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Category: futurism – Page 605

Facebook Bug Causes Users’ Feeds to Be Spammed

Facebook suffered a bug leading to users’ feeds being spammed with posts from strangers on the pages of celebrities on the site earlier today.

The social media platform’s parent company Meta blamed the problem on a “configuration change” in a statement to Metro.co.uk, adding: “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

The technical glitch meant that when anyone posted a comment on a celebrity’s page, it appeared on the feed of anyone who followed that celebrity. This issue reportedly began at around 6.30 am BST on Wednesday, August 24.

Moving Worlds and Earth as a Rogue Planet

An exploration of the option of moving planets through gravitational migration and the idea of Earth getting ejected from the solar system and wander the galaxy as a rogue planet, perhaps to be captured by another star in the far future.

My new clips and live channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwwuMqY1SXZhTB5hIFFUmlg.

My Patreon Page:

https://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgodier.

My Event Horizon Channel:

Continue reading “Moving Worlds and Earth as a Rogue Planet” | >

Artificial Intelligence “Megatron” Scared Scientists With Its Predictions

A recent debate at Oxford University has convinced scientists that artificial intelligence is worth considering. The computer was asked about its views on the future, and whether AI’s emergence is ethical.

The AI that answered the questions is called Megatron and was created by a team at Nvidia. Megatron’s head contains all of Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles, and 38 gigabytes of Reddit chat.

This information helped him form his opinion. Participants also participated in the discussion. Megatron responded to their statements that they don’t believe that AI will have an ethical future, in a way that terrified those present.

William MacAskill: ‘There are 80 trillion people yet to come. They need us to start protecting them’

All those numbers seem incalculably abstract but, according to the moral philosopher William MacAskill, they should command our attention. He is a proponent of what’s known as longtermism – the view that the deep future is something we have to address now. How long we last as a species and what kind of state of wellbeing we achieve, says MacAskill, may have a lot to do with what decisions we make and actions we take at the moment and in the foreseeable future.

That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of his new book, What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View. The Dutch historian and writer Rutger Bregman calls the book’s publication “a monumental event”, while the US neuroscientist Sam Harris says that “no living philosopher has had a greater impact” upon his ethics.

We tend to think of moral philosophers as whiskery sages, but MacAskill is a youthful 35 and a disarmingly informal character in person, or rather on a Zoom call from San Francisco, where he is promoting the book.

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