Daily Archives: February 13, 2024

Heads up! Tin Can Deorbit

A massive, defunct satellite is set to come crashing through the Earth's atmosphere, plummeting towards the ground, in just a matter of weeks.

Launched into orbit in 1995, the European Space Agency's European Remote Sensing 2 (ERS-2) satellite was decommissioned over a decade ago. Since then, it's used up the last of its fuel reserves and is set to reenter the atmosphere "around mid-February" per an ESA statement.

Even without the fuel, the massive Earth observatory still weighs north of 5,000 pounds, a giant piece of space debris that could technically wreak havoc if it were to crash into a populated area.

Fortunately, as the ESA is quick to point out in a FAQ specifically about the reentry, "the annual risk of an individual human being injured by space debris is under 1 in 100 billion."

In other words, you're orders of magnitude more likely to be hit by lightning.

As Space.com points out, far larger objects have uncontrollably made their descent from orbit, including the core stage of China's Long March 5B rocket, which weighed a whopping 23 tons when it crashed back down a week after liftoff back in 2022.

NASA officials have since called out China for its reckless habit of allowing massive rocket parts to come raining down unassisted.

And the risks are real, especially when it comes to recently-launched rocket boosters. Just last month, videos circulated on social media showing what appears to be a pair of rocket boosters of a Chinese Long March 3B rocket uncontrollably tumbling towards an inhabited area, resulting in massive fireballs.

As to where the ESA's mammoth satellite will land is impossible to tell at this point.

"The satellite is under frequent observation, and we are tracking its orbital altitude as it decays," the ESA's FAQ reads. "However, because the reentry is natural, it is impossible to predict exactly when and where the satellite will begin to burn up."

Besides turning into a massive piece of space junk, the ERS-2 satellite has "collected a bounty of data on Earths diminishing polar ice, changing land surfaces, sea-level rise, warming oceans and atmospheric chemistry," per the agency. It has also assisted during natural disasters.

While a largely uncontrolled descent sounds like a reckless decision, its eventual plummet is still technically a more desirable outcome than having it pose a threat to space explorers later down the line.

Our planet's orbit is already chockful of space junk and the problem is only bound to get worse as more rockets are launched (and satellites decommissioned).

More on reentries: NASA Terrified of Space Station Careening Out of Control and Crashing Into People

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Massive European Satellite to Plummet Back Down to Earth Uncontrollably - Futurism

Yikes. Aborted Stunt

An infamous thrill-seeker was recently arrested in Las Vegas after climbingthe Las Vegas Sphere, the city's new glowing orb of wonderentirely covered in screens.

Self-proclaimed skyscraper climber Maison DesChamps, a Las Vegas native, was detained on Wednesday after footage of him climbing the 367-foot structure in a white hoodie and sunglasses made the rounds on social media.

But a simple daredevil's lark, this isn't. DesChamps is a staunch anti-abortion activist who calls himself the "pro-life Spiderman." According to USA Today, he was scaling the orb as a way of canceling an innocent homeless woman's upcoming abortion.

DesChamps previously attempted to climb the Accenture Tower in Chicago without any rope. At the time, he was charged with two misdemeanors conducts of reckless conduct and criminal trespass.

He then attempted to climb the Chase Tower in downtown Phoenix ahead of last year's Super Bowl. According to local police, he was facing charges of trespassing and criminal nuisance at the time.

The Sphere, however, is a very different beast thanks to its "exosphere" of LED screens. The price tag of the unique structure was well over $2 billion, making it the ultimate monument to our hypercapitalist dreams.

It can seat 17,600 spectators and features an ear-popping 164,00-speaker audio system.

What builders didn't have in mind,however, is a pro-life nutcase climbing the structure. Fortunately, local authorities quickly stepped in and nobody got hurt.

"We are grateful to the local authorities for their support in this matter," a statement by owner Sphere Entertainment reads. "The individuals involved are currently in the custody of [the Las Vegas Metro Police Department]."

For the record: After the US Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, millions of women across the country don't have access to a legal abortion. Not only is that a major infringement on somebody's constitutional rights, it's incredibly dangerous from a health perspective like they need another reminder, especially one as inane as this.

More on the Sphere: The Giant Las Vegas Sphere's Halloween Costume Is Pretty Great

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"Pro Life Spider Man" Tries to Climb the Sphere in Las Vegas, Gets Immediately Arrested - Futurism

Scientists have set a new fusion energy world record, producing 69 megajoules at the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK.

The "major scientific achievement" was the lab's final experiment following 40 years of fusion research, a "fitting swansong" per UK minister for nuclear Andrew Bowie.

The facility is a donut-shaped tokamak, a type of fusion reactor that traps a cloud of ultra-hot plasma inside a strong magnetic field.

During its record-breaking run, the JET facility used just 0.2 milligrams of fuel to produce 69 megajoules (12.5 megawatts), which enough to power around 12,000 homes, per New Scientist though only for five seconds.

On the downside, the record also failed to produce a net positive energy balance, requiring far more energy to be put in to achieve these results. As the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics points out, it's "physically impossible" to achieve an "energy gain" with "JET and all other current magnetic fusion experiments worldwide."

Fusion reactors mimic the same processes that power stars, including the Sun. By smashing atoms to bind them together the reverse of nuclear power reactors, which rip atoms apart scientists are hoping to generate vast quantities of green energy without the risk of a nuclear meltdown.

But getting to a point where fusion reactors not only generate a net positive energy output, but produce energy at a meaningful scale as well, has been incredibly difficult. Despite many decades of research, we've only recently started achieving the first, and the latter is still likely many years out.

