relay stories like this about Page. While being interviewed on Fox News earlier this year, Musk was one of them. He explained that he used to be close with Page but they no longer talked after a debate in which Page called Musk specist too. My perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough, Musk said. He really seems to want digital superintelligence, basically digital God, if you will, as soon as possible.

All of the people LEADING THE DEVELOPMENT OF AI right now are COMPLETELY DISINGENUOUS in public.

Lets just stop for a moment and unpack this. Larry Pagethe founder of one of the worlds biggest companiesa company that employs thousands of engineers that are building artificial intelligence machines right now, as you read thisbelieves that AI will, and should, become so smart and so powerful and so formidable andandthat one day it wont need us dumb pathetic little humans anymoreand it will, and it should, GET RID OF US!

See the article here:

Artificial Intelligence May Be Humanity's Most Ingenious Invention ... - Vanity Fair

The feel of a cat's fur can reveal some information, but seeing the feline provides critical details: is it a housecat or a lion? While the sound of fire crackling may be ambiguous, its scent confirms the burning wood. Our senses synergize to give a comprehensive understanding, particularly when individual signals are subtle. The collective sum of biological inputs can be greater than their individual contributions. Robots tend to follow more straightforward addition, but Penn State researchers have now harnessed the biological concept for application in artificial intelligence (AI) to develop the first artificial, multisensory integrated neuron.

Led by Saptarshi Das, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, the team published their work on September 15 in Nature Communication.

"Robots make decisions based on the environment they are in, but their sensors do not generally talk to each other," said Das, who also has joint appointments in electrical engineering and in materials science and engineering. "A collective decision can be made through a sensor processing unit, but is that the most efficient or effective method? In the human brain, one sense can influence another and allow the person to better judge a situation."

For instance, a car might have one sensor scanning for obstacles, while another senses darkness to modulate the intensity of the headlights. Individually, these sensors relay information to a central unit which then instructs the car to brake or adjust the headlights. According to Das, this process consumes more energy. Allowing sensors to communicate directly with each other can be more efficient in terms of energy and speed -- particularly when the inputs from both are faint.

"Biology enables small organisms to thrive in environments with limited resources, minimizing energy consumption in the process," said Das, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Institute. "The requirements for different sensors are based on the context -- in a dark forest, you'd rely more on listening than seeing, but we don't make decisions based on just one sense. We have a complete sense of our surroundings, and our decision making is based on the integration of what we're seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, etcetera. The senses evolved together in biology, but separately in AI. In this work, we're looking to combine sensors and mimic how our brains actually work."

The team focused on integrating a tactile sensor and a visual sensor so that the output of one sensor modifies the other, with the help of visual memory. According to Muhtasim Ul Karim Sadaf, a third-year doctoral student in engineering science and mechanics, even a short-lived flash of light can significantly enhance the chance of successful movement through a dark room.

"This is because visual memory can subsequently influence and aid the tactile responses for navigation," Sadaf said. "This would not be possible if our visual and tactile cortex were to respond to their respective unimodal cues alone. We have a photo memory effect, where light shines and we can remember. We incorporated that ability into a device through a transistor that provides the same response."

The researchers fabricated the multisensory neuron by connecting a tactile sensor to a phototransistor based on a monolayer of molybdenum disulfide, a compound that exhibits unique electrical and optical characteristics useful for detecting light and supporting transistors. The sensor generates electrical spikes in a manner reminiscent of neurons processing information, allowing it to integrate both visual and tactile cues.

It's the equivalent of seeing an "on" light on the stove and feeling heat coming off of a burner -- seeing the light on doesn't necessarily mean the burner is hot yet, but a hand only needs to feel a nanosecond of heat before the body reacts and pulls the hand away from the potential danger. The input of light and heat triggered signals that induced the hand's response. In this case, the researchers measured the artificial neuron's version of this by seeing signaling outputs resulted from visual and tactile input cues.

To simulate touch input, the tactile sensor used triboelectric effect, in which two layers slide against one another to produce electricity, meaning the touch stimuli was encoded into electrical impulses. To simulate visual input, the researchers shined a light into the monolayer molybdenum disulfide photo memtransistor -- or a transistor that can remember visual input, like how a person can hold onto the general layout of a room after a quick flash illuminates it.

They found that the sensory response of the neuron -- simulated as electrical output -- increased when both visual and tactile signals were weak.

"Interestingly, this effect resonates remarkably well with its biological counterpart -- a visual memory naturally enhances the sensitivity to tactile stimulus," said co-first author Najam U Sakib, a third-year doctoral student in engineering science and mechanics. "When cues are weak, you need to combine them to better understand the information, and that's what we saw in the results."

Das explained that an artificial multisensory neuron system could enhance sensor technology's efficiency, paving the way for more eco-friendly AI uses. As a result, robots, drones and self-driving vehicles could navigate their environment more effectively while using less energy.

