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Category: geopolitics – Page 3

It is an unsettling moment. Critics argue the rush to AI comes too fast — while competitive pressure— among giants like Google and start-ups you’ve never heard of, is propelling humanity into the future ready or not.

Sundar Pichai: But I think if take a 10-year outlook, it is so clear to me, we will have some form of very capable intelligence that can do amazing things. And we need to adapt as a society for it.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told us society must quickly adapt with regulations for AI in the economy, laws to punish abuse, and treaties among nations to make AI safe for the world.

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Won’t that just make enemies of AI?

One of the world’s loudest artificial intelligence critics has issued a stark call to not only put a pause on AI but to militantly put an end to it — before it ends us instead.

In an op-ed for Time magazine, machine learning researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has for more than two decades been warning about the dystopian future that will come when we achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), is once again ringing the alarm bells.

Yudkowsky said that while he lauds the signatories of the Future of Life Institute’s recent open letter — which include SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and onetime presidential candidate Andrew Yang — calling for a six-month pause on AI advancement to take stock, he himself didn’t sign it because it doesn’t go far enough.

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South Korea’s giant leap into space started with a small step on the internet.

With treaties banning certain tech transfers, South Korea’s rocket scientists turned to a search service to find an engine they could mimic as the country embarked on an ambitious plan to build an indigenous space program. The nation launched its first home-grown rocket called Nuri in October 2021.

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Putin also said that Russia would suspend its participation in a treaty aimed at keeping a lid on nuclear weapons expansion. The so-called New START Treaty was signed by Russia and the U.S. in 2010. It caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads they can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.

Putin said Tuesday in a major address that Russia was not fully withdrawing from the treaty yet. He said Russia must stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the US does so.

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Western countries Tuesday of igniting and sustaining the war in Ukraine, refusing any blame for Moscow almost a year after the Kremlin’s invasion of its neighbor that has killed tens of thousands of people.

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.

“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in a speech days before the war’s first anniversary on Friday. Ukraine “has become hostage of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”

Continue reading “Putin not backing down on Ukraine, insists West is at fault” | >

UN hopes to complete revisions to the Law of the Sea governing the protection of marine biodiversity.

In 2017, the members of the General Assembly of the United Nations convened to review the existing Convention on the Law of Sea with the idea to look at providing protection for marine biodiversity and ocean waters beyond marine national government boundaries and exclusive economic zones. Subsequently, there have been meetings at the United Nations to work through outstanding issues with the last in August 2022. A revised Intergovernmental conference is now underway and expected to last two weeks to complete a new High Seas Treaty.

The world’s oceans and seas cover more than 70% of the planet’s surface. The ocean contains 1.35 billion cubic kilometres (324 million cubic miles) of water representing 97% of all the water on the planet. The ocean is where life on Earth first came from and is what makes the continuation of life on this planet possible.

A portion of the ocean lies within the jurisdictions of nation-states. In these locales, countries establish the rules regarding the exploitation of ocean resources from below the seabed, through the entire vertical water column, to the surface as above. But beyond these jurisdictions is a collective commons where national laws bear no weight. That, however, hasn’t stopped countries, fishers, fossil fuel companies and even mining ventures from staking claims. In this arena, a mere 1.2% is currently protected from those looking to exploit what the ocean has to give.

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A year ago, astronomers discovered a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) lasting nearly two minutes, dubbed GRB 211211A. Now, that unusual event is upending the long-standing assumption that longer GRBs are the distinctive signature of a massive star going supernova. Instead, two independent teams of scientists identified the source as a so-called “kilonova,” triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Because neutron star mergers were assumed to only produce short GRBs, the discovery of a hybrid event involving a kilonova with a long GRB is quite surprising.

“This detection breaks our standard idea of gamma-ray bursts,” said co-author Eve Chase, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We can no longer assume that all short-duration bursts come from neutron-star mergers, while long-duration bursts come from supernovae. We now realize that gamma-ray bursts are much harder to classify. This detection pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limits.”