But there are glimmers of hope. The news comes the same week as the publication of a series of papers confirming that the National Ignition Facility achieved a net energy gain in 2022 using the laser-powered reactor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The output, however, was comparatively minuscule at 2.5 megajoules of energy, or about enough electricity to boil a kettle.

Scientists are now eagerly awaiting the completion of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, the JET facility's much larger and more modern successor.

Researchers are hoping to produce outputs of up to 700 megawatts using the next-gen reactor.

"These are what I usually call power plant scale," Tim Luce, deputy head of the ITER construction project, told reporters during a Thursday briefing, as quoted by New Scientist. "Theyre at the lower end of what you would need for an electricity generating facility."

"In addition, we need to extend the timescale to at least 300 seconds for the high fusion power and gain but perhaps as long as an hour in terms of energy production," he added. "So what JET has done is exactly a scale model of what we have to do in the ITER project."

It's not just the US and Europe developing fusion reactors. Last year, China's "artificial Sun," the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, reportedly beat its own record, sustaining plasma inside a tokamak for nearly seven minutes.

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research experiment also managed to maintain temperatures north of 100 million degrees Celsius, enough to fuse atoms, for 30 seconds back in 2022.

While the JET facility's latest record is an important step towards establishing a reliable and entirely renewable form of energy, scientists still have a long way to go.

All eyes are now on ITER. Officials are hoping if everything goes according to plan a big if given the uncertainties involved a prototype fusion power plant could open its doors by 2050.

More on fusion: Fusion Facility Generates Twice the Power Put Into It

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Fusion Reactor Produces Record Amount of Energy in Final Experiment - Futurism

Image by Andrew Bret Wallis/Getty Images

Neurodegenerative disease is often seen as a death sentence but heartening new research finds that even after symptoms start to show, there are still ways to fight back.

As CNN reports, a fascinating new study conducted by Rush University researchers showed that introducing healthy lifestyle habits helped to lower symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer'sdisease in patients already exhibiting warning signs.

Dementia, Alzheimer's, and similar neurodegenerative diseases are devastating conditions that largely remain without a cure. And though the results of this study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology,certainly don't show a curefor Alzheimer's or dementia, they do offer compelling evidence that lifestyle changes could offer a potent stopgap even in cases where telltale markers like beta-amyloid or tau plaques are already present in a patient's brain.

"We found that the lifestyle-cognition association was independent of Alzheimer's disease pathology burden," Rush Institute for Healthy Aging assistant professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine Klodian Dhana, the lead author on the study, told CNN, suggesting that a healthy "lifestyle may provide cognitive benefits even for people who have begun to accumulate dementia-related pathologies in their brains."

The study results are based on observations and autopsies of a total of 586 participants, all of whom lived in the Chicago area and took part in the Rush Memory and Aging Project between the years 1997 and 2022. Per CNN, the participants lived to an "average age of 91, underwent regular cognitive and physical testing, and filled out annual questionnaires on their lifestyles for over two decades before they died."

Using the self-reported data from the Memory and Aging Project, researchers devised a criteria-based system to determine whether the participants lived lower-risk, healthy lifestyles or had higher-risk habits.

Per the study, those deemed low-risk had a few significant lifestyle choices in common. For one and likely very obvious thing, these participants didn't smoke. They also consumed alcohol in moderation, meaning roughly one or fewer daily drinks for womenor roughly two or fewer for men, and exercised for "at least 150 minutes a week." On a regular weekly basis, these individuals also engaged in mentally stimulating activities according to the study, this would include activities like reading, afternoons at museums, or playing board games and puzzles. Finally, those deemed "healthy" were observed to adhere fairly closely to the Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, or "MIND" diet for short.

The MIND diet isn't new; it was devised by researchers at Rush and Harvard's School of Public Health in Boston back in 2015. Rooted in elements of the "Mediterranean" diet and the hypertension-fighting DASH diet, MIND centers on lowering an individual's blood pressure and cholesterol while emphasizing the consumption of fruits and vegetables, healthy fats from sources like olive oil and nuts, and whole grains. Fish is encouraged, but cholesterol-spiking red meat is confined to an occasional treat. Sodium is also kept to a minimum, and to all of our dessert lovers, we apologize but sugar, especially processed sugar, is mostly off the table.

Armed with decades of data points, the Rush researchers compared lifestyle scores against the results of each participant's eventual autopsy after they died. During the autopsies, scientists looked for certain signs of neurodegenerative conditions, including the aforementioned plaque build-up in addition to any vascular damage in the brain and when lifestyle scores and brain pathology were taken into consideration together, the results were striking.

According to the study, those living lower-risk lifestyles were shown to have less severe pathological signs of neurodegenerative disease overall. What's more, though, was the discovery that nearly 90 percent of the participants' cognitive health was in direct correlation to living choices; conversely, only 11.6 percent of the elders' cognition was directly impacted by pathological factors like beta-amyloid or vessel damage.

In other words, it looks like living well carried far more weight for their cognitive health than any measurable signs of neurodegeneration did.

"It's like a video game where you are shooting monsters," Richard Isaacson, who serves as the director of research at Florida's Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Florida and who was not involved in the study, told CNN of the discovery. "The gun the lifestyle changes was able to defeat the ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires and zombies."

While the research is exciting, there are a few caveats, most notably the reality that the MIND diet isn't accessible to everyone. Eating well is expensive and often challenging, and food deserts are rampant throughout the US. These challenges fall disproportionately on low-income families and minorities; meanwhile, Black and Latinx people are more likely to develop Alzheimer's and dementia, and yet remain woefully underdiagnosed. If healthy, plant-forward, and unprocessed diets are indeed medicine, many Americans, particularly those who aren't white and middle-class, continue to be left out.

