The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction

This is part two of Tim Urban's article on the coming AI revolution.  Urban gives a sense of the almost unimaginable impact AI could have on the future of humanity- Artificial Superintelligence, or ASI is certainly a real possibility in coming decades and the outcome of the development of this technology could be immortality or extinction. 

Immortality or Extinction?

The AI Revolution: the Road to Superintelligence

The AI Revolution: the Road to Superintelligence

The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much.- Tim Urban

Inflated tower concept may be an alternative to a space elevator

An alternative to a space elevator that is technologically feasible with current technology

Impact of life extension on world population and population sustainability

Is death necessary?  While radical life extension technology likely remains decades away, constant advances in understanding the processes of aging opens the door to the possibility that at some point in that not so distant future people may be able to choose to live lives that are much longer than a natural life span.

The link below takes a look at the impact of different factors on future world population growth, and also addresses the requirements of a larger world population.

One thought related to this is the role of death in the evolution of life.  Obviously, throughout history death has been necessary to advance life due to the limited resources available in the environment and the process of natural selection.  However, when people can expand their environment by leaving earth and can intelligently adapt to a changing environment by choice through technologies such as gene modification, death is arguably not a necessary element of human life.  The role of death would be in many ways obsolete.

Future population and radical life extension         

Is Our Universe A Fake?

I began bemused. The notion that humanity might be living in an artificial reality — a simulated universe — seemed sophomoric, at best science fiction. But speaking with scientists and philosophers on "Closer to Truth," I realized that the notion that everything humans see and know is a gigantic computer game of sorts, the creation of supersmart hackers existing somewhere else, is not a joke. Exploring a "whole-world simulation," I discovered, is a deep probe of reality.   -  Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Kuhn article on the possibility we live in a simulated reality

Theories of Everything, Mapped

Quanta Magazine provides a neat, interactive guide to Theories of Everything:

TOE, an interactive guide

Data Opens Possibility Of A Curved Cosmos

 

 This article at livescience.com discusses recent data from the Planck satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 2009 that supports the existence of the same anomaly NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, found.  The Wilkinson data unexpectedly suggested that the universe may be lopsided — hot and cold spots on one side of the cosmos appear hotter and colder than on the other. One explanation for the data is that the universe is curved, or saddle shaped.  From the article:

Researchers investigating a major anomaly in the afterglow of the Big Bang suggest the fabric of space and time may actually be curved like a saddle, possibly upending the currently leading notion that light and anything else traveling through spacetime zips through a "flat" universe in straight lines. In a saddle-shaped universe, however, any object that seems like it is traveling parallel to another item will actually veer away from it after vast distances.

Andrew Liddle, a cosmologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland Liddle and his colleague Marina Cortês detail their findings in the Sept. 13 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

A New Theory of Consciousness

In an article published in Aeon Magazine, Michael Graziano presents a new theory of consciousness.  His theory is that the evolution of attention was a useful data handling mechanism in brains that became more complex over time.  Further, "Attention requires control. In the modern study of robotics there is something called control theory, and it teaches us that, if a machine such as a brain is to control something, it helps to have an internal model of that thing."  Graziano proceeds to explain his theory:

The brain will attribute a property to itself and that property will be a simplified proxy for attention. It won’t be precisely accurate, but it will convey useful information. What exactly is that property? When it is paying attention to thing X, we know that the brain usually attributes an experience of X to itself — the property of being conscious, or aware, of something. Why? Because that attribution helps to keep track of the ever-changing focus of attention...I call this the ‘attention schema theory’. It has a very simple idea at its heart: that consciousness is a schematic model of one’s state of attention. Early in evolution, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, brains evolved a specific set of computations to construct that model. At that point, ‘I am aware of X’ entered their repertoire of possible computations.

Link to the article in Aeon Magazine

Michael Graziano is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. His latest book, Consciousness and the Social Brain, is scheduled for release in September.

Frank Wilczek's paper on the prsopect of a multiverse: "Multiversality"

Multiversality

Valid ideas that physical reality is vastly larger than human perception of it, and that the perceived part may not be representative of the whole, exist on many levels and have a long history. After a brief general inventory of those ideas and their implications, I consider the cosmological “multiverse” much discussed in recent scientific literature. I review its theoretical and (broadly) empirical motivations, and its disruptive implications for the traditional program of fundamental physics. I discuss the inflationary axion cosmology, which provides an example where firmly rooted, plausible ideas from microphysics lead to a well-characterized “mini-multiverse” scenario, with testable phenomenological consequences

Swirls in the Afterglow of the Big Bang Could Set Stage for Major Discovery

From Science Now:

Scientists have spotted swirling patterns in the radiation lingering from the big bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB). The observation itself isn't Earth-shaking, as researchers know that these particular swirls or "B-modes" originated in conventional astrophysics, but the result suggests that scientists are closing in on a much bigger prize: B-modes spawned by gravity waves that rippled through the infant universe. That observation would give them a direct peek into the cosmos' first fraction of a second and possibly shed light on how it all began.