Category Archives: Singularity

S. Mitra Kalita and Sara Lomax-Reese had this moment when they knew they had to build something with existing newsrooms, not remake them or start new.

There was yet another piece about a mainstream news outlet and racism it was contending with in its top ranks, Kalitatold Poynters Mel Grau last October. I called Sara. We had seen enough of that at that point. I remember one of us said, We have to do something. And the moment is now.

That was July 2020. By January 2021, the former senior vice president for news, opinion and programming for CNN Digital (Kalita), and the CEO/president of WURD Radio in Philadelphia (Lomax-Reese) launchedURL Media. URL stands for uplift, respect and love, and URLs homepage describes their work as a decentralized, multi-platform network of high-performing Black and Brown media organizations. Well share content, distribution, and other resources to enhance reach, expand revenue and build long-term sustainability.

URL Media launched one year ago today. Via email, I asked the founders about the last year, starting with whats changed since they first gathered eight network member newsrooms.

In the world: we are seeing deeper, more sophisticated ways of dividing the country along racial lines, Lomax-Reese said. The Virginia governors race was a blueprint for how to mobilize white voters around the issue of critical race theory. Dog whistles are real. We are seeing increased restrictions on voting rights as we head into the 2022 midterm elections. And COVID fatigue seems to be numbing out the country just when we need to be energized to fight for reproductive rights, voting, health care, education and everything. This is why URL and the work of all of our BIPOC media partners is absolutely critical right now. We need diverse, trusted voices to chronicle the truth of our present reality.

In URL Medias first year, it:

Held a monthly roundtable, Meet the BIPOC Press, on The Laura Flanders Show, which airs on 280 public television stations

Grew to help its members with coaching and talent development

Added two more newsrooms,Sahan JournalandNative News Online

Got the networks newsrooms on Apple News, which is something mainstream newsrooms have taken for granted for years to reach masses, Kalita said. Our BIPOC newsrooms dont always have the developers or audience managers to enable this so this felt like a real feat.

Among URLs 10 newsrooms, theres also a common thread of generosity and openness, Lomax-Reese said. Kalita, who is the founder and publisher ofEpicenter NYC, agreed.

I often joke that our members are the same because we all grew up with extra relatives living in our basement and strangers showing up at the dinner table, Kalita said. I say this because a spirit of generosity runs through every single one of our newsrooms. When I think about what we represent to our communities in this deadly pandemic that has disproportionately sickened us, killed us even, I get choked up. Theres a sameness there but also a singularity and customization by community and platform.

In its second year, URL Media ishiring, working to grow advertising and sponsorship revenue and to add members. I asked the two founders what we should all learn from the newsrooms URL Media works with.

I think all of our partners center and prioritize service to their audiences, Lomax-Reese said. This is a relatively new trend in mainstream journalism right now, but this is fundamental and foundational for our BIPOC media organizations. And this has been at the center of Black media throughout history, starting as early as 1827 when the first Black newspaper, Freedoms Journal, was launched to advocate for the humanity of enslaved Africans. Our business models are intimately connected to service, filling gaps that exist not just in the media but in society.

This piece originally appeared in Local Edition, our newsletter devoted to the telling stories of local journalists

View original post here:

URL Media is turning one. Here's what it accomplished in supporting Black and Brown newsrooms Poynter - Poynter

Affiliate streaming specialist Interactive Gaming Group (IGG) has entered a multi-year partnership with leading Danish eSports organisation, Team Singularity.

Founded in 2017, IGG has some of the most successful gaming-focused Twitch channels in the world, with over 1,000 creators worldwide.

By creating this partnership, the company aims to expand beyond its core igaming streaming business into esports, utilising Team Singularitys diverse roster of over 100 players in over 30 countries.

This partnership follows the launch of IGGs proprietary platform WinParty in October.

We are delighted to partner with Team Singularity, an organisation which is paving the way to a growing worldwide eSports ecosystem across multiple platforms, Interactive Gaming Group chief executive Cristina Niculae commented.