The study was also based heavily on self-reported data, which comes with its own risks. But the study does add to the growing body of research linking diet and lifestyle to neurodegenerative disease. So in the future, when you're trying to decide between salmon or a double-stacked bacon cheeseburger for dinner, just remember by making the switch, you could be bulking up your brain's resilience to harrowing diseases.

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If You Have Signs of Dementia, Doctors Found a Way to Help - Futurism

In late 2022, scientists at the National Ignition Facility claimed to have achieved an important fusion energy milestone with their laser-powered reactor: getting more energy out than they put in.

Now, the results have cleared the peer review process, confirming the achievement.

And it gets even better. The scientists claim in a separate paper to have gotten even better results in subsequent experiments, as New Scientist reports, releasing close to twice the amount of energy the system consumed.

However, as the team was quick to point out, there's still a long road to a commercial fusion reactor.

Nonetheless, they hope that by demonstrating it's possible despite many decades of research, the feat of achieving a net energy gain had long seemed to remain perpetually elusive the industry will be encouraged to keep trying to realize its goal of a greener future.

Unlike nuclear fission, nuclear fusion involves smashing together particles under extreme conditions. There are several different types of fusion reactors currently being investigated, including the "tokamak," a donut-shaped device that confines plasma using magnetic fields at extreme pressure and temperatures.

The National Ignition Facility's reactor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) takes a notably different tack, bombarding small packets of hydrogen isotope fuel using what it describes as the "worlds largest and highest-energy laser system."

The resulting temperatures are immense, exceeding those found in the Sun.

Despite the landmark achievement, there's still plenty of room for improvement, the LLNL's Richard Town told New Scientist.

For one, the amount of energy the team got out from the December 2022 trial was minuscule. At the time, the reaction produced around 2.5 megajoules of energy, or about enough electricity to boil a kettle.

However, the system could eventually be scaled up even if it isn't optimized for max output.

"A bigger hammer always helps," Town told New Scientist. "If we can get a bigger hammer, I think we could get to target gains of about roughly ten."

The scientists are also hoping to switch out the current lasers with high-power laser diodes to bring down the energy consumption and improve yields.

But will we ever see a future where fusion reactors can put a dent in our reliance on fossil fuels before it's too late?

Some experts remain pessimistic.

"Fusion is already too late to deal with the climate crisis," nuclear fusion research fellow at the University of Manchester Aneeqa Khan, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist. "We are already facing the devastation from climate change on a global scale."

More on fusion: Physicists Say New Breakthrough Proves Fusion Power Is Possible

Read more:
Fusion Facility Generates Twice the Power Put Into It - Futurism

In the midst of her bizarre beef with Megan "Megan Thee Stallion" Pete, award-winning rapper Onika "Nicki Minaj" Maraj-Petty has signed on with fellow artists to support artificial intelligence regulation despite leaning way into the tech herself.

Minaj signed an open letter including signatories as diverse as singer and actress Bette Midler, singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, heavy metal band Lamb of God, and even her other rival, Belcalis Marlenis "Cardi B" Cephus supporting the "No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas And Unauthorized Duplications Act."

Introduced in the House of Representatives last month, the bill would regulate the use of AI voice replicas.

"The No AI FRAUD Act would defend your fundamental human right to your voice and likeness, protecting everyone from nonconsensual deepfakes," reads the open letter, which ran in the print edition of USA Today. "Protect your individuality."

It's a particularly heated topic as of late. Last year, record label Universal Music Group forced several songs that used AI-generated vocals of Aubrey "Drake" Graham and Abel Makkonen "the Weeknd" Tesfaye to be taken offline.

Just last week, the same label pulled the songs of its comprehensive list of musicians which includes Taylor Swift and Drake off TikTok, arguing the network wasn't doing enough to protect artists from being replaced by AI.

Like the hundreds of other stars who signed the open letter last week,Minaj has taken a not altogether surprising stand to protect her rights to her own voice and likeness.

It gets complicated, however, when considering the imagery she's used in recent months including on the single artwork for her Megan Thee Stallion diss track, "Big Foot" that seems almost certainly generated by AI.

Last month, before turning up the heat on her feud with the younger rapper, Minaj posted a number of more-than-likely AI-generated images promoting her latest single "Press Play." Done up in the style of the AI fan art that went viral just prior to the release of her latest album, "Pink Friday 2," the images featuregarbled text that has become a hallmark characteristic of AI-generated images.

Almost immediately after Minaj began posting the "Press Play" promos, critics pointed out that she'd begun posting AI-generated images to her stories as part of the single rollout as well.

"Nickis entire rollout being AI images is so tiring," one user on X-formerly-Twitter mused, pointing out that a hand in the image had six fingers.

She didn't end her AI experimentation there, either.

When promoting her track "Big Foot," Minaj shared a B-side image for the single that also showed signs of having been generated by an AI, including a weird spelling of the word "police" and an inconsistent number of toes on the comically oversized footprints seen in the image.

Given that she didn't disclose if any of the images were AI-generated whichwill eventually be required on YouTube and Meta products there's still a (tiny) chance she hired human artists to come up with the artwork, even if the evidence makes that overwhelmingly unlikely.

Nonetheless, her signing of the open letter could highlight a double standard when it comes to the use of the tech.

While she's interested in protecting the rights to her own voice and likeness, her support of the rights of human illustrators, who are increasingly wary of being replaced by AI, feels noticeably absent.