As we’ve reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. The first gamma-ray bursts were observed in the late 1960s, thanks to the launching of the Vela satellites by the US. They were meant to detect telltale gamma-ray signatures of nuclear weapons tests in the wake of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The US feared that the Soviets were conducting secret nuclear tests, violating the treaty. In July 1967, two of those satellites picked up a flash of gamma radiation that was clearly not the signature of a nuclear weapons test.

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WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (Reuters) — The United States and Russia are expected to meet soon and discuss resuming inspections under the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty that have been paused since before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a daily press briefing, Price said the bilateral consultative commission (BCC), the mechanism for implementation of the last remaining arms control agreement between the world’s two largest nuclear powers, will meet “in the near future.”

Russia in August suspended cooperation with inspections under the treaty, blaming travel restrictions imposed by Washington and its allies over Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine, but said it was still committed to complying with the provisions of the treaty.

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Nuclear arsenals remain large enough to fundamentally shift the Earth system in the blink of an eye.

The U.S. and Russia have recently agreed to hold talks on the New START Treaty, and the only accord left regulating the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. While this is undoubtedly good news, we must not allow it to lull us into complacency. Global events this year, most notably in Ukraine, have raised fears of a nuclear conflict to levels not seen since the cold war. More than 10,000 nuclear warheads remain in the world, and the Kremlin’s language regarding weapons of mass destruction has become increasingly threatening in 2022.

Global famine and climate breakdown

In 1982, a group of scientists, including Carl Sagan, began to raise the alarm about a climate apocalypse that could follow a nuclear war. Using simple computer simulations and historic volcanic eruptions as natural analogs, they showed how smoke that lofted into the stratosphere from urban firestorms could block the sun for years.

They found that this “nuclear winter,” as it came to be called, could trigger catastrophic famine far from the location of the war. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, leaders of the United States and Soviet Union in the 1980s, both cited this work when they declared that a nuclear war could not be won.

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Do we need a new criteria for death, that covers the technicalities around neuro preservation, issues of legal identity upon reanimation and an approach to rehabilitation? What are the misunderstandings or misinformation that surround transhumanism and endeavour to make the distinction between transhumanism and technocracy? Should we be worried about the wrong headedness of The Population Bomb, climate catastrophism and the fashionability of long termism?

Today, I speak with Max More. As some of you may already know, Max is considered to be the founder of modern transhumanism, a philosopher and futurist who writes extensively on technology and humanity. He’s also currently ambassador and President Emeritus at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, having served almost 10 years as President and CEO there, and having been its 67th member. His 1995 University of Southern California doctoral dissertation, ‘The diachronic self identity continuity and transformation’, examined several issues that concern transhumanists, including the nature of death. He is the Co-editor of Rhe Transhumanist Reader, and he’s written many articles on transhumanism and extropianism, including the 1990 essay, ‘Transhumanism: toward a futurist philosophy’, in which he introduced the term transhumanism, in its modern sense.

This episode of The Future of You covers:

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Avi Loeb, Professor of Science at Harvard University, joins us to discuss a recent interstellar visitor, if we’ve already encountered alien technology, and whether we’re ultimately alone in the cosmos.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Whether ‘Oumuamua is alien or natural in origin.
–The culture of science and how it affects fruitful inquiry.
–Looking for signs of alien life throughout the solar system and beyond.
–Alien artefacts and galactic treaties.
–How humanity should handle a potential first contact with extraterrestrials.
–The relationship between what is true and what is good.

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2021/07/09/avi-loeb-on-oumuamua-ali…tructures/

Apply for our new Podcast Producer position here: https://futureoflife.org/job-postings/

Check out the audio version of the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/futureoflife/avi-loeb-on-oumuamua-ali…tructures.

Continue reading “Avi Loeb on ‘Oumuamua, Aliens, Space Archeology, Great Filters, and Superstructures” | >