We believe in the power of community building, and team Singularity stands out in their ability to engage a community between content and competition, Niculae explained. This partnership is one step forward towards our vision to inspire the world to play and bring great interactive entertainment to people around the globe.

Atle S. Stehouwer, founder and CEO of Team Singularity, added: I am excited for team Singularity to team up with the good people from Interactive Gaming Group.

Their extensive track record speaks for itself, and this partnership will help us grow our revenue stream and partnership engagements overall.

Read more:

Interactive Gaming Group signs partnership with Team Singularity - iGaming Business

An old leak potentially related to Horizon Forbidden West is getting some fresh heat, as it could point to the big villains of its new story.

The leak was originally posted in October 2019 by a Reddit user under a throwaway account. It predates the announcement of Horizon Forbidden West, referring to the project with an allegedly in-development name of Horizon 2: Singularity. That didn't stick, but as Reddit user Vincent201007 pointed out today, some other details have proven more or less correct: for instance, an expanded climbing system and the addition of a grappling hook.

The original post also points to the emergence of a tribe called the Oshua, who use comparatively advanced technology granted to them by Vast Silver, a rogue AI which is referenced in Horizon Zero Dawn. Vincent201007 proposes that these Oshua are the "even stronger tribe: strangers who pass the shore, searching for secrets" referenced by Aloy's voiceover in the Horizon Forbidden West trailer from earlier this month.

As the original leak has it, the Oshua and Vast Silver itself would be the true antagonists of Forbidden West's story, with the Oshua seeking to enthrone Vast Silver in one of the great war machines from before the robot apocalypse. However, it's worth pointing out the inconsistencies with the old info as well.

Beyond the difference in title, the leak claimed the bulk of the game would take place in the Mojave Desert. From what we've seen of Forbidden West so far, at least a decent chunk of it is set in the ruins of San Francisco, which is fairly distant from the Mojave. It also makes no mention of the Red Blight and the massive storms which lead Aloy to journey far beyond her home in the Rocky Mountains.

Game projects often change quite a bit between the time of their first conception and their announcement, let alone their release, so it's possible all of the details in the 2019 leak were accurate at one point. It's also possible that it was all made up and the points that still make sense now were simply coincidences. Leaks without a clear provenance, such as this one, are always worth taking with skepticism.

An old prototype shows what Horizon Zero Dawn may have looked like if Aloy could ride flying Glinthawks.

Read the original here:

Horizon Forbidden West villains may have been leaked two years ago - Gamesradar

After spending the past five years as president of Ridley Scotts Scott Free Productions, Kevin Walsh is leaving for a multi-year deal with Apple TV+ to produce film and television for the streamer.

Christening his producing shingle The Walsh Company, Walsh will bring in and set up projects of his own, while helping package product already at Apple, where film is run by head of film Matt Dentler and Apple TV+ chiefs Zack Van Amburg & Jamie Erlicht. After getting an Oscar nomination for producing Manchester By The Sea, Walsh joined Scott and oversaw worldwide development and production of Scott Frees film group. Walsh produced over a dozen films in that time, including most recently House of Gucci (alongside Giannina Scott), The Last Duel, All the Money in the World, Death on the Nile, Naked Singularity, Jungleland, Earthquake Bird, Our Friend, American Woman and Zoe.

Walsh will continue his tie with Scott at Apple TV+, where he will produce with Scott and Mark Huffam the Napoleon Bonaparte-Empress Josephine epic Napoleon [formerly Kitbag], to star Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby. Walsh is currently in production on the Scott Free drama Boston Strangler at 20th Century, starring Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon, Chris Cooper and Alessandro.

Working with Ridley Scott has been the highlight of my career, Walsh told Deadline. The past five years has been a whirlwind, and being able to learn at the side of a true genius has been invaluable. Im thrilled to keep doing what I love with Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world. Under Zack and Jamies vision, theyve built the studio into the premier destination for filmmakers, and I know its the right home for what I want to make. To produce Napoleon for them, with Ridley directing and Joaquin in the lead, is a dream come true.

