If you find this interesting and can appreciate the complexity of something we use or hear every day, why wouldn’t you find what your mate is really thinking or meaning when they do or say whatever they do or say that you don’t understand or are not sure of? We humans love complexity and can appreciate it whenever it is clearly described. Only your mate can clearly describe the inner workings of their mind to you and only you can clearly describe the inner workings of your mind to them. Yes, FIML allows you both to do that. FIML is easier to understand than this video and much more rewarding, though I really do like the video. A little ingenuity and you can become a FIML pro. ABN
Tag: technology
Device keeps brain alive, functioning separate from body
DALLAS – Nov. 02, 2023 – Researchers led by a team at UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a device that can isolate blood flow to the brain, keeping the organ alive and functioning independent from the rest of the body for several hours.
Juan Pascual, M.D., Ph.D., is a Professor of Neurology, Pediatrics, and Physiology, and in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development at UT Southwestern. He holds the Ed and Sue Rose Distinguished Professorship in Neurology and The Once Upon a Time Foundation Professorship in Pediatric Neurologic Diseases.
The device, tested using a pig brain model and described in Scientific Reports, could lead to new ways to study the human brain without influence from other bodily functions. It also could inform the design of machines for cardiopulmonary bypass that better replicate natural blood flow to the brain. The findings build on previous research by study leader Juan Pascual, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues.
“This novel method enables research that focuses on the brain independent of the body, allowing us to answer physiological questions in a way that has never been done,” said Dr. Pascual.
…Isolating the brain will allow researchers to manipulate inputs to this organ to study how they change brain function without the body’s influence. For example, Dr. Pascual said, he and his colleagues have already used this system to better understand the effects of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) in the absence of other factors. Although scientists can induce hypoglycemia by restricting food intake in lab animals or dosing them with insulin, the body can partially compensate for either of these scenarios by altering metabolism and this, in turn, alters the brain. In contrast, the new device allows researchers to alter the glucose content directly in blood pumped to the brain.
Silkworms gene-edited with spider DNA to make silk six times as tough as Kevlar and ten times as strong as nylon
…Junpeng Mi and his colleagues working at Donghua University, China, used CRISPR gene-editing technology to recode the silk-creating properties of a silkworm. First, they took genes from Araneus ventricosus, an East Asian orb-weaving spider known for its strong silk. Then they placed these complex genes – genes that involve more than 100 amino acids – into silkworm egg cells.
This had all been done before, and this had failed before. Where Mi and his team succeeded was using a concept called “localization.” Localization involves narrowing in on a very specific location in a genome. For this experiment, the team from Donghua University developed a “minimal basic structure model” of silkworm silk, which guided the genetic modifications. They wanted to make sure they had the exactly right transgenic spider silk proteins. Mi said that combining localization with this basic structure model “represents a significant departure from previous research.” And, judging only from the results, he might be right. Their “fibers exhibited impressive tensile strength (1,299 MPa) and toughness (319 MJ/m3), surpassing Kevlar’s toughness 6-fold.”
This would make excellent motorcycle apparel if not too hot to wear. ABN
Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water
Engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device that is inspired by the ocean, and powered by the sun.
In a paper appearing today in the journal Joule, the team outlines the design for a new solar desalination system that takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight.
The configuration of the device allows water to circulate in swirling eddies, in a manner similar to the much larger “thermohaline” circulation of the ocean. This circulation, combined with the sun’s heat, drives water to evaporate, leaving salt behind. The resulting water vapor can then be condensed and collected as pure, drinkable water. In the meantime, the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device, rather than accumulating and clogging the system.
The new system has a higher water-production rate and a higher salt-rejection rate than all other passive solar desalination concepts currently being tested.
The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.
paper: Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distillation with thermohaline convection
Concepts don’t exist — as objective, phenomenological, cognitive, or neural structures
The case for removing concepts from cognitive science and AI research
It can be difficult to convince someone that concepts don’t exist. Everyday experience appears to provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Concepts are not only intuitively perceived to be active in daily life, they are also a widespread feature of theories across AI and cognitive science, where they are assumed to be necessary for symbolic and logical thought¹. Most who read the title of this post would be tempted to brush off the argument as patently, demonstrably absurd. It’s akin to trying to convince a European 500 years ago that God doesn’t exist, when everything around them appears to be evidence of, and indeed presupposes God’s existence. Any contrary argument is likely to be taken as the result of sophistry or word-wrangling, or because some critical piece has been neglected.
Despite their seeming obviousness, it is worth noting that there is still no complete and unambiguous explanation for what concepts are, or how they work on thoughts —and indeed how to program them into AI. The human ability to learn and create concepts is multifaceted and complex. AI theories and implementations generally only touch on one or two of its features, while neglecting large numbers of counter-cases. This has lead some researchers, notably Lawrence Barsalou, to suspect that the way we think of concepts is flawed. Perhaps the whole notion of concepts — as a native mechanism for grouping experiences — is untenable.
