I had an amazing experience at the Foresight Institute’s Whole-Brain Emulation (WBE) Workshop at a venue near Oxford! For more information and a list of participants, see: https://foresight.org/whole-brain-emulation-workshop-2023/ I had the opportunity to work within a group of some of the most brilliant, ambitious, and visionary people I’ve ever encountered on the quest for recreating the human brain in a computer. We also discussed in depth the existential risks of upcoming artificial superintelligence and how to mitigate these risks, perhaps with the aid of WBE.
My subgroup focused on exploring the challenge of human connectomics (mapping all of the neurons and synapses in the brain).
WBE is a potential technology to generate software intelligence that is human-aligned simply by being based directly on human brains. Generally past discussions have assumed a fairly long timeline to WBE, while past AGI timelines had broad uncertainty. There were also concerns that the neuroscience of WBE might boost AGI capability development without helping safety, although no consensus did develop. Recently many people have updated their AGI timelines towards earlier development, raising safety concerns. That has led some people to consider whether WBE development could be significantly speeded up, producing a differential technology development re-ordering of technology arrival that might lessen the risk of unaligned AGI by the presence of aligned software intelligence.
Tanzania has a lot of mineral respources I have all geological maps of Tanzania to prove it. Tanzania also found huge lithium deposits and many are scrambling for them. One thing Musk can do is buy companies to gain competitive advantage.
Dar es Salaam. Tesla, the American multinational automotive, artificial intelligence and clean energy company, has signed an agreement under which it will purchase Anode Active Material (AAM) from Tanzania.
A new study shows that areas of the brain that are responsible for movement are also connected to networks involved in thinking and planning, as well as the control of involuntary bodily actions.
A team of oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, working with a colleague from Chungnam National University and another from the University of Hawaii, has mapped 19,000 previously unknown undersea volcanoes in the world’s oceans using radar satellite data. In their paper published in the journal Earth and Space Science, the group describes how they used radar satellite data to measure seawater mounding to find and map undersea volcanoes and explains why it is important that it be done.
The ocean floor, like dry land masses, features a wide variety of terrain. And as with dry land, features that truly stand out are mountains—in the ocean they are called seamounts. And as on land, they can be created by tectonic plates pushing against one another, or by volcanos erupting. Currently, just one-fourth of the sea floor has been mapped, which means that no one knows how many seamounts exist, or where they might be. This can be a problem for submarines—twice U.S. submarines have collided with seamounts, putting such vehicles and their crew at risk. But not knowing where the seamounts are located presents another problem. It prevents oceanographers from creating models depicting the flow of oceanwater around the world.
In this new effort, the research team set themselves the task of discovering and mapping as many seamounts as possible, and to do it, they used data from radar satellites. Such satellites cannot actually see the seamounts, of course, instead they measure the altitude of the sea surface, which changes due to changes in gravitational pull related to seafloor topography; an effect known as sea mounding. In so doing, they found 19,000 previously unknown seamounts.
The deployment of his spy ships is chilling. Britain is far from ready to counter whatever he has planned.
For a long time it was only speculation. Now we know for certain: Russian spy ships are mapping wind farms and key cables off the British coast. There can be only one reason for this – to learn how to sabotage UK and European critical infrastructure in the event of a full-scale war with the West.
The sobering truth is that our potential adversaries, Russia in the West and China in the East, are gearing up for wider conflict. That does not mean that conflict will happen –preparation makes it less likely – but we must urgently recognise the extent of the threat to the current order. Our world is becoming markedly more dangerous. And Britain is not ready.
First observed in liquid helium below the lambda point, superfluidity manifests itself in a number of fascinating ways. In the superfluid phase, helium can creep up along the walls of a container, boil without bubbles, or even flow without friction around obstacles. As early as 1938, Fritz London suggested a link between superfluidity and Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC)3. Indeed, superfluidity is now known to be related to the finite amount of energy needed to create collective excitations in the quantum liquid4,5,6,7, and the link proposed by London was further evidenced by the observation of superfluidity in ultracold atomic BECs1,8. A quantitative description is given by the Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation9,10 (see Methods) and the perturbation theory for elementary excitations developed by Bogoliubov11. First derived for atomic condensates, this theory has since been successfully applied to a variety of systems, and the mathematical framework of the GP equation naturally leads to important analogies between BEC and nonlinear optics12,13,14. Recently, it has been extended to include condensates out of thermal equilibrium, like those composed of interacting photons or bosonic quasiparticles such as microcavity exciton-polaritons and magnons14,15. In particular, for exciton-polaritons, the observation of many-body effects related to condensation and superfluidity such as the excitation of quantized vortices, the formation of metastable currents and the suppression of scattering from potential barriers2,16,17,18,19,20 have shown the rich phenomenology that exists within non-equilibrium condensates. Polaritons are confined to two dimensions and the reduced dimensionality introduces an additional element of interest for the topological ordering mechanism leading to condensation, as recently evidenced in ref. 21. However, until now, such phenomena have mainly been observed in microcavities embedding quantum wells of III–V or II–VI semiconductors. As a result, experiments must be performed at low temperatures (below ∼ 20 K), beyond which excitons autoionize. This is a consequence of the low binding energy typical of Wannier–Mott excitons. Frenkel excitons, which are characteristic of organic semiconductors, possess large binding energies that readily allow for strong light–matter coupling and the formation of polaritons at room temperature. Remarkably, in spite of weaker interactions as compared to inorganic polaritons22, condensation and the spontaneous formation of vortices have also been observed in organic microcavities23,24,25. However, the small polariton–polariton interaction constants, structural inhomogeneity and short lifetimes in these structures have until now prevented the observation of behaviour directly related to the quantum fluid dynamics (such as superfluidity). In this work, we show that superfluidity can indeed be achieved at room temperature and this is, in part, a result of the much larger polariton densities attainable in organic microcavities, which compensate for their weaker nonlinearities.
Our sample consists of an optical microcavity composed of two dielectric mirrors surrounding a thin film of 2,7-Bis[9,9-di(4-methylphenyl)-fluoren-2-yl]-9,9-di(4-methylphenyl)fluorene (TDAF) organic molecules. Light–matter interaction in this system is so strong that it leads to the formation of hybrid light–matter modes (polaritons), with a Rabi energy 2 ΩR ∼ 0.6 eV. A similar structure has been used previously to demonstrate polariton condensation under high-energy non-resonant excitation24. Upon resonant excitation, it allows for the injection and flow of polaritons with a well-defined density, polarization and group velocity.