Prior to Scott Free and the Oscar-nominated Manchester By The Sea, Walsh produced Thoroughbreds and The Way Way Back. He started his career in assistant roles to Tommy Mottola, Scott Rudin, and Steven Spielberg.

Walsh is represented by Gregory Slewett of Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.

Follow this link:

Kevin Walsh Moves From Scott Free Prexy To Multi-Year Apple TV+ Producing Deal - Deadline

Being able to beam yourself into a robotic body has all kinds of applications, from the practical to the fanciful. Existing interfaces that could make this possible tend to be bulky, but a wireless electronic skin made by Chinese researchers promises far more natural control.

While intelligent robots may one day be able to match humans dexterity and adaptability, they still struggle to carry out many of the tasks wed like them to be able to do. In the meantime, many believe that creating ways for humans to teleoperate robotic bodies could be a useful halfway house.

The approach could be particularly useful for scenarios that are hazardous for humans yet still beyond the capabilities of autonomous robots. For instance, bomb disposal or radioactive waste cleanup, or more topically, medical professionals treating highly infectious patients.

While remote-controlled robots already exist, being able to control them through natural body movements could make the experience far more intuitive. It could also be crucial for developing practical robotic exoskeletons and better prosthetics, and even make it possible to create immersive entertainment experiences where users take control of a robotic body.

While solutions exist for translating human movement into signals for robots, it typically involves the use of cumbersome equipment that the user has to wear or complicated computer vision systems.

Now, a team of researchers from China has created a flexible electronic skin packed with sensors, wireless transmitters, and tiny vibrating magnets that can provide haptic feedback to the user. By attaching these patches to various parts of the body like the hand, forearm, or knee, the system can record the users movements and transmit them to robotic devices.

The research, described in a paper published in Science Advances, builds on rapid advances in flexible electronics in recent years, but its major contribution is packing many components into a compact, powerful, and user-friendly package.

The systems sensors rely on piezoresistive materials, whose electrical resistance changes when subjected to mechanical stress. This allows them to act as bending sensors, so when the patches are attached to a users joint the change in resistance corresponds to the angle at which it is bent.

These sensors are connected to a central microcontroller via wiggly copper wires that wave up and down in a snake-like fashion. This zigzag pattern allows the wires to easily expand when stretched or bent, preventing them from breaking under stress. The voltage signals from the sensors are then processed and transmitted via Bluetooth, either directly to a nearby robotic device or a computer, which can then pass them on via a local network or the internet.

Crucially, the researchers have also built in a feedback system. The same piezoresistive sensors can be attached to parts of the robotic device, for instance on the fingertips where they can act as pressure sensors.

Signals from these sensors are transmitted to the electronic skin, where they are used to control tiny magnets that vibrate at different frequencies depending on how much pressure was applied. The researchers showed that humans controlling a robotic hand could use the feedback to distinguish between cubes of rubber with varying levels of hardness.

Importantly, the response time for the feedback signals was as low as 4 microseconds while operating directly over Bluetooth and just 350 microseconds operating over a local Wi-Fi network, which is below the 550 microseconds it takes for humans to react to tactile stimuli. Transmitting the signals over the internet led to considerably longer response times, thoughbetween 30 and 50 milliseconds.

Nonetheless, the researchers showed that by combining different configurations of patches with visual feedback from VR goggles, human users could control a remote-controlled car with their fingers, use a robotic arm to carry out a COVID swab test, and even get a basic humanoid robot to walk, squat, clean a room, and help nurse a patient.

The patches are powered by an onboard lithium-ion battery that provides enough juice for all of its haptic feedback devices to operate continuously at full power for more than an hour. In standby mode it can last for nearly two weeks, and the devices copper wires can even act as an antenna to wirelessly recharge the battery.

Inevitably, the system will still require considerable finessing before it can be used in real-world settings. But its impressive capabilities and neat design suggest that unobtrusive flexible sensors that could let us remotely control robots might not be too far away.

