| Why the Future Is Non-AlgorithmicThere has been a lot of talk lately about how the use of multiple concurrent threads is considered harmful by a growing number of experts. I think the problem is much deeper than that. |
| Studies show the value of not overthinkingFishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought. |
| PC Pro: News: AI could power next-gen CCTV camerasUK researchers are working on fitting CCTV cameras with artificial intelligence, allowing them to more quickly respond to crimes.
The technology, being developed by University of Portsmouth scientists, would allow cameras to "hear" violent sounds and react, swiveling quickly in the direction of a broken window or somebody shouting abusively for example, before alerting an operator. |
| Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrolThey start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.” |
| How new software will create titanium bone replacementsThe idea of having an irreparably damaged bone scanned, a titanium copy created in a replicator and then surgically inserted into our bodies seems more Star Trek science fiction than modern-day medicine. But advances in three-dimensional printing and a key piece of breakthrough software mean that, within a year, this will be a reality. |
| Scientists Close to Reconstructing First Living CellHarvard Medical School researchers report in Nature that they have built a model of what they believe the very first living cell may have looked like, which contains a strip of genetic material surrounded by a fatty membrane. |
| Military Supercomputer Surpasses Petaflop MilestoneAn American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. |
| Space Station Could Beam Secret Quantum Codes by 2014When two particles such as photons are born from the same event, they emerge entangled, meaning they can communicate instantaneously no matter how far apart they are. Transmitting entangled pairs of photons reliably is the backbone of so-called quantum key distribution—procedures for converting those pairs into potentially unbreakable codes. |
| Apple in Parallel: Turning the PC World Upside Down?“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”
Apple, he asserted, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough. |
| Robot Asimo can understand three voices at onceThe HARK system actually goes beyond normal human listening capabilities, Okuno told New Scientist. "It can listen to several things at once, and not just focus on a particular single sound source." |
| Why is AI Dangerous?To put it in a single sentence, I’d say that it’s because only a minority of cognitively possible goal sets place a high priority on the continued survival of human beings and the structures we value. |
| When Do Post-Humans Show Up?Will the Singularity arrive within a few decades? Unlikely, according to most of experts writing in a fascinating issue of IEEE Spectrum examining the idea that we’re approaching a revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software. |
| Hints of 'time before Big Bang'A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. |
| AI Success StoriesI’ve been invited to give a talk on AI Success Stories, so I’ve compiled a list of things that illustrate progress in AI research. |
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