The electron is the basic unit of electricity, as it carries a single negative charge. This is what we’re taught in high school physics, and it is overwhelmingly the case in most materials in nature.
But in very special states of matter, electrons can splinter into fractions of their whole. This phenomenon, known as “fractional charge,” is exceedingly rare, and if it can be corralled and controlled, the exotic electronic state could help to build resilient, fault-tolerant quantum computers.
To date, this effect, known to physicists as the “fractional quantum Hall effect,” has been observed a handful of times, and mostly under very high, carefully maintained magnetic fields. Only recently have scientists seen the effect in a material that did not require such powerful magnetic manipulation.
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, in collaboration with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Cosmic Future Initiative at the Faculty of Arts & Science, present Geoffrey Hinton on October 27, 2023, at the University of Toronto.
0:00:00 — 0:07:20 Opening remarks and introduction. 0:07:21 — 0:08:43 Overview. 0:08:44 — 0:20:08 Two different ways to do computation. 0:20:09 — 0:30:11 Do large language models really understand what they are saying? 0:30:12 — 0:49:50 The first neural net language model and how it works. 0:49:51 — 0:57:24 Will we be able to control super-intelligence once it surpasses our intelligence? 0:57:25 — 1:03:18 Does digital intelligence have subjective experience? 1:03:19 — 1:55:36 Q&A 1:55:37 — 1:58:37 Closing remarks.
Talk title: “Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?”
Abstract: Digital computers were designed to allow a person to tell them exactly what to do. They require high energy and precise fabrication, but in return they allow exactly the same model to be run on physically different pieces of hardware, which makes the model immortal. For computers that learn what to do, we could abandon the fundamental principle that the software should be separable from the hardware and mimic biology by using very low power analog computation that makes use of the idiosynchratic properties of a particular piece of hardware. This requires a learning algorithm that can make use of the analog properties without having a good model of those properties. Using the idiosynchratic analog properties of the hardware makes the computation mortal. When the hardware dies, so does the learned knowledge. The knowledge can be transferred to a younger analog computer by getting the younger computer to mimic the outputs of the older one but education is a slow and painful process. By contrast, digital computation makes it possible to run many copies of exactly the same model on different pieces of hardware. Thousands of identical digital agents can look at thousands of different datasets and share what they have learned very efficiently by averaging their weight changes. That is why chatbots like GPT-4 and Gemini can learn thousands of times more than any one person. Also, digital computation can use the backpropagation learning procedure which scales much better than any procedure yet found for analog hardware. This leads me to believe that large-scale digital computation is probably far better at acquiring knowledge than biological computation and may soon be much more intelligent than us. The fact that digital intelligences are immortal and did not evolve should make them less susceptible to religion and wars, but if a digital super-intelligence ever wanted to take control it is unlikely that we could stop it, so the most urgent research question in AI is how to ensure that they never want to take control.
About Geoffrey Hinton.
Geoffrey Hinton received his PhD in artificial intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978. After five years as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon he became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he is now an emeritus professor. In 2013, Google acquired Hinton’s neural networks startup, DNN research, which developed out of his research at U of T. Subsequently, Hinton was a Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google until 2023. He is a founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence where he continues to serve as Chief Scientific Adviser.
This timelapse of future technology begins with 2 Starships, launched to resupply the International Space Station. But how far into the future do you want to go?
Tesla Bots will be sent to work on the Moon, and A.I. chat bots will guide people into dreams that they can control (lucid dreams). And what happens when humanity forms a deeper understanding of dark energy, worm holes, and black holes. What type of new technologies could this advanced knowledge develop? Could SpaceX launch 100 Artificial Intelligence Starships, spread across our Solar System and beyond into Interstellar space, working together to form a cosmic internet, creating the Encyclopedia of the Galaxy. Could Einstein’s equations lead to technologies in teleportation, and laboratory grown black holes.
Other topics covered in this sci-fi documentary video include: the building of super projects made possible by advancing fusion energy, the possibilities of brain chips, new age space technology and spacecraft such as a hover bike developed for the Moon in 2050, Mars colonization, and technology predictions based on black holes, biotechnology, and when will humanity become a Kardashev Type 1, and then Type 2 Civilization.
To see more of Venture City and to access the ‘The Future Archive Files’…
• Timelapse of Future Technology (Master List) • Encyclopedia of the Future (Entries)
Title: Metacognition: ideas and insights from neuro-and educational sciences See… https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-021-00089-5 Abstract: Metacognition comprises both the ability to be aware of one’s cognitive processes (metacognitive knowledge) and to regulate them (metacognitive control)…
Fleur, D.S., Bredeweg, B. & van den Bos, W. Metacognition: ideas and insights from neuro-and educational sciences. npj Sci. Learn.6, 13 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-021-00089-5
This is a sci-fi documentary, looking at how warp drive technology and warp spaceships work. As well as the negative energy needed to travel at warp speed. The faster than light journey to Mars takes 18.6 seconds, but how long does it take to reach the nearest black hole?
It is a journey showing the future science of space travel, exploration, and future space technology.
Personal inspiration in creating this video comes from: Star Trek: The Next Generation, and baby Groot — Guardians of the Galaxy II.
PATREON The first volume of ‘The Encyclopedia of the Future’ is available on my Patreon.
Along with: Timelapse of Future Technology (Master List)
SpaceX launched an environmental research satellite for NASA early Thursday, a nearly $1 billion spacecraft that survived multiple cancellation threats and is now poised to shed new light on climate change and the complex interplay of heat-trapping carbon, aerosols and sea life on global scales.
The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission — PACE — “will dramatically advance our understanding of the relationship between aerosols and clouds, and the global energy balance,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth sciences division. “This is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in our ability to model the climate.”
She said PACE is “going to teach us about the oceans in the same way that Webb (the James Webb Space Telescope) is teaching us about the cosmos.” And that includes “a tremendous amount about ocean biology.”