Image Credit: geralt / 23811 images

Read more:

Sensor-Packed 'Electronic Skin' Controls Robots With Haptic Feedback - Singularity Hub

Before this, Stephen and Jon had previously worked together in producing the album artwork and trailer for Singularity, his previous album. Describing Jon as a lovely, conscientious and very collaborative person to work with, when he approached Stephen with an initial edit of the track alongside Eileens watercolour artworks Stephen knew it was a project worth taking. The two work together harmoniously, and often, Stephen will approach the collab in the most open manner possible in response to the sensations the music creates. Yet equally, Eileens paintings were of similar importance when it came to animating the video. The handcrafted aesthetic of her paintings was an apt pairing to the psychedelic undertones of the track and finished film; theyre almost dripping in paint, bleeding from the splash of a brush and into the rest of the frame. It feels both small, physical and tactile, hand-crafted but with a sense of something vast and cosmic in scope within it, says Stephen. I was very keen to explore a shifting sense of scale, flowing from a scene that feels microscopic to something that feels like a vast cosmos fireworks exploding in impossibly slow-motion, schools of iridescent fish fluttering by.

To achieve a final outcome like this, of course takes time and skill. Or, as Stephen puts it, a mix of the physical and the technical. For instance, the opening sequence is composed using rostrum filmed elements of ink, expanding and soaking into wet watercolour paper, or flowing in pools and swirls. Then, as the music changes, the more computer-generated 3D world opens up. I created loosely sketched forms as three-dimensional structures to travel through, emitting motes of colour that advect through simulations of swirling fluid and smoke movement, he explains. The flow of colourful specks reflect the seeping of the watercolours in the earlier sections, but now moving in depth as well.

Read the original:

Stephen McNally teams up with Jon Hopkins to create a flowing animation for a song with no beat - It's Nice That

These Industrials stocks are trading higher:

-Planet Labs PBC (PL) stock is trading at $6.77, a rise of $1.13, or 18.79%, on high volume. Planet Labs Pbc gets a Sentiment Score of Bullish from InvestorsObserver and receives an average analyst recommendation of Strong Buy with a price target of $16.00.

-OceanPal Inc (OP) stock is trading at $2.21, an increase of $0.26, or 13.33%, on low volume. Oceanpal Inc gets a Sentiment Score of Very Bearish from InvestorsObserver.

-NXT-ID Inc (NXTD) stock is trading at $3.58, a gain of $0.41, or 12.93%, on average volume. Nxt-Id Inc gets a Sentiment Score of Bearish from InvestorsObserver.

-Virgin Orbit Holdings (VORBW) stock is trading at $1.79, a gain of $0.17, or 10.49%, on moderate volume. Virgin Orbit Hldgs Inc WT gets a Sentiment Score of Very Bullish from InvestorsObserver.

Find the top stocks in the Industrials Sector here.

-Vertical Aerospace Ltd (EVTL) stock is trading at $9.34, a decline of $0.96, or 9.32%, on low volume. Vertical Aerospace Ltd gets a Sentiment Score of Neutral from InvestorsObserver.

-Evolv Technologies Holdings Inc (EVLV) stock is trading at $3.62, a decline of $0.37, or 9.27%, on moderate volume. Evolv Technologies Hldgs Inc gets a Sentiment Score of Very Bearish from InvestorsObserver and receives an average analyst recommendation of Strong Buy with a price target of $13.33. Evolv Technologies Hldgs Inc next reports earnings on February8.

-Singularity Future Technology Ltd (SGLY) stock is trading at $4.00, a drop of $0.4, or 9.09%, on low volume. Singularity Future Technology gets a Sentiment Score of Neutral from InvestorsObserver.

Find the top stocks in the Industrials Sector here.

Read more:

Industrials Stocks on the Move Wednesday: PL, OP, NXTD, VORBW, BZ, EVTL, EVLV, SGLY - InvestorsObserver

Almost immediately on entering St Helens churchyard I could see its most wonderful occupant. Its a yew tree, at least of equal age to the adjacent 12th-century building, but reputed to be as old as Christianity itself.