This article is well-worth reading. Below, I have made a few notes based on my reading of it. To my eye, it demonstrates the existence of consciousness as a thing, the existence of a very real subjective world, the high probability that this subjective world is not entirely confined in your head, that consciousness is a primary of existence and not confined to our brains, and also, importantly for this website, why FIML works so well.
(The sections in quotes are from the article.)
Firstly, concepts: they exist within consciousness and are used to reason, analyze, communicate, organize, and so on. They are probably a features of consciousness itself, depending on how you define them. They need not be stable.
Secondly, FIML:
To begin with, there is no scientific experiment or empirical observation that can be used to prove that any given concept “exists”, and by extension that concepts exist at all.
No. FIML practice provides unlimited empirical observations that concepts exist. FIML is a scientific experiment and can easily be repeated as many times as you like.
To objectively prove that any given interpretation matches reality, you would somehow have to compare your subjective mental concepts against an objective view of the real situation. But the latter isn’t possible.
Yes, it is possible. FIML is precisely that—a means ‘to compare your subjective mental concepts against an objective view of the real situation’.
FIML accomplishes this by allowing two subjective consciousnesses to objectively compare their mutually ‘subjective mental concepts’ against each other. To claim that ‘an objective view of the real situation’ can only be achieved by some other means is absurd. The very best means to objectively compare subjective states is to have two honest informants compare them based on a shared micro unit of communication in the real-world in real-time. This is what FIML does.
Continue reading “Concepts don’t exist — as objective, phenomenological, cognitive, or neural structures”The discreteness of concepts is a built-in requirement of language itself, one that does not necessarily reflect what an individual mind is doing.
NVIDIA AI agent uses LLMs to automatically generate reward algorithms to train robots to accomplish complex tasks
A new AI agent developed by NVIDIA Research that can teach robots complex skills has trained a robotic hand to perform rapid pen-spinning tricks — for the first time as well as a human can.
The stunning prestidigitation, showcased in the video above, is one of nearly 30 tasks that robots have learned to expertly accomplish thanks to Eureka, which autonomously writes reward algorithms to train bots.
Eureka has also taught robots to open drawers and cabinets, toss and catch balls, and manipulate scissors, among other tasks.
The Eureka research, published today, includes a paper and the project’s AI algorithms, which developers can experiment with using NVIDIA Isaac Gym, a physics simulation reference application for reinforcement learning research. Isaac Gym is built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a development platform for building 3D tools and applications based on the OpenUSD framework. Eureka itself is powered by the GPT-4 large language model.
“Reinforcement learning has enabled impressive wins over the last decade, yet many challenges still exist, such as reward design, which remains a trial-and-error process,” said Anima Anandkumar, senior director of AI research at NVIDIA and an author of the Eureka paper. “Eureka is a first step toward developing new algorithms that integrate generative and reinforcement learning methods to solve hard tasks.”
Google’s AI: This Should Be Impossible!
People with pronounced psychopathy and sadism are harder to startle
…“We conclude that individuals with high levels of sadism show a diminished startle reflex that is relatively immune to potentiation by negative environmental stimuli,” the study authors wrote. “These findings provide further insight into the biological markers of the Dark Tetrad traits and their unique facets. Our findings may also have implications for fields beyond psychology, like business and economics, where managerial effectiveness (e.g., navigating workplace crises) and financial decision-making (e.g., loss aversion and risk-taking) may depend on the personality of a single individual with socially aversive tendencies.”
The study makes an important contribution to the scientific understanding of biological markers of dark traits. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, most of the study participants were students. Although the second study included participants with very high levels of sadism, it is still unlikely that it included many individuals with truly high levels of this malevolent trait.
The study: “Blunted startle reactivity in everyday sadism and psychopathy”, was authored by Erin E. Buckels, Douglas A. Williams, Paul D.Trapnell, Siavash Kermani Koosheh, Owen M. Javra , and Sasha C. Svenne.
Today’s leaders of the Western world, including Israel, clearly exhibit extreme Dark Tetrad personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. This study relies on student subjects (a limitation) but corroborates physical markers of the startle reflex convincingly enough to provide decent evidence for the hypothesis. I singled out Western leaders above but am sure that almost all major political leaders throughout history have had Dark Tetrad traits. Human social instincts lean heavily toward hierarchical submission and it takes outliers to climb that ladder. Nice guys finish last is one way to say it. Given humanity as it is today biologically, I see no hope in changing this. Given the promise of gene selection through selective breeding of non-coerced willing parents, I see a lot of hope that human societies will improve enough to remove our most vulgar, violent, destructive traits. I hope readers of this site have cast off the negative shroud surrounding the word eugenics. Done properly, without force or humiliation, eugenics would be a very good thing for our species. As it is, people do it all the time on their own anyway through partner selection, birth-control, abortion, in vitro gamete and zygote selection, and so on. ABN
Janus custom motorcycles
Newly developed ‘superlens’ allows 4X increase magnification of light microscopy
…“We have now developed a practical way to implement superlensing without a super lens,” said Dr. Alessandro Tuniz from the School of Physics and University of Sydney Nano Institute and the study’s lead author, in a press release announcing the achievement.
