Category Archives: Singularity

COMPUTING

Hologram-in-a-Box Can Teleport You AnywhereJohn Boyd | IEEE SpectrumARHT Media, based in Toronto, Canada, andPORTL Inc., a start-up in Los Angeles, have begun shipping portable plug-and-play, cabinet-based holoportal systems the size of a telephone booth. In both cases, a person in a studiothe presentercan appear in full-size, lifelike 3D form and interact with people anywhere in the world where one or more booths are hooked up to the companies networks via the internet.

Helion Secures $2.2B to Commercialize Fusion EnergyHaje Jan Kamps | TechCrunchHelion, as a company, has been focusing less on fusion as a science experiment and more on a more important question: Can their technology generate electricity at a commercial and industrial scale? Some projects in the fusion space talk about heat, or energy, or other things. Helion is focused on electricity generation. Can we get it out fast, at a low cost? Can we get it to industrial-scale power? asks David Kirtley, Helions co-founder and CEO.

Hackers Are Stealing Data Today So Quantum Computers Can Crack It in a DecadePatrick Howell ONeill | MIT Technology ReviewFaced with this harvest now and decrypt later strategy, officials are trying to develop and deploy new encryption algorithms to protect secrets against an emerging class of powerful machines. That includes the Department of Homeland Security, which says it is leading a long and difficult transition to what is known as post-quantum cryptography.

Tagalong Robots Follow You to Learn Where You GoKhari Johnson | Ars TechnicaFollower robots have been tapped forsenseless pursuitslike carrying a single bottle of water, but robots can also carry tools in a warehouse or just-picked fruit from an orchard to a packing station.Artificially intelligentmachines trained to follow people or other machines can transform how we think about everyday objects, likecarry-on luggageora set of golf clubs. Now the makers of follower robots want to coordinate movement around the modern workplace.

Planetary Scientists Recreate Arrakis From Dune, and It Really Is a HellholeGeorge Dvorsky | GizmodoBy modifying a well-known climate model and applying it to the fictional world of Arrakis, a group of scientists has shown that Frank Herberts depiction of a desert planet in the book seriesDune was surprisingly apt, though with some surprising differences.

Why Cant People Teleport?Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson | WiredWhoever said its the journey, not the destination clearly never had to sit in traffic every day and never got stuck in a middle seat on a transatlantic flight. What if you could just appear where you want to go, without going through all the places in between? Set your phasers on stun, because we are going to beam you up on the physics of teleportation.

US Astronomers Want a Giant Telescope to Hunt Earth-Like PlanetsTatyana Woodall | MIT Technology ReviewSignificantly larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, it will be able to observe planets that are fainter than their star by a factor of at least 10 billion. This will profoundly change the way astronomers view the known universe. Today, the estimated cost for the project is around $11 billion, and if its approved by NASA, a potential launch isnt slated until the early 2040s.

Facebook to Stop Using Facial Recognition, Delete Data on Over 1 Billion PeopleTim de Chant | Ars Technicaover the years, facial recognition became a headache for the company itselfit drew regulatory scrutiny along with lawsuits and fines that have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, Facebook (which recently renamed itself Meta)announcedthat it would be shutting down its facial recognition system and deleting the facial recognition templates of more than 1 billion people.

Cars Are Going Electric. What Happens to the Used Batteries?Gregory Barber and Aarian Marshall | WiredUsed electric vehicle batteries could be the Achilles heel of the transportation revolutionor the gold mine that makes it real. By the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency estimates there will be between 148 million and 230 million battery-powered vehicles on the road worldwide, accounting for up to 12 percent of the global automotive fleet. The last thing anyone wants is for those batteries to become waste.

The United Nations Could Finally Create New Rules for SpaceRamin Skibba | WiredThe proposal to create a process for preventing military confrontations and misunderstandings in orbit would be the first major step in more than 40 years. If we dont get this right, we risk getting into conflict, because people dont have rules of the road at the moment. So thats what we want to create, but it takes time, says David Edmondson, the UKs policy head of space security and advanced threats.