Like all veteran trees Ive experienced, it is memorable not for its postcard beauty or elegance, and certainly not for its evocation of some Platonic ideal of the tree of life. What assails you is the monumental imperfection.

Its trunk appears to have been shorn of the wilder pubic epicormic growth common to this species, but its still a bristling hogs-back of a bole. The thing surges as one muscular rising stem, but it also twists and ripples and buckles back on itself. By head height, any singularity in that eight-metre girth has dissolved into a chaos of lesser branches, some of which are dead or hollowed out with rot. Above, amid the detail of the fretwork foliage, all sense of human order is gone and what ascends there is magnificence entirely on its own terms.

Yews, perhaps more than any other trees, possess something that gets to the heart of why we love these ancient veterans. Ironically, it is manifest most completely in a yew that stands just next to this oldest one at St Helens. This other monster is but 2.5 metres about its waist, and its upper canopy surges up then swoops down writhing like limbs about an octopus. This illustrates something noted by Richard Williamson in his book The Great Yew Forest: the species capacity to flow and sway in liquid shapes. Yews may be celebrated for wood harder than iron, but they often suggest many of the properties of water.

They are, of course, like all plants, made largely of water, and we see in the oldest organisms both their obdurate, awkward centuries-long hold on existence, yet also the moment-by-moment green grace by which they capture photons of light and turn water to carbohydrate fuel for new life. They are both alive to the light of each passing second, but they store in those archives of wounded lignin a profound story of their lived past.

Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary

Original post:

Country diary: The ancient yew, hard as iron yet flowing like water - The Guardian

Media tech business Interactive Gaming Group (IGG) has signed a multi-year partnership with Danish esports organisation Team Singularity.

As part of the deal, IGG will act as a key partner and will look to raise the commercial profile of Team Singularity.

RELATED: Team Singularity expands Blocksport partnership to launch NFT series

Atle S. Stehouwer, Founder & CEO of Team Singularity, commented: I am excited for Team Singularity to team up with the good people from Interactive Gaming Group. Their extensive track record speaks for itself, and this partnership will help us grow our revenue stream and partnership engagements overall.

According to the release, the collaboration is anchored around Team Singularitys vision to become a global leader in esports, with a strong and dedicated core community. To do that, IGG will leverage some of its own existing relationships across key global markets and raise awareness of the Team Singularity brand.

Cristina Niculae, CEO of Interactive Gaming Group (IGG), added: We are delighted to partner with Team Singularity, an organisation which is paving the way to a growing worldwide eSports ecosystem across multiple platforms.

We believe in the power of community building, and Team Singularity stands out in its ability to engage a community between content and competition. This partnership is one step forward towards our vision to inspire the world to play and bring great interactive entertainment to people around the globe.

RELATED: Team Singularity unveils first Path2Pro partnerships

At the end of 2021, Team Singularity joined forces with gaming chair manufacturer AndaSeat. Moreover, the organisation expanded its cooperation with Swiss-based sportstech company Blocksport to launch fan tokens.

Esports Insider says: Team Singularitys commercial profile is set for a big boost with the help of Interactive Gaming Group (IGG). The media company boasts some big-name partners in the tech and esports industry such as Google, Twitch and YouTube. With the right strategy, Team Singularity will be able to further grow its global community.

Sign up to our ESI Dispatch Newsletter

The rest is here:

Team Singularity signs multi-year deal with IGG - Esports Insider

The Age of AI:And Our Human Futureby henry a. kissinger, eric schmidt, and daniel huttenlocherjohn murray, 256 pages, $30

This is a book with three authors, which is both unusual and tricky because, while reading it, youre constantly wondering who might have written the section or sentence before you. Unsurprisingly, it is a book incapable of entering into functional relationships. You cannot settle down with it or get to know the mind that created it, so as to succumb to or fight against it. This book has an insinuating purpose that is not literary, not purposefully discursive, not even argumentative. What it advances is a rather sly, self-interested, and one-sidedbrieffor how the most pressing issue currently facing the human race might be boxed off to the benefit of you-know-who.