To accomplish this feat, the researchers placed their light probe a distance from the sample they wanted to image and collected high-resolution and low-resolution information. According to the release, the probe gathered light “at terahertz frequency at millimetre wavelength, in the region of the spectrum between visible and microwave.”
Next, that information is entered into a computer and run through processes that effectively “select” the most valuable light and remove the unwanted light. The result is an image that peers through the seemingly unbreakable diffraction limit by a factor of four times, something previous efforts have failed to get past.
“We overcome this (diffraction limit) by performing the superlens operation as a post-processing step on a computer, after the measurement itself,” Tuniz explained. “This produces a ‘truthful’ image of the object through the selective amplification of evanescent, or vanishing, light waves.”
US Goes ‘All In’ On China Chip Controls
New US export control rules aim to close loopholes that Chinese firms used to buy and make advanced AI chips. They add dozens of items to a list of restricted chip-making equipment and blacklist 13 Chinese companies, including China’s AI leaders.
The message is clear: the Biden Administration prioritizes security over sales. Yet unanswered questions abound. Will reinforced export controls cause a rift with allies? Will they hold back US innovation? And will they even prevent China from developing cutting-edge technology?
Start with the impact on US companies. California-based NVIDIA took an immediate hit. Its high-flying shares dropped almost 8%. Overall, 30 chip stocks, including Intel, AMD, Applied Materials, and ASML, the Dutch lithography machine maker, lost a combined $73 billion in market value. US semiconductor companies warn that cutting sales to China will boomerang in the long term, hurting their competitiveness.
…As Western supplies shrink, China is redoubling its own efforts to develop high-performance chips. Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone contains a domestically produced seven-nanometer chip, showing that China can produce cutting-edge hardware despite American export restrictions. In a pointed shot, the phone was launched at the same time as US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited Beijing, surprising the US government.
What is Artificial General Intelligence?
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of AI that can understand, learn, and solve tasks that require a human level of intelligence. Just like us, it can adapt to different environments and solve various complex problems.
Unlike artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), which is the type of AI that we have today, AGI is not trained for a specific task, but it’s made to observe, learn, and adapt on its own without being directly commanded by a specific code.
Nearly everything we do today is, in one way or another, linked to narrow AI. The order of content and ads that you see on the Internet is governed by a specialized AI. Your neighbor’s kid is playing a video game against an AI opponent. Perhaps the customer service assistant you just talked to was a synthesized voice of narrow artificial intelligence. These all function seamlessly, but put any one of these narrow AI to do the task of the other, and it will fail.
Artificial general intelligence could learn and perform all these tasks and more. Eventually, when we develop an AGI in earnest, it would display the capabilities of the median human, but retain the potential to become an expert in the field, something we now consider reserved for the narrow AI. It would be possible for AGI to become a scientist, an engineer, or a doctor.
“Would be”, as we have yet to reach the point of general AI. But some experts say that we’re getting there.
ETA for AGI?
The big question is: when will we create artificial general intelligence?
For proper general AI, there are three vital components of consciousness it must have:
- A model of surroundings with the body of the unit at the center
- Perception of time for projections of future outcomes
- An ability to consider and evaluate multiple actions and choose the most optimal one
In other words, it has to be able to explore, learn, interpret, and solve various problems in different environments. For example, just like a three-year-old child can.
While current AI models efficiently tackle various tasks, we have failed to develop a system that would harmonize these tasks into a single AI solution. Our AI fails to overcome problems that three-year-old children routinely solve. Forget the toddler, we still have to reach the intelligence of a parrot or a mouse.
But the necessary research is rapidly advancing, and investments are bigger than ever. John Hennessy estimates that we’re 20 to 40 years away from artificial general intelligence. John Carmack, an ex-Meta executive, gives a 95% chance of AGI being developed by 2050 and 60% chance of this happening by 2030.
In our lifetimes! Should we buckle up?
Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI
AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch.
A pitch deck for Anthropic’s Series C fundraising round discloses these and other long-term goals for the company, which was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI researchers.
In the deck, Anthropic says that it plans to build a “frontier model” — tentatively called “Claude-Next” — 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, but that this will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months.