Image Credit:Li Zhang / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 6) - Singularity Hub

While getting humans to Mars is likely to be one of the grandest challenges humanity has ever undertaken, getting them back could be even tougher. Researchers think sending genetically engineered microbes to the Red Planet could be the solution.

Both NASA and SpaceX are mulling human missions to Mars in the coming decades. But carrying enough fuel to make sure its a round trip adds a lot of extra weight, which dramatically increases costs and also makes landing on the planet much riskier.

As a result, NASA has been investigating a variety of strategies that would make it possible to produce some or all of the required fuel on Mars using locally-sourced ingredients. While the planet may be pretty barren, its atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide and there is abundant water ice in certain areas.

That could provide all the ingredients needed to create hydrocarbon rocket fuels and the liquid oxygen needed to support combustion. The most ambitious of NASAs plans would be to use electrolysis to generate hydrogen and oxygen from water and then use the Sabatier reaction to combine the hydrogen with Martian CO2 to create methane for use as a fuel.

The technology to do that at scale is still immature, though, so the more likely option would see methane shipped from Earth and oxygen generated in place using solid oxide carbon dioxide electrolysis (SOCE). That would still require 7.5 tons of fuel and 1 ton of SOCE equipment to be transported to Mars, though.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have outlined a new strategy in a paper in Nature Communications, which would use genetically engineered microbes to produce all the fuel and oxygen required for a return trip on Mars.

Carbon dioxide is one of the only resources available on Mars, first author Nick Kruyer said in a press release. Knowing that biology is especially good at converting CO2 into useful products makes it a good fit for creating rocket fuel.

The researchers proposal involves building four football fields worth of photobioreactorsessentially liquid-filled transparent tubeswhich will be used to grow photosynthetic cyanobacteria.

While it is possible to get these microbes to produce fuels themselves, they are fairly inefficient at it. So instead, they will be fed into another reactor where enzymes will break them down into simple sugars, which are then fed to genetically modified E. coli bacteria that produce a chemical called 2,3-butanediol.

On Earth this chemicalis primarily used to make rubber, and burns too inefficiently to be used as a fuel. But thanks to Mars low gravity, it is more than capable of powering a rocket engine there, and also uses less oxygen than methane.

You need a lot less energy for lift-off on Mars, which gave us the flexibility to consider different chemicals that arent designed for rocket launch on Earth, said Pamela Peralta-Yahya, who led the research.

The process also generates 44 tons of excess oxygen that could be used for life support. The one catch is that if the system was built with todays state-of-the-art technology, it would require 2.8 times as much material to be delivered to Mars compared to the most likely NASA strategy.

However, once there it would use 32 percent less power, and resupply missions would only need to carry 3.7 tons of nutrients and chemicals rather than 6.5 tons of methane every time. And modeling studies suggest that by optimizing the biological processes involved and designing lighter-weight materials, a future system could actually weigh 13 percent less than the NASA solution and use 59 percent less power.

The biggest barrier at the minute might be the fact that current NASA regulations prohibit sending microbes to Mars due to fears of contaminating the pristine environment. The researchers acknowledge that they will have to develop foolproof biological containment strategies before the proposal could be seriously considered.

But if we want to make round trips to Mars a regular feature in the future, then it appears inevitable that we will need an approach that makes use of local resources. Given that microbes have already developed efficient ways for turning air and water into useful chemicals, it seems like a no-brainer to bring them along for the ride.