More on AI imagery:Coke's AI-Generated Super Bowl Ad Is Downright Scary

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Nicki Minaj, Who's Used AI, Decries Use of AI - Futurism

Whoa. Say Cheese

A spectacular image taken by NASA's Juno probe this past weekend shows Jupiter's moon Io with twin eruptions on the surface, underlining the fact that Io is the most volcanically active place in our Solar System.

The NASA image, which Juno captured from around 2,400 miles away, shows the faint but telltale signs of gaseous-looking trails on the moon's horizon. NASA says the eruptions are "emitted either by two vents from one giant volcano, or two volcanoes near each other."

This is the second flyby by the spacecraft, and whizzed by as close as 930 miles after an initial flyby in late December.

"The twin flybys are designed to provide new insight into how Ios volcanic engine works and whether a global magma ocean exists under Ios rocky surface," NASA posted on X-formerly Twitter.

The volcanoes on Earth are a natural marvel, but those on Jupiter's Io are something else entirely. The moon is a little larger than our own natural satellite, but is far more geologically active, pockmarked with hundreds of erupting volcanoes and dramatic lakes of lava.

Jupiter's gravity, and that of its lunar neighbors Europa and Ganymede, make for a dramatically hellish landscape.

There's compelling evidence from data gathered by Juno that a gigantic ocean of magma exists under Io's surface, but further observations from Juno's current trip may cement our understanding.

More on Io: A Giant Volcano on One of Jupiter's Moons is About to Erupt

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NASA Spacecraft Swoops So Close to Io That It Can See Volcanic Eruptions - Futurism

Harvard professor and notorious UFO hunter Avi Loeb claims he has new evidence that meteor fragments recovered from the ocean floor are alien technology, Boston Public Radio reports, pushing back against detractors who argue their origins are more mundane.

"It raises the possibility that it may have been a Voyager-like meteor, artificially made by another civilization," Loeb told the station on Monday, referencing an actual pair of probes sent screaming out of the solar system by NASA back in the 1970s.

Though perhaps best known for his provocative theories on the interstellar object 'Oumuamua that passed through our solar system back in 2017, Loeb's latest findings concern another interstellar oddity which, unlike Oumuamua, found its way to Earth albeit not in one piece.

Dubbed IM1, the meteor plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea nearly a decade ago, but was overlooked until Loeb spearheaded efforts that confirmed in 2022 that it was the first interstellar object known to fall to Earth.

In hot pursuit, the astrophysicist launched an expedition to comb the ocean floor for the object last year and found, he claims, its remnants in the form of spherical metal fragments, or "spherules," that he thinks could suggest IM1 might be some form of alien technology.

Those findings, documented in a paper published in October, were met with skepticism. Some scientists rebutted that the spherules were the result of fallout from human nuclear testing, or even just coal ash.

Not so easily deterred, Loeb told Boston Public Radio he's released new findings to silence the skeptics, concluding in his preprint paper that some of the spherule's "chemical composition differs from any known solar system material."

"What we did is compare 55 elements from the periodic table in coal ash to those special spherules that we found," he told the station. "And it's clearly very different."

Loeb also appeared to have a message for the haters.

"It's not based on opinions," he added. "And, of course, if you're not part of this scientific process and you are jealous of the attention that it gets, then you can raise a lot of criticism."

His near indefatigable search for evidence of alien life won't end there. Off the back of a fruitful, Netflix-documented expedition and a year in which public hysteria over UFOs reached a fever pitch, Loeb is gearing up for another trip back to the Pacific, hoping to find bigger fragments.

Still, for all the headlines he's made for scouring the ocean floor, Loeb believes our best bet of finding extraterrestrials remains in the sky. In particular, he cautions that his scientific peers, often fixated on the farthest reaches of the cosmos, shouldn't overlook what's in our solar system.

"The best approach to figure it out is actually to do the scientific work of building observatories that look out and check what these objects are," he told Boston Public Radio. "And if they happen to be birds, or airplanes, or Chinese balloons, so be it."

"But we need to figure it out, it's our civil duty as scientists," he added.

More on aliens: Experts Push Back Against Rumors of James Webb Life Detection

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Harvard Scientist Presents New Evidence That Samples Are Alien Spacecraft - Futurism

MS. BAIRD: Hello, and welcome. Im Kathy Baird, the chief communications officer here at The Post and the general manager of Washington Post Live. It is so great to have all of you here with us today.

Over the course of the past year, we've all heard plenty of both the hype and the fear around the explosive growth of generative artificial intelligence. It's playing an increasingly critical and exciting role in scientific research, the healthcare industry, sustainability, and education. But content generated by AI is also being used in campaign attack ads to create dangerous deep fakes and to spread misinformation.

Today, you will hear from leaders in Congress, the White House, and Silicon Valley, who will speak to the rise of AI, its promises and its perils, and how this moment is shaping our future.

First, my colleague Cat Zakrzewski will sit down with Democratic Congressman Don Beyer and Republican Congressman Marcus Molinaro to discuss their bipartisan efforts to regulate AI.

Then David Ignatius will be joined by Annie Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies at the White House, to discuss the impact of advances in AI on national security.

And next, Page Winfield Cunningham will be joined by Neal Khosla, CEO and co-founder of Curai, a telehealth company using AI to improve access to affordable health care.

Before we get started, I'd like to thank today's sponsor for this event, TechNet. Thank you all again for coming. My colleague Cat Zakrzewski will take the stage after this short video.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: Well, good morning and welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Cat Zakrzewski, national tech policy reporter here at The Washington Post. And we have two wonderful guests today. I'm joined by Congressman Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, and Congressman Marcus Molinaro, a Republican from New York. Congressmen, thank you so much for being here with us today.