Dario Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking with him a number of OpenAI employees, including OpenAI’s former policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly commercial focus.
“These models could begin to automate large portions of the economy,” the pitch deck reads. “We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.”
Anthropic released Claude commercially in March following a closed beta late last year, allowing around 15 partners initial access. It counts among its beta users and potential customers the following industries (with the asterisk indicating that a human is in the loop to supervise the model):
- Legal document summary and analysis*
- Medical patient records and analysis*
- Customer service emails and chat
- Coding models for consumers and B2B
- Productivity-related search, document editing and content generation*
- Chatbot for public Q&A and advice
- Search employing natural language responses
- HR tasks like job descriptions and interview analysis*
- Therapy and coaching
- Virtual assistants*
- Education at all levels*
The Case for Enclave-Based Immigration Over Nationalism
Rethinking Immigration in the Context of Post-Americanism
Counting all US in-migration annually, half a million migrants are admitted via the CBP app, a new parole program will admit another half a million Venezuelans, another new program will allow 200k immigrants to fly directly to American cities to claim asylum, existing legal immigration is about 1 million, and there are about 2 million illegal border crossings. That adds up to over 4 million migrants annually, breaking all past records for border crossings and immigration. It would not be farfetched for 8 million migrants to arrive in 2024. The migrant crisis will only accelerate due to economic crisis and food shortages in the Global South, and the impacts of chain migration. Basically a trial run for open borders, considering that the numbers who want to immigrate globally are about 900 million. The date when Whites become a minority in America could easily move up from 2045 to 2035.
…What I am advocating for is basically national multiculturalism but with local homogeneity, re-establishing the “us-ness” at a local level. If multiculturalism is inevitable then trying to hold together a diverse society with a mass mono-culture and centralized institutions is insane. The current situation is the worst of both worlds, since we basically have a policy of multiculturalism for non-Whites but compulsory universalism for White Americans, who are expected to hold the empire together, rather than pursue their own interests. White Americans are in a state of limbo, where the old America is dead, yet the idea of acting as a diaspora is alien. I want to be optimistic, but a plausible scenario is where there is continued mass demographic change, a top-down centralized managerial power structure, widespread anti-White discrimination and political persecution, White economic downward mobility, scapegoating of Whites for income inequality, yet where Whites remain hyper-individualistic, being at a tremendous disadvantage and politically disenfranchised. While there is little hope in reforming the system towards radical decentralization, one White Pill is that the shock from rapid demographic change and economic collapse will force Whites to become tribal and rebuild social capital to survive. A more cutthroat society will make enclaves, tribes, and patronage networks a necessity.
This is a thoughtful essay, well-worth reading in full.
Recently, I have made comments about ‘digital babies’ ending all tribalism, ethnicity, and lineage pride due to their parents ‘soon’ being able to choose major genetic traits, including intelligence. ‘Digital babies’ will massively affect how America develops, even given uncontrollable immigration and multiculturalism.
The term digital babies is meant to be a shorthand marker for the rapidly advancing technologies of gene selection through in vitro selection processes leading eventually to selection through digital processes.
True digital gene insertion may be over one hundred years away (maybe not so long), but selection through manipulation of gametes and zygotes in a laboratory is already possible today and probably being done somewhere in the world right now. This process involves using stem cells from parents to make many gametes. Then selecting the best of those gametes and using them to make many zygotes. Then selecting the best of those zygotes and using stem cells taken from them to make more gametes. If this process is repeated scores or even hundreds of times, the resulting offspring will be extremely intelligent, healthy, and long-lived. Through other processes, they will also carry zero mutational burden. For a time, these offspring may become even more tribal but as soon as gene-insertion or even gene-creation becomes possible, parents will surely choose whatever is best for their offspring, thus completely blurring the lines between races, tribes and lineages.
As we imagine the future, we must also image the effects of digital babies and also AI, or super-AI, a field that is also moving quickly, and with massive implications for the science of digital babies and how they will evolve. ABN
Energy Hungry World Drives Obvious Demand for Cheap, Reliable Coal-Fired Power
Germany and Australia share delusional obsessions with wind and solar power; but they also share a desperate demand for reliable coal-fired power. Hidden from sight, both Germany and Australia have recognised (albeit a little too late) that the only way of delivering 24 x 365 power, whatever the weather at prices everyone can afford is by using coal-fired power plants.
As to Germany, Bridget Ryder take a look at moves by Germany’s RWE to demolish wind turbines to allow it to access more of Germany’s brown coal. That move doesn’t sit with the narrative about Germany transitioning to an all wind and sun powered future.
Nor does the next story from The Australian. Where reality is pressing upon those who claim that Australia is already well on its way to running on nothing but sunshine and breezes.
American Buddhist Net 