Image Credit: NASA

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How Bacteria Could Make Rocket Fuel on Mars for the Return Trip to Earth - Singularity Hub

Thomas (Tom) Baruch currently invests in early-stage companies focused on resource scarce and climate sensitive markets out of his family office, Baruch Future Ventures (BFV). His focus at BFV is on transformative seed investments related to "free" renewables (solar energy), the digitized power grid (Source Global), and synthetic biology related to low-cost and high value proteins (Calysta, Codexis). In 2011, Tom founded Formation 8, a venture capital fund with $950 million under management where he currently serves as Emeritus Partner. In 1998, Tom formed CMEA Capital with New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and the 3M Company. At CMEA, he was responsible for managing a total of $1.2 billion of capital across seven funds and personally led investments resulting in 18 IPO's including, Aclara Biosciences, Codexis, CNano Technologies, Flextronics, Intermolecular, and Symyx Technologies, and 8 M&A transactions including Silicon Spice (acquired by Broadcom). Ten of Tom's successful portfolio exits were at market capitalizations of greater than $1 billion ("unicorn" category). Earlier in his career, Tom worked at ExxonMobil for 12 years and later founded Microwave Technology, Inc. where he served as CEO for 6 years. Currently, he serves on the board of Codexis,Inc. and numerous privately held companies and public service entities. Tom is a Senior Advisor to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1.2 billion venture capital fund founded by Bill Gates that is dedicated to investing in climate-impactful companies. Tom has an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he currently serves as a Trustee, and a J.D. degree from Capital University. He is a registered U.S. Patent Attorney.

On his appointment, Baruch said, "In 1999, I was proud of the achievement of a 'Unicorn' size outcome realized from my early investment in Symyx Technologies, Inc., the pioneer company to apply combinatorial synthesis (automation and robotics) to the discovery of new high-performance materials. Noble.AI represents the 21st Century's first great leap forward since Symyx in the application of the accumulation of almost 20 years of power law technologies to advanced materials discovery. Noble.AI's platform for achieving a quantum singularity, leveraging AI and GPU computing, will match or exceed in software what investors in quantum computing hardware are only now dreaming about to take place for some period 10 years in the future."

"'Simulation Singularity' is what we are defining to be the point where one can do essentially all experiments with a simulation rather than physical testing," said Dr. Matthew C. Levy, Founder and CEO of Noble.AI. "The bottom line represents a positive financial impact on reducing cash requirements for making and selling products and services of the fifth energy transformation to deep electrification of the grid and the 'Carbon Economy.' I am so proud to have Tom onboard in new deep capacities as CEO Coach and Senior Special Advisor, helping us make a positive impact on the world for generations to come."

About Noble.AI

Noble.AI builds AI tools that lower the cost of R&D. The company partners with the world's most important R&D organizations to accelerate their process of innovation and help them bring products to market faster.

Learn more at http://www.noble.ai

SOURCE Noble AI

noble.ai

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Noble.AI Announces the Appointment of Thomas Baruch as Senior Special Advisor - PRNewswire

Here's another one for the 'black holes are weird' file: back in 2018, a team of mathematicians calculated that some black holes in an expanding Universe like ours can press the reset button on the history of their contents, effectively erasing the past and turning the future into a giant question mark.

Exactly what this would look like from an observer's point of view is anybody's guess. But if it turns out to be true, we might finally have a solution to one of the biggest questions in modern cosmology.

If we follow the laws of physics to their logical conclusions, all the mass of a collapsed star gets squeezed into an infinitely small point called a singularity.

That's a little like saying there are volumes of space that keep secrets from the rest of the Universe, places where physics itself crumbles apart.

To deal with this breakdown between the rule-based Universe as we know it and these 'here be dragons' parts of black holes, physicists apply a little thing called cosmic censorship.

This censorship comes in two flavors.

One suggests there's a barrier inside black holes deeper than the 'event horizon' most people have heard of beyond which physics is effectively cancelled and nothing can be predicted.

This barrier conveniently seals off these troublesome singularities from the rest of space and time, preventing their lawlessness from becoming a pressing issue.

Meanwhile, a stronger version of cosmic censorship holds sacred the idea that there's no such thing as physical lawlessness. So it would require making this barrier disappear and let physics continue happily in some form.

Peter Hinz, a mathematician from the University of California, Berkeley, has his doubts about version number two.