"The super additive summation of weak visual and tactile cues is the key accomplishment of our research," said co-author Andrew Pannone, a fourth-year doctoral student in engineering science and mechanics. "For this work, we only looked into two senses. We're working to identify the proper scenario to incorporate more senses and see what benefits they may offer."

Harikrishnan Ravichandran, a fourth-year doctoral student in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, also co-authored this paper.

The Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation supported this work.

Read more:

Making AI smarter with an artificial, multisensory integrated neuron - Science Daily

Elon Musk

Widespread access to worlds richest man allowed biographer Walter Isaacson to detail a number of illuminating anecdotes

Tue 12 Sep 2023 08.26 EDT

A new biography of Elon Musk was published on Tuesday and contains colourful details of the life of the worlds richest man.

Musk afforded widespread access to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the author of the bestselling biography of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and the book contains a series of illuminating anecdotes about Musk. Here are eight things we learned from the book.

Musk, 52, was born and raised in South Africa and endured a fraught relationship with his father, Errol, an engineer. Isaacson writes that Errol bedevils Elon.

Musks brother, Kimbal, says the worst memory of his life was watching Errol berate Musk after he was hospitalised after a fight at school (the book says Musk was still getting corrective surgery for the injuries decades later). My father just lost it, says Kimbal.

Musk and Kimbal, who are estranged from their father, describe Errol as a volatile fabulist. Interviewed by Isaacson, Errol admits he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness in his sons.

Grimes, the artist who is mother to three of his 10 children, says PTSD from Musks childhood shaped an aversion to contentment: I just dont think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers. Musk tells Isaacson he agrees: Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high.

Shortly before taking over Twitter, or X as it is now called, Musk told Isaacson that the woke mind virus a derogatory term for progressive politics and culture would prevent extraplanetary settlement (one of Musks fixations).

Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary, said Musk.

Musk fired Twitters executive team as soon as he completed the takeover of Twitter in October last year and it had been coming. When Musk bought a significant stake in Twitter months before, he agreed to meet the CEO, Parag Agrawal. After the meeting, Musk said: What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon and Parag is not that.

They soon fell out. Agrawal texted Musk to say his tweet asking if Twitter was dying was not helpful. Musk, on a break in Hawaii, replied: What did you get done this week? He added: Im not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.

This was during discussions about Musk joining the board. Agrawals reply underlined the power imbalance, and Twitters fear of Musk. He texted: Can we talk? Musk soon lodged an official bid for Twitter, which he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out of, but the die was cast for Agrawal and his colleagues.

The founder and CEO of the fallen cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, offered via his banker to put $5bn (4.1bn) into the Twitter takeover, the book claims. Bankman-Friedalso wanted to discuss putting Twitter on a blockchain the technological underpinning for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

A subsequent call between Musk and Bankman-Fried in May 2022 went badly, Isaacson wrote. My bullshit detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter, Musk is quoted as saying.

Bankman-Frieds offer to invest or to roll over $100m of Twitter stock that he claimed he had invested, came to nothing.

In his early tycoon career, Musk pondered recruiting the then mayor of New York as a political fixer to help him turn his PayPal business into a bank in 2001. Musk sought a meeting with Giuliani, then coming to the end of his tenure in office, because he wanted to turn PayPal an online payments company into a social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry.

In 2001, Musk and an investor, Michael Moritz, went to New York to see if they could hire Giuliani to guide them through the process of turning PayPal into a bank. It didnt go well.

It was like walking into a mob scene, Moritz says in the book. Giuliani was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didnt have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.

This guy occupies a different planet, Musk told Moritz.

One of Musks reasons for founding a new artificial intelligence company, xAI, is addressing the threat of population collapse. In one face-to-face conversation with Isaacson, the multi-billionaire said human intelligence was in danger of being surmounted by digital intelligence.

The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was levelling off because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moores law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.

This conversation was conducted at the Austin, Texas house of Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musks Neuralink business who is the mother of two of his children. Zilis told Isaacson she agreed to have children with Musk via IVF after listening to his arguments about having children as a kind of social duty. She said: He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to, she said.

He tells Isaacson that human consciousness is under threat from the prospect of super-intelligent, and uncontrollable, AI systems.

Musk says: What can be done to make AI safe? I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize AI danger and assure that human consciousness survives?

Musks satellite communications unit, Starlink, has a key role in Ukraines defence against the Russian invasion. When a Russian cyber-attack crippled Ukraines satellite comms network an hour before the invasion, Musk stepped in following an appeal for help from Ukrainian officials and the countrys deputy prime minister.

However, the book alleges that Musk told his engineers to turn off Starlink coverage that would have facilitated an attack by drone submarines on Russias navy at the Sevastopol base in Crimea.

However, Isaacson has subsequently clarified this excerpt after Musk used his X platform to state that there was no Starlink coverage in that area and he refused a Ukrainian request to activate it. Musk posted: If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is published by Simon & Schuster. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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See the original post:

Eight things we learned from the Elon Musk biography - The Guardian