ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

How to Give A.I. a Pinch of ConsciousnessChris Baraniuk | OneZeroThat higher, attentive level of processing is not always necessary or even desirable but it seems to be crucial for humans to learn new skills or adapt to unexpected challenges. A.I. systems and robots could potentially avoid the stupidity that currently plagues them if only they could gain the same ability to prioritize, focus, and resolve a problem.

Synthetic Biologists Have Created a Slow-Growing Version of the Coronavirus to Give as a VaccineAntonio Regalado | MIT Tech ReviewIt might seem scary to imagine getting infected by the coronavirus on purpose, but attenuated-virus vaccines are common. The kids flu vaccine FluMist has a weakened influenza virus in it. And Serum Institute sells 750,000 doses a year of vaccines using live measles. The only disease ever successfully eradicated from the globe, smallpox, was wiped out with shots of a live virus.

IBM Publishes Its Quantum Roadmap, Says It Will Have a 1,000-Qubit Machine in 2023Frederic Lardinois | Tech CrunchGil believes that 2023 will be an inflection point in the industry, with the road to the 1,121-qubit machine driving improvements across the stack. The most importantand ambitiousof these performance improvements that IBM is trying to execute on is bringing down the error rate from about 1% today to something closer to 0.0001%.

Is There a Black Hole in Our Backyard?Dennis Overbye | The New York TimesWhat is an astrophysicist to do during a pandemic, except maybe daydream about having a private black hole? Although it is probably wishful thinking, some astronomers contend that a black hole may be lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. All summer, they have been arguing over how to find it, if indeed it is there, and what to do about it, proposing plans that are only halfway out of this world.

This Tiny Reproduction ofGirl With a Pearl EarringIs Painted With LightJennifer Ouellette | Ars TechnicaScientists have fabricated tiny nanopillarscapable of transmitting specific colors of light, at specific intensities, which hold promise for improved optical communication and anti-counterfeit measures for currency. For proof of concept, they decided to digitally reproduce Dutch master Johannes Vermeers famous paintingGirl With a Pearl Earringjust painted in light instead of pigment.

Forget Planting Trees: This Company Is Making Carbon Offsets by Putting Seaweed on the Ocean FloorAdele Peters | Fast CompanyDone at a large scale, the process could make a meaningful difference. A 2019 study that looked at the potential for seaweed farming to offset carbon emissions calculated that growing and sinking macroalgae in a tiny fraction of the federal waters off the California coastline could fully offset emissions from the states enormous agriculture industry, for example.

Is the Internet Conscious? If It Were, How Would We Know?Meghan OGieblyn | WiredDoes the internetbehave like a creature with an internal life? Does it manifest the fruits of consciousness? There are certainly moments when it seems to. Google can anticipate what youre going to type before you fully articulate it to yourself. Facebook ads can intuit that a woman is pregnant before she tells her family and friends. It is easy, in such moments, to conclude that youre in the presence of another mindthough given the human tendency to anthropomorphize, we should be wary of quick conclusions.

Image credit:Juskteez Vu / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 19) - Singularity Hub