"People had been complacent for some 20 years, since the mid '90s, that strong cosmological censorship is always verified," said Hinzback in February 2018."We challenge that point of view."

Hinz and his team were studying hypothetical charged, non-rotating objects called Reissner-Nordstrm-de Sitter black holes.Theoretically, these kinds of black holes would have a barrier called a Cauchy horizon.

Beyond the Cauchy horizon, there's no cause and effect inside this warped landscape, but time and space are smeared smoothly into an infinite instant.

Advocates of strong cosmic censorship models have argued that these horizons would be obliterated by the singularity with even the slightest deviation in the gravitational pull of a collapsing star.Which should rule out Cauchy horizons in favor of the strong cosmic censorship models.

The 2018 study shows how the two could technically continue to coexist even with such disturbances, but only when the Universe surrounding the black hole is expanding at an accelerating rate like ours.

The reasoning behind this conclusion is pretty heavy going, but here's a tl;dr version.

Thanks to their charge, Reissner-Nordstrm-de Sitter black holes would already have a slight internal push resisting gravity's monstrous pull, subtly countering its time- and space-warping effects.

Meanwhile, an expanding Universe like ours sets time and energy limits to the bending of physics surrounding a singularity.

The combination of these two effects would offer some protection for the Cauchy horizon, giving us both a physics-shattering singularity and an infinite instant behind a line of no return.

In this strange zone objects would be disconnected from their past and have no particular future.

Crossing into it would mean you could never go back, but you wouldn't be crushed into a speck either.

If you don't know what that would feel like, rest assured, the researchers aren't all that sure either.

Physicist and team member Joo Costa from the Universitario de Lisboa in Portugal explained it using a familiar subject.

"Thinking about Schrdinger's cat, we know we can assign probabilities to the cat being alive and dead," Cardoso tells Edwin Cartlidge at physicsworld.com.

"But if the cat were to fall inside the Cauchy horizon we could not even compute these probabilities."

That makes the weirdness of a black hole even stranger than the insanity of quantum mechanics. Which is really saying something.

Since Reissner-Nordstrm-de Sitter black holes probably don't even exist, the exercise is a philosophical one,but that doesn't make the conjecture useless.

The mathematics still work out for typical, neutrally-charged black holes, and they argue it might even be observed in the wash of gravitational waves from colliding black holes.

In that event, we'd at last have our first tantalizing glimpse inside parts of the Universe where secrets are locked away forever.

This research was published in Physical Review Letters.

A version of this article was first published in March 2018.

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These Theoretical Black Holes Could Erase Your Past And Mess With Your Future - ScienceAlert

Published: 11/8/2021 10:19:36 AM

GREENFIELD Andrew Baker is the worship leader on Sunday, Nov. 7, at 10:30 a.m., at All Souls Church, 399 Main St. His sermon is Engendering Spirit. Baker, will explore the personal quest for spiritual identity. Can the fullest expression of our particular singularity help each one of us to step beyond our tribal identities and unite to do big things together? Come and let us find out together. Music will be provided by The Kensington Duo, with Harry Seelig, piano, and Katherine Baker, violin. They will be playing violin-piano sonatas by George Frederick Handel.

BERNARDSTON Sunday, Nov. 7, the Bernardston UU Congregation will meet in person for vaccinated members. Masks are required. Dan Tinen leads the service the first Sunday of each month. Coffee hour starts at 11 a.m. and the service begins at 11:30 a.m. The service will also be on Zoom. For a Zoom link, text your name and email to 413-330-0807.

Tinens topic: Letting Loose vs. Bottling Up.

Tinen said, Many people have problems directly confronting the people or things that trouble them. When is it time to speak up, and when is it best to hold your tongue? Finding the right method, time and place to be the squeaky wheel is crucial for emotional and organizational health; it also depends on cultural factors were not always aware of.

Music will be provided by Lynne Walker.