The overall impression is of a kind of manifesto for an election yet to be declared. Clearly, the book aims to seize the initiative on AI so that Big Tech can monopolize and control it, because thats why Big Tech exists. Anyone genuinely seeking to understand what is happening with AI and the related spheres of transhumanism, posthumanism, and the Technological Singularity should probablylook elsewhere.

The questions concerning what is to be done with or about AI, and who will have control of the toggle switch, are about to become urgent ones. After a period of seeming technical somnambulanceAI winters, techies call these pauses in advancementthere has lately been a burst of renewed above-ground activity, perhaps indicating that the moment of Technological Singularity (essentially, when the machines created by man become more clever than their creators) may be at hand. This moment will trigger a frenetic jockeying for positionby governments, corporations, and especially by Silicon Valleyto lay claim to control, to table and filibuster against regulation, to frame the philosophical contract that will govern this new era.

As things stand, it appears that artificial intelligence, while capable of outperforming humans in certain tasks and reckonings, still requires human supervision. Being neither sentient nor self-aware, AI cannot reflect on its own processes. It gets things wrong, mainly due to insufficient, poor, or confusing inputs, albeit less so than before. Sometimes the problems arise from human bias manifesting in the input data. It seems the AI cannot (as yet?) be taught common sense. Such teething problems are inevitable, we are told, but the authors pointedly note thatwhiledevelopers are continually weeding out flaws, deployment has often preceded troubleshooting. This tendency, they concede, is extremely risky. But also, I would interject, inevitable when things are left in the hands of amoral corporations.

For many years, the pursuit of what is called the technological posthuman has continued at the subterranean level, pushing forward without much pause for check or scruple. The discussion, such as it was, happened in-house at Silicon Valley, and largely had to do with how far things might go before anyone started to wonder why not much about what was happening was being reported above ground.

The undoubtedly determined march of AI, with or without the Singularity, will change the majority of human lives beyond all recognition, eliminating most human work, creating a form of supra-intelligence to which humans may rapidly become subject on terms lacking accountability or transparency, and essentially demoting humanity to the role of second most intelligent species on the planet. We have no idea where this will take us, and we have yet to begin any coherent general conversations about it.

It goes without saying that the risksassociated with AI have nothing ultimately to do with the inert pieces of metal and plastic comprising the attendant technology, but with the people who will control it. The most important question is: Who should manage this epoch-making moment?

Big Tech already controls the world via the internet, through data harvesting, intimate surveillance, and censorship. Now it moves toward the final stage: the unity of humans and machine, but not on the terms of the human, or at least not the human race. Instead, as usual, the plan is for things to be handled by placing the well-placed few over the befogged many, in the name of progress.

The three authors of this book are insiders: Eric Schmidt is a former CEO and chairman of Google, Daniel Huttenlocher is a tech academic and Amazon board member; Henry Kissinger is Henry Kissinger. It goes without saying: All three authors are convinced globalists. The idea seems to be to lead the discussion in the required direction, raising the democratic and human concerns, but happily subjecting these to a series of controlled explosions so as to minimize the possibility of their being raised again before we are well past the finishing line.

In November,Timemagazine published an article titled Henry Kissingers Last Crusade: Stopping Dangerous AI, which included interviews with Kissinger and Schmidt.It contained a quote from Schmidt that defines the central problem with this book:

This may have gone down well with readers ofTime, but to the unwashed and unwoke it is clear that Schmidt comes to bury governments, not corporations. An even narrower agenda is visible also, since his reference to governments interfering in elections is designed to invoke the Russian interference lie that was comprehensively debunked by revelations arising from the Robert Mueller investigationa lie sustained by Big Tech. Schmidt thus eloquently conveys that his concern is neither philosophical nor anthropological, but superficially ideological, which is to say money- and power-related. His reference to the antivax movement is even more tedium-inducing. As far as the present COVID controversy is concerned, there is, in effect, noantivax movementjust campaigns by concerned citizens against certain vaccines, and for very good reasons that Big Tech seeks to suppress.

