TEMPO will study pollutants like asthma-inducing nitrogen dioxide and cancer-causing formaldehyde.
A new space instrument called TEMPO will target North America’s air pollution problem, and highlights one of its big challenges.
Continue reading “NASA and Other Agencies Have a New Pollution Eye in the Sky” »
😗 I am actually pretty happy about this because full automation will simply life rather than needing as much education the AI can do most of the work much like the star trek computer. Full automation will allow for more freedom even from common tasks allowing the AI to most of the thinking and tasks.
A senior developer tested GPT4 for programming. GPT4 gave the Terraform script code for a single instance of the Fargate API. GPT4 knows that the code will not scale to 10,000 requests per second. It then describes how to create an auto-scaling group and make the modifications to scale the code with AWS and configure the application load balancer.
GPT-4 is here, and you’ve probably heard a good bit about it already. It’s a smarter, faster, more powerful engine for AI programs such as ChatGPT. It can turn a hand-sketched design into a functional website and help with your taxes. It got a 5 on the AP Art History test. There were already fears about AI coming for white-collar work, disrupting education, and so much else, and there was some healthy skepticism about those fears. So where does a more powerful AI leave us?
Perhaps overwhelmed or even tired, depending on your leanings. I feel both at once. It’s hard to argue that new large language models, or LLMs, aren’t a genuine engineering feat, and it’s exciting to experience advancements that feel magical, even if they’re just computational. But nonstop hype around a technology that is still nascent risks grinding people down because being constantly bombarded by promises of a future that will look very little like the past is both exhausting and unnerving. Any announcement of a technological achievement at the scale of OpenAI’s newest model inevitably sidesteps crucial questions—ones that simply don’t fit neatly into a demo video or blog post. What does the world look like when GPT-4 and similar models are embedded into everyday life? And how are we supposed to conceptualize these technologies at all when we’re still grappling with their still quite novel, but certainly less powerful, predecessors, including ChatGPT?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve put questions like these to AI researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, and people who are currently building AI applications. I’ve become obsessive about trying to wrap my head around this moment, because I’ve rarely felt less oriented toward a piece of technology than I do toward generative AI. When reading headlines and academic papers or simply stumbling into discussions between researchers or boosters on Twitter, even the near future of an AI-infused world feels like a mirage or an optical illusion. Conversations about AI quickly veer into unfocused territory and become kaleidoscopic, broad, and vague. How could they not?
Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.
From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when it finally came out in 1976, did not look like a best-seller. But sell it did. It was reviewed in science magazines and psychology journals, Time, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978. New editions continued to come out, as Jaynes went on the lecture circuit. Jaynes died of a stroke in 1997; his book lived on. In 2000, another new edition hit the shelves. It continues to sell today.
Recorded on February 10th, 2023.
Historian Stephen Kotkin became the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2022. He taught at Princeton for more than 30 years, and is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his biography of Joseph Stalin, Paradoxes of Power, 1,878 to 1928 and Waiting for Hitler, 1929 to 1941. He is now completing the third and final volume. Since the war in Ukraine broke out a year ago, Kotkin has appeared regularly on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to offer his unique perspective on the Russian aggression and answer five questions for us. This is the third installment.
Continue reading “A Historian of the Future: Five More Questions for Stephen Kotkin” »
Year 2022 😗😁
For decades we have dreamed of true holographic displays for entertainment, communication, and education. Star Wars had 3D projections rendered in real-time — the definition wasn’t great, but they were communicating across interplanetary distances — and Avatar had holographic maps showcasing the terrain of Pandora. In reality, we mostly have 2D images which show dimension and depth when viewed from different angles. That might be on the verge of changing.
Pierre-Alexandre Blanche from the Wyant College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona recently published a paper in Light: Advanced Manufacturing which acts as a roadmap toward true 3D holographic displays.
Continue reading “3D holographic televisions are much closer than a galaxy far, far away” »
Human Cyborg — We’ve all seen Cyborgs in Hollywood blockbusters. But it turns out these fictional beings aren’t so far-fetched.
Human Cyborg (2020)
Director: Jacquelyn Marker.
Writers: Kyle McCabe, Christopher Webb Young.
Stars: Justin Abernethy, Robert Armiger, John Donoghue.
Genre: Documentary.
Country: United States.
Language: English.
Also Known As: Cyborg Revolution.
Release Date: 2020 (United States)
Continue reading “Human Cyborg | Documentary | Transhumanism | Neuroscience” »
Algorithms are complex mathematical formulas used to perform tasks in our digital world. They are programmed to process information, make decisions, and take actions. Algorithms are used in various applications, such as search engines, social media, autonomous vehicles, and digital assistants.
But not all algorithms are innocent. Some algorithms have a sinister #scary side that poses a threat to our privacy, our freedom, and our humanity… #aiscarystories #aihorrorstories #scarystories #scarystory #horrorstories #horrorstory #realstories #realhorrorstories #realscarystories #truestories #truestory #creapystories #AIScarystory #AIHorror #artificialintelligence #scaryai #scaryartificialintelligence #trueaiscarystories #truescarystories.
Continue reading “Sinister Algorithms: The dark side of our future” »
Top universities are finally bringing the excitement of the quantum future into the classroom.
Dr. Emily Rice, an Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the Macaulay Honors College of CUNY and resident research associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), is one of the keynote speakers at the TEDxCUNY conference to be hosted on March 10, 2023.
Dr. Rice is extremely involved in the scientific community through her role as a researcher and professor. Dr. Rice co-founded the research group Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC) with Dr. Kelle Cruz from CUNY Hunter College and Dr. Jackie Faherty from AMNH. Brown Dwarfs are objects that have masses between giant exoplanets and low mass stars. Dr. Rice explained there was a lot about Brown Dwarfs that scientists were yet to explore and understand.
“The three of us started this research group following a small project we had collaborated on,” Dr. Rice said. In 2010, Dr. Cruz had started their work with Hunter College, Dr. Rice was wrapping up her postdoctoral work, and Dr. Faherty was finishing up graduate school. “We all happened to be in New York City at the time, and we were all working with Brown Dwarfs, so we decided to create a research group focused on these substellar objects,” Dr. Rice remarked.