NORTHFIELD Educating Our Society will be the topic at First Parish of Northfield, Unitarian, this Sunday at 10 a.m. Lay reader Dan Tinen will lead the service. Tinen says of his sermon, A good education forges new, unfamiliar paths in your brain and prunes away the false connections you mightve already made. We are in a world that demands lifelong learning from childhood through old age, but what lessons should we teach in our schools, churches, and in the media, and why?

Religious education will be led by Jennifer Smith. The older youth will work together to bake a take home coffee hour treat and then enjoy some game time together. Masks are required for indoor activities. Parishioners will gather in the church sanctuary wearing masks and with socially distanced seating, ventilation and air filtration. In addition, the service will be cast via Zoom to home participants. To obtain the Zoom link, send an email to fpnorthfieldma@gmail.com.

NORTHFIELD All are welcome to join Trinitarian Congregational Church, Northfield, Sundays at 10 a.m. We will begin worship indoors on Nov. 7. Covid guidelines will be observed. For more information, contact the church office at 413-498-5839.

Also, please join Trinitarian Congregational Church for its annual Hollyberry Fair today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The church is at 147 Main St.

SUNDERLAND The church worship service on Nov. 7 will begin at 11 a.m. The Gospel is Jesus' story of the poor widow's donation to the Temple treasury, and the sermon asks the question if we are really listening. All are welcome.

A breakfast will be served at the church on Saturday from 7 to 10 a.m. Takeout or eat in. And the Serendipity Shoppe will be open from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; masks are required.

GREENFIELD The Interfaith Council of Franklin County is inviting all to a gathering on the Greenfield Common at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 14. There will be a brief Thanksgiving observance with music, conversation and a focus on gratitude. That will be followed by a turkey meal to go.

Our theme for this year is I am not alone. You are not alone. We are not alone. We hope that you will join us on the 14th.

Trinity Church Shelburne Falls (which is four denominations), St Johns Episcopal Church in Ashfield, the Federated Church of Charlemont, The Congregational Church of Ashfield, the Congregational Church of Buckland and Shelburne Congregational will offer a Thanksgiving Ecumenical Service not in person but on YouTube. Three of the churches will send recordings of their choirs singing a Thanksgiving hymn. One pastor will offer a message. Others will offer a Call to Worship, an Invocation, Prayers of the People and a Benediction. The text is from the Letter to the Colossians 3: 12-17. If you would like a link to the service when it comes online (Tuesday Nov. 23), you can write to the Rev. Marguerite Sheehan at msheehan222@gmail.com

BUCKLAND The Silver Bell Bazaar at the Mary Lyon Church on Upper Street in Buckland, will take place on Saturday, Nov. 20, from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. Vendors and tables will be located downstairs in the church and in the nearby Buckland Public Hall. There will be hand-sewn items, a large variety of handmade crafts, plants, birdhouses, cards, jewelry, watercolor paintings and prints, bake sale, and so much more. There will also be a bag raffle, the Monday Nighters quilt raffle, other raffles, and a silent auction. Lunch will be served beginning at 11:30 a.m. (Please be advised that due to Covid regulations, this might change).

Originally posted here:

Your Religion News: Nov. 6, 2021 - The Recorder

Published:12:05 PM November 3, 2021

Updated: 12:06 PM November 3, 2021

An illuminated sculpture designed by leading artists who create light displays around the world could brighten up Shoreditch over Christmas.

Brookfield Properties has applied for temporary planning permission for the spherical steel artwork, Singularity by Squidsoup, at Principal Place off Worship Street.

It is part of the Illumino City Festival, which will lead people on a trail of bright spots as dusk falls. It aims to encourage visitors to see London in a new light this winter as people continue to return to the city and offices.

Other bright spots planned by Brookfield Properties are London Wall Place and Citypoint, the 36-storey tower on Ropemaker Street in the City.

If approved, the sculpture at the 15-storey office block Principal Place will be lit up from 3-10pm from December 6 until January 19.