REP. MOLINARO: We're glad to be with you. And I just want to extend my thanks to Don, and certainly all of you. This is a great platform. We appreciate the conversation.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: Well, thank you.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And I want to dive right in, Congressman Beyer.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And ask you a little bit about your work as vice chair of the AI Caucus in Congress. We've seen a number of proposals introduced by you and your colleagues on AI, but we haven't yet seen any of those proposals become law. When are we going to see some movement?

REP. BEYER: Well, I hope right away. You know, the AI Caucus was primarily put together to educate the members of Congress and their staffs on what AI is and how it's developing. We had some really interesting speakers, you know, the Sam Altmans and the Jack Clarks and others.

But Kevin McCarthy, when he was still speaker, put together an informal working group, including Marcus and myself, to try to actually bring bills to the floor to pass bills this year. And then, you know, it happened and Kevin's no longer--

REP. MOLINARO: What are you talking about, Don?

REP. BEYER: And so things have slowed down a little bit. And the new speaker, Mike Johnson, it's--I believe it's his intention to stand up this bipartisan working group to make things happen. He's been a little distracted recently, but we're hoping that it will happen this month.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And Congressman Molinaro, do you have any perspective on how Speaker Johnson is thinking about this and what direction he might go in with that working group?

REP. MOLINARO: Yeah, I think the speaker accepts both the need to get the working group up and functional, to move legislation, and also understands about the potential benefit and risks of AI and establishing the basic framework.

But to Don's point, and to everything we all know, it has been a year of unnecessary and unlimited distractions. And, you know, I wish that we were a bit more, you know, advanced on some of these policies. We have digital currency legislation that's waiting for floor time. And like all things, you know, Im new to Congress, but I certainly have watched the federal government function. And I know that my colleague knows this. You know, too often we are too far behind. This last year has really caused us to be even further behind.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And Congressman Beyer, on that point, we saw about a year ago the Senate set up its own working group. They've been having their forums hosted by Senator Schumer with some of the CEOs you just mentioned, as well as Elon Musk and others. Does the House risk falling behind the Senate right now?

REP. BEYER: I don't think we've ever been behind the Senate. Although I think in general, in Congress, Senate and House, we risk falling way behind the American people. Typically, we're always trying to catch up with where the people are. And you know, we don't have the 60-vote limit, which helps us in the House. But even better on AI, this has been remarkably bipartisan so far. Lots and lots of great discussions. I think we all want to avoid what we didn't do on social media, which is basically nothing over the last 24 years, other than make sure they can't be sued. That's all. So, yeah.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And I mean, I guess, Congressman, I wanted to ask you just given we know that Senator Schumer is working on a framework on AI--he says that's coming soon--do you see common ground right now between House Republicans and Senate Democrats when it comes to AI policy?

REP. MOLINARO: Well, I'm very careful not to assume I know what any or most of my Republican or Senate Democratic colleagues are thinking at any given moment, because that is likely to change at any given moment. But no, I think there is.

I mean, listen, I'll use the digital currency conversation, and to Don's point, social media. I think--I think we recognize in a bipartisan, bicameral way we were slow to and didn't obviously create the framework or guidelines in the social media space, both to respect intellectual property, personal freedoms, but also the protection of identities and children. We relate to all of that. I think we acknowledge and know that we have to be working much more collaboratively, which is why, again, I do think we're going to be moving digital currency guidelines soon. And then our work, I think, will advance pretty rapidly. And there's room for both common ground and agreement.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And you both have brought up social media. You've both brought up common ground. I've been covering tech policy for more than five years, and I've heard a lot about how there's bipartisan agreement on kids' safety, on privacy, a lot of these issues. Why is AI any different?

REP. BEYER: I think because of all the things--all these things are important, right? But the AI I think has the possibility to change our lives in untold ways, ways we can't even imagine. We're seeing every week the advances in healthcare, the diagnoses of different kinds of cancer, the development of new medicines. We're all going to live to be 120 because of this.

But there are also downsides. I think somebody very well said the other day it makes good things much better and bad things much worse. And so our job is not to suppress the extraordinary advantages that are going to come from AI but to make sure we address the known downsides as best we can.

REP. MOLINARO: And can I try to explain this? Actually, I'll say this to my 14-year-old son. Social media is the extension of our humanness--right?--good and bad. AI is artificial humaneness. It is very much rapid; it moves faster than we do. And the potential and risk is much--is much greater, certainly, than the social media platform space. But it is an extension of us. And frankly, I got into this space because of the potential that it provides in the intellectual and developmental disability space, neuro divergence, and being able to help individuals who struggled to kind of connect with the world, use the technology to more adequately and more ably to do that.

And so I think we acknowledge the broad scope, the broad potential, whether it's healthcare or national defense, but also the risk--the risk to harm humans, the risk of harm people, and the risk to harm institutions.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And on that topic of risks, Congressman Beyer, what are you most worried about when it comes to AI? What keeps you up at night?

REP. BEYER: Well, the short term and the most obvious thing is what it does to creative destruction of jobs. We know there's been a lot of displacement. Sometimes you hear numbers in the 20 percent of all jobs in the world. Although that's also been true in the agricultural revolution, the technology revolution, we will adapt, but it will be a painful adaptation.

The more--the more concerning things, I think, are about election security, about privacy. I don't much worry about the existential risks, although I think it's always important that we pay attention to that, because some very smart people are worried about the end of humanity.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And Congressman, how about you?

REP. MOLINARO: Well, other than the end of humanity.

REP. BEYER: We can agree on that.