Schmidts arguments, in short, derive entirely from the palette of woke pseudo-liberalism, which is to say the emerging tyranny now threatening the world and its inhabitants.

This book bears the same stamp, albeit more subtly imprinted. The word disinformation, for example, is scattered throughout the text, but nowhere does it manifest as other than a camouflagedapologiafor partisan ideological censorshipfor silencing those who say things Big Tech doesnt like. There is no criticism, even implied, of Silicon Valley abuses in this connection. Nor is there any mention of Twitter's suppression of the story of Hunter Bidens laptop, or of that companys high-handed suspension of the account of a sitting president of the United States.

Yet the authors also concede that In a free society, the definition of harmful and disinformation should not be the purview of corporations alone. But if they are entrusted to a government panel or agency, that body should operate according to defined public standards and thorough verifiable processes in order not to be subject to exploitation by those in power. Chance would be a fine thing. And, what, by the way, does powermean? Governmental power only, it is clear.

The Age of AIclaims to set out the questions to be faced in the coming years of the AI advance, as well as tools to begin answering them. What do AI-enabled innovations in health, biology, space, and quantum physics look like?; what does AI-enabled war look like?; when AI participates in assessing and shaping human action, how will humans change?; what, then, will it mean to be human?

Good questions, urgent questions. Too urgent to be left to insiders spinning on behalf of interests already proven to be unfit to hold power. The committee nominated to discuss or dispose of the pressing AI issues should contain the minimum possible of Bilderbergers, Trilateralists, current or past board members of Google, or members of the Party of Davos.

Some scientists acknowledge, rather blithely, that the moment of Technological Singularity may well result in the obliteration of virtue, conscience, and morality, and even the final exit of the human species from the world, as human beings lose the battle to justify their existence against the claims of vastly more intelligent beings. Against these risks, scientists posit benefits like increased cognitive capacity and processing speed, leading to the possibility of more and more scientific discoveries, but rarely do they get to the question:to whose benefit?The outcome of such questions may depend on the emphasis placed on values, conscience, and morality in programming the AI, and will depend also on the meanings attributed to rationality and intelligence, and whether these are compatible with a moral framework. A super-intelligent entity, primed to maximize rationality in pursuit of even higher intelligence, may decide that human-centered morality is irrational, and therefore counter-productive. Inevitably, as things progress, the pressure will grow to remove impediments to the growth of machine intelligence, which will by definition mean that humans will be first to hit the pine.

The Age of AIissues intermittent calls for a discussion of such questions, and yet it reflects precisely the demeanor that has radically curtailed public discussion over the past two decades. It fails to deal with or even mention the selective censorship practices of Silicon Valley operators, while still implicitly assuming that such operators have some kind of prior entitlement to continue at the wheel even after the age of intelligent inanimacy has moved into top gear.

AI ultimately will either be a new beginning or a final ending. There is a view in tech circles that, since the human race faces extinction thanks to its own behavior, some kind of absorption of humanity by the machine may be the only way of maintaining an intelligent, albeit mechanical, human presence on earth. Thus, this thesis expands, the biological essence of humanity might have to be sacrificed, and the species maintained in the only form by that stage possible: posthumanist man. Conversely, there is the hypothesis that the moment of Technological Singularity will bring with it a radical threat to natural selection: The machine will elevate humans according to values different from those of naturea Superman. Where have we heard that before?

We have reached the upper stories of the Tower of Babel and most of us are coming down with acute vertigoand the only level-headed ones remaining have rather worrying glints in their eyes.

John Watersis an Irish writer and commentator, the author of ten books, and a playwright.

First Thingsdepends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Clickhereto make a donation.

Clickhereto subscribe toFirst Things.

Photo by Virtuo Doc via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

Here is the original post:

Morality in the Age of Machines | John Waters - First Things