REP. MOLINARO: Yeah, we do. Although when very smart people start worrying about things, we should probably start thinking about worrying about those things, I worry about election integrity, certainly. And to Don's point, obviously, the erosion and the impact on jobs. But just I think that for me the base concern is intellectual property and human identity in this concept that all of that is at risk. And we really need to create the framework and the guidelines to protect ourselves from ourselves.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And, Congressman, I want to come back to that topic of election security. But I also wanted to ask you, we just were talking about the lessons to be learned from social media. Congressman Beyer, you've been working on legislation that would expand cloud computing resources. Are we at a point right now in the AI revolution where we risk just seeing the big tech companies get even bigger?

REP. BEYER: Well, that is a danger. In fact, one of the legislation that Marc and I have done together is the CREATE AI Act. Its been very bipartisan. And it's the whole notion of most--even most companies and certainly universities can't afford to set up the 100 billion--million-dollar resource platform. So, what we want to do is create our own huge database, like OpenAI, for example, scrub the internet of 6 trillion different words, a significant percentage of which were not correct words or correct ideas. But if we can do the CREATE AI Act, we could then give universities, companies, small companies the democratization of AI by giving them a database resource to use for all these searches.

REP. MOLINARO: Listen, without question, again, going back to the social media space, what's the last major piece of legislation we've worked on but to protect children? If you think about it, the CREATE AI Act that Don mentioned provides that sort of broad foundation, if you will, to protect ourselves in that--in that sense. And my concern, ultimately is, is that we will be well too late and that lives will be horribly impacted because we didn't establish those guidelines.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And on that point of the idea of big tech getting bigger, we know that the FTC has been studying the relationships between some of the AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and the bigger tech players. Congressman Molinaro, do you support the FTC or DOJ opening an investigation into Microsoft and OpenAI?

REP. MOLINARO: Well, here's what I think, and it's part of what we're trying to accomplish. So, you know, you have the president's executive order which sort of stands up this sort of broad oversight to a degree, but we've got to legislate. And I do worry at times that the FTC kind of functions without legislative guiderails.

That said, at the moment, that's the tool, and the tool needs to be used effectively. So, I don't want to start getting ahead of an investigation so to speak. But I do think that the threat of and the consideration of using the FTC to at least, you know, hold somebody to account is necessary. But where we're absent is broad congressional action, that there needs to be the legislative function that then those agencies can work within.

And again, using digital assets as a parallel, that's where--that's the risk we have there. We don't have federal standards. The EU does. Great Britain does. We don't. And once we do--not by executive order, but by legislative action--then those regulatory agencies have the function and the capacity to appropriately provide the oversight--and by the way, accountability.

REP. BEYER: Thats a really interesting piece, though, too, because one of the big questions that keeps coming up again, is do we regulate the underlying math and the computer science, or do we regulate the use?

REP. BEYER: And I think we both come down heavily on the end use rather than trying to tell people you can't think. But then the question is, if youre regulating end use, who's doing the regulation. And so far, I think the debate has tended to be with the FTC and DOJ and others, we have the resources right now, the FCC, to do the regulation at the end use case, rather than setting up a big new federal bureaucracy to do it, which we're not excited about.

REP. MOLINARO: No, and I think using the existing tools is necessary. But again, using the crypto and digital space as the parallel, that's the issue. I serve on the Ag Subcommittee on Digital Assets. Yes, the Agriculture Committee has its Subcommittee on Digital Assets. Why? Because when treated in part as a commodity. Well, is it a commodity, or isn't it? And so we have the same sort of issue here. And that's why legislative action, I think, is necessary.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And, Congressman, you just mentioned the EU. They've obviously reached a deal on the EU AI Act. The UK has established their AI Safety Summit. The head of that summit--the head of their AI Safety Institute is actually in town this week. I'm just curious, does the U.S. risk falling behind these other countries and letting them take the lead when it comes to setting international AI standards?

REP. BEYER: I think we're way ahead of Britain. You know, their Bletchley Declaration is just a declaration. The president's executive order goes far beyond that. And NIST has established, we think, the best international standard of what AI should be. And the EU, I think we're trying to learn from that, and especially learn from their mistakes, because at least businesses pushed back really hard on it being overly prescriptive, lots of licensing, lots of looking at the underlying computer science, and we're trying to stay away from that.

REP. MOLINARO: Yeah, I think that is important. I would say that, I mean, first, let's be honest, we are all behind. I mean, it doesn't matter which nation or organization of nations, we are behind. But that's not awful. I do think the standards that NIST has set up and the president's executive order is broad and necessary. But I'll also take this as an opportunity to also state the obvious. It's kind of okay sometimes for someone else to take the first couple of steps. We can learn from both their success and their missteps as well. But I do think that--and listen, I'm new to this space, Don and others have been really engaged--I think we have attempted, I think earnestly, to keep pace. We just haven't yet established, in my view, broad enough I'll say guiderails for both protection, Americans protection, and Congress's base oversight.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And I want to make--

REP. MOLINARO: If I said that correctly.

REP. BEYER: Yeah, you said it beautifully. One of the dangers there was, NIST, whom we lift up, apparently has two and a half whole staffers on this. So, we think there might--there's a lot more--

REP. MOLINARO: Theyre smart, though.

REP. BEYER: They are. They might need a little more resources, especially with the challenge we've given them.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: The UK has put over $100 million into its safety initiative. How much money does NIST need?

REP. BEYER: Not for me to say but--

REP. MOLINARO: And whatever he says, I say a few bucks less.

REP. BEYER: Right, yeah. Especially--more than two and a half people. Lets just say that.

REP. MOLINARO: We can negotiate to five, maybe six.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And I want to make sure that we get to the topic of election security, because we've already seen issues with AI-generated robo calls, impersonating candidates in the race. We've seen political candidates using chat bots already. Is it already too late for Congress to take action to protect the 2024 elections from AI?

REP. BEYER: I hope not. You know, both Ritchie Torres and Yvette Clarke have had legislation for a couple of sessions that would either prohibit the use of AI in election ads and robo calls and the like, or at least require disclosure. And I'm hoping our bipartisan group can come together because, you know, it's both sides have been affected by it, whether it's President Biden's, you know, the fake--the calls that he was making, or Donald Trump with a nice picture with Anthony Fauci that Governor DeSantis put out so.

REP. MOLINARO: Well, last week, it was Trump and Biden playing cards. I don't know if you saw that.

REP. BEYER: No, I didnt see that.

REP. MOLINARO: Is it too late for '24? Likely not. I think that there are, you know, again, regulatory restrictions. The other of course is, we have 50 states that many of them have at least taken some action to restrict. We had an incident in New York with a political leader, and there was a deep fake voicemail message that sent shockwaves. It just reminds the--right, so states being the laboratories of democracy, they can act a little bit more quickly, perhaps not as effectively, certainly not broadly. But they can act a little bit more quickly. And some are both through their boards or organizations of elections or through state legislation. But this is a space that we certainly have to come to some formal agreement on. Because, again, it is--it is about protecting democracy. And let's be--let's be candid. I mean, some of these fakes are better than like the real politicians.

REP. BEYER: And to the notion of the states as laboratories, the more states that do this, the more examples we have of what can work, what might work.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And on this point, though, we've seen when we're talking about social media, this issue of disinformation or falsehoods online really divide the parties. I mean, do you think that this will be different, Congressman Molinaro, with AI that, deep fakes is an area where the parties might be able to work together?

REP. MOLINARO: Well, I hope so. I hope so. I mean, at the end of the day, we all want to preserve, you know, our, in quotes our identity. But again, you all have watched what has happened on the national stage. The minute we think we have agreement, we don't. and I certainly don't want to predict the future of a Congress that often is prepared to expect the unexpected or unexpect the expected.

And I just would say, though, I think that the work that we're doing in a bipartisan way does establish the base for what is common ground on this--on this issue as it relates specifically to our elections.

REP. BEYER: And typically, we've been worried about voter fraud, the wrong people voting, ineligible people voting. Now it goes far beyond that to are we delivering completely authentic but dishonest and incorrect messages--you know, the pictures of President Trump and Biden playing cards.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And, Congressman Molinaro, I mean, right now, Trump is the front runner in the Republican field. If he becomes president again, do you expect him to uphold Biden's executive actions on AI?

REP. MOLINARO: Well, I have desperately attempted to stay out of presidential politics for as long as you will allow me, or as long as I will allow myself. I would expect so. But more importantly, I think because there is bipartisan, bicameral support for aggressively and earnestly moving into this space, I will tell you, whether it's presidential action or not, I think congressional action is the most appropriate, period. That is constitutionally supported, and therefore, I think the agenda will continue to move forward with smart people--well, us and smart people--to address that. But again, I think that--I mean, this conversation is just emblematic of what is a bipartisan, bicameral discussion underway every day on this topic.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: And, Congressman, before we go, I do want to ask one news of the day question,

REP. BEYER: Ask him about the president.

REP. MOLINARO: All I can tell you is Mike Johnson is still speaker.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: Well, the Senate released its long-awaited bill on border security. This is the most conservative bill that we've seen in years. It has the support of the Border Patrol union. Why doesn't it have your support?

REP. MOLINARO: Well, this is what I'll offer. The president--in my view, the president undid actions. He took executive action that made worse a crisis, period. I believe earnestly that the president ought to take the similar executive action to show in good faith that we have the capacity, he has the capacity and desire to restrict illegal crossings. The bill includes components that I could support--support of law enforcement, more streamlining of the asylum and vetting process. I don't believe it earnestly confronts the root cause of the problem. And unless I can--I think the president needs to--needs to show some leadership in that regard. I just feel like we are at a position now where some want to codify a bit of the crisis instead of addressing the root cause of the crisis. I'm hopeful we can get there. I don't happen to think that the Senate should simply take H.R. 2, which is, I would say, the most conservative security--border security bill ever adopted by Congress. We could say that the Senate Bill is the most conservative ever proposed by Congress. The Senate's got to adopt theirs. We adopt ours. We're supposed to negotiate. That's how it works. I wasn't elected to accept what the Senate offers. The Senate wasn't elected to accept what we offer. We have--we have a divided government and a divided country. There needs to be negotiation to some common ground.

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: Congressman Beyer, we're almost out of time, but I want to give you a chance to respond.

REP. MOLINARO: If you want, I can keep talking so he has no time left to counter my position.

REP. BEYER: I think it's sad we have not done meaningful immigration reform since at least 2005. We talk about it every year. We now have something that the right hates on the--on the end and the left hates on the end, which means its probably just where it should be. And I would love to be able to vote for it

MS. ZAKRZEWSKI: Well, we're out of time, so we'll have to leave it there. Congressmen, thank you both for joining us today.

And please stick around for our next segment.

REP. MOLINARO: Thank you.

REP. BEYER: Thank you very much.

MS. MOORE: Hello, thank you all for being with us today. I'm Linda Moore. I'm the CEO of TechNet. And if you're not familiar with TechNet, we were founded in 1997 in Silicon Valley to work with policymakers to make sure that we seize the opportunities and address the challenges of making sure that America is the most innovative country on Earth.

Representative Eshoo, who's here with me today, remembers the beginning of TechNet, I'm sure. We're advocating a targeted policy agenda at the federal and the 50-state level, and we're excited to talk to you about AI today, just the latest in a long series of technologies that America has led.

In the time that Representative Eshoo has been in Congress for over 30 years, she has seen the evolution of technology. And I want to ask her a little bit about that today so she can share with you her perspective. She represents the 16th District of California, which represents Silicon Valley, also has Stanford University.

And we're so happy to have you here with us today. I know you're extremely busy, so thank you.

REP. ESHOO: Thank you, Linda. It's great to be with you, great to be with everyone. And thank you to The Washington Post for sponsoring this forum. Wonderful.

MS. MOORE: So, I want to ask you, in your 30 years that you've been in Congress now, you've seen the evolution of the internet, smartphones, and now we have AI. So, in that time, you know, how do you view the evolution of technology in America and its impact on the U.S. and the world?

REP. ESHOO: Well, I think I've had a front row seat to all of this, and it is--it really is a revolution, I think going back to the industrial revolution. When I first was elected to Congress 1992--the year of the woman, I think they meant it just to be that year--but when you think of how we accessed music, it was CDs, it was records. If there was--well, there was the beginning of phones, but they were practically the size of backpacks. So many of the companies that we are totally familiar with now, some of them hadn't even been born. And some had but they were in their infancy. So, there has been an extraordinary, extraordinary change over the years.

Now music, information is at our fingertips. It's all in a computer that fits in our pockets. So, it's been a real revolution. And I'm very proud that so much of the innovation has come from my congressional district and it continues to.

MS. MOORE: Yeah, one of the things that we were talking about a few moments ago was the fact that, you know, there are a lot of people out there who feel that AI just burst upon the scene with ChatGPT, but we know that that's not the case. It's been around for a very long time. We've been using it in our daily lives, and it's powered everything from GPS to other technologies. So, can you share, you know, your view on the evolution of AI in particular?

REP. ESHOO: Well, very recently I was chatting with a dear friend of mine, and very early in her career, she worked at Stanford Research Institute, at SRI, and that was in the in the '70s. And she was telling me how she audited reports relative to AI. She edited, did a great deal of editing. I didn't know that she had done that. But it was so interesting to me the dates of when that occurred. So, it--artificial intelligence has been around for a long time.

But what's new about it are the large language models and the generative AI. And of course, last, what, November, December, when ChatGPT came out with what they came out with, it was--it was extraordinary. And for most people in the country, I think, it was their first hearing about AI. But it's not brand new.

REP. ESHOO: It is--it's something that I think holds a great deal of promise, Linda, but also the peril. And depending on, I think, what Congress does with it, that we can avoid the peril and enlarge the promise.

MS. MOORE: Exactly, a goal that we share with you, for sure.

I want to ask you about your bill, the CREATE AI Act. I know there's a hearing in the House Science Committee today about that. So, can you tell us a little bit about the purpose of that bill?

REP. ESHOO: Well, when I leave here, I'm going to be going directly to that hearing at science, space, and technology. The CREATE Act and the forerunner to the CREATE Act which was in a previous Congress legislation that I carried, was really originally shaped at Stanford University, which is in the heart of my congressional district. Stanford has its Human-Centered AI Institute, and we worked together to shape the following. First, the original legislation from a previous Congress was to create a task force of experts that would look across AI and make recommendations--this is very broad--make recommendations to the Congress on it. I passed that legislation in a previous Congress, and now the CREATE Act.

These experts really made the recommendation that there be a national AI research resource. And I think simply put, it's to democratize AI. What is held today, in terms of resources, are really the very large technology companies, because it takes enormous data. It takes enormous resources to--you know, to draw from.

We have many sectors in the country. We have the public sector, we have the private sector, we have the medical sector, we have nonprofit, we have academic. So, this legislation is to--it's public and private. But those resources would be available to all sectors.

Original post:
Transcript: The Futurist: The Rise of AI - The Washington Post

"A real-life example of an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election." Vote Not

Officials say they've identified the culprit behind an AI-generated robocall featuring a fake President Joe Biden telling people not to vote a weird bit of AI-inflected political maneuvering that could be a sign of things to come in a dirty election year.

The Washington Post reports that New Hampshire's attorney general is opening a criminal investigation into the alleged perpetrator of the calls, a Texas-based outfit called Life Corp. Also involved is a company called Lingo Telecom, which asTechCrunch notes has gone by many different names and received numerous citations from the Federal Communications Commission for illegal activity.

Held on January 23, New Hampshire's primary ballot didn't include Biden's name because the Democratic National Committee recognizes South Carolina's election, which took place last week, as the first "official" election of the presidential primary season. To work around the confusion, Biden boosters launched a write-in campaign urging potential supporters to jot down his name on their ballots anyway.

NH Democrats were targeted by the offending robocalls and urged not to write the president in because their vote "makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday."

Soon after the incident, the FCC moved to make AI robocalls illegal, and as the NHDepartment of Justice explained in a press release, it's working closely with the agency's enforcement bureau in its criminal probe, which will look into "potential election law violations, consumer protection act violations, and telephone consumer protection act violations."

The debacle has clearly shaken up elections experts, who are no stranger to attempts at interference.

Former federal attorney David Becker, who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told PBS last month that although "robocalls and dirty tricks go back a long ways," this instance is particularly dangerous.

"They dont need to convince us that what theyre saying, the lies theyre telling, are true," Becker said. "They just need to convince us that there is no truth, that you cant believe anything youre told."

More on AI fakery:Embattled Sheriff Caught Posting AI-Generated Headlines About How She's Awesome

See the article here:
Operator of AI-Powered Joe Biden Unmasked, Criminal Investigation Opened - Futurism