The block near Liverpool Street was designed by Foster and Partners and has shops and restaurants on the ground floor. It also lets to online retail giant Amazon.

The development also includes a 50-storey tower block of flats and a 25,000sq ft public piazza.

According to UK-based artists Squidsoup, a singularity in maths and physics is a point of extreme variability where normal rules no longer apply and change and unpredictability become the norm.

They said the light sculpture represents a time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

The developers teamed up with Amsterdams pioneering Light Art Collection, which makes illuminations for events worldwide, including the Toronto Light Festival in Canada and Sea World Light Festival in Shenzhen in China.

Other projects include Starry Night in Amsterdam, featuring the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh.

According to the planning application, the LED light used in the sculpture is dimmable, so it can be displayed at varying illumination levels".

The temporary licence will run from November 29 to January 30 next year if the application is approved under delegated powers by Hackneys planning department.

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Singularity sculpture could light up Hackney this winter - Hackney Gazette

Tencent's We Summit, an annual gathering where luminaries share advanced ideas on science and technology, was held on Saturday. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Top scientists in mathematical physics, astrophysics, brain-computer interfaces and intelligent robotics shared their insights on cutting-edge global science and technology innovations at the ninth We Summit held by Chinese tech behemoth Tencent on Saturday.

Nobel prize winners British mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose and German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel along with four leading scientists John A Rogers, Krishna V Shenoy, Wang Chaoyang and Xplorer Prize winner Li Tiefeng attended the summit this year.

"By 2021, it became clear that our practices had to change. We could improve our quality of life, leveraging our new technologies and escaping the traditional constraints of nature while maintaining a new balance with natural forces on earth," said David Wallerstein, chief exploration officer and senior executive vice-president at Tencent.

Roger Penrose, emeritus professor at the University of Oxford, discussed the evolution of thinking around black holes, singularity and cyclic cosmology, and his experience spending decades alongside great minds such as Stephen Hawking.

He and his peers have been leveraging mathematics toward solving large and fundamental questions around the formation of black holes, as well as establishing the foundational mathematical structure that defines modern cosmology.

Reinhard Genzel, professor at the University of Munich and emeritus professor at the University of California Berkeley, provided an overview of his 40 years of work in proving the existence of black holes through observational methods, and obtaining definitive evidence that led to the creation of a new field of research on supermassive celestial bodies.

Pennsylvania State University Professor Wang Chaoyang, whose research has led to the development of all-climate battery technology used by the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics to power electric vehicles during the Games, shared some of his latest research achievements regarding 10-minute fast-charging batteries, and how the technology represents an important step in the development of truly futuristic advancements such as the commercialization of flying cars with fast-charging battery technology.

Founded in 2013, Tencent's We Summit has shared the voices and insights of nearly 80 world-leading scientists to over 80 million people. In 2020, a record 25 million people watched the summit's livestream.

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Summit gathers top minds in science and tech - Chinadaily USA

Four and a half years ago, a robot named Flippy made its burger-cooking debut at a fast food restaurant called CaliBurger. The bot consisted of a cart on wheels with an extending arm, complete with a pneumatic pump that let the machine swap between tools: tongs, scrapers, and spatulas. Flippys main jobs were pulling raw patties from a stack and placing them on the grill, tracking each burgers cook time and temperature, and transferring cooked burgers to a plate.

This initial iteration of the fast-food robotor robotic kitchen assistant, as its creators called itwas so successful that a commercial version launched last year. Its maker Miso Robotics put Flippy on the market for $30,000, and the bot was no longer limited to just flipping burgers; the new and improved Flippy could cook 19 different foods, including chicken wings, onion rings, french fries, and the Impossible Burger. It got sleeker, too: rather than sitting on a wheeled cart, the new Flippy was a robot on a rail, with the rail located along the hood of restaurant stoves.

This week, Miso Robotics announced an even newer, more improved Flippy robot called Flippy 2 (hey, theyre consistent). Most of the updates and improvements on the new bot are based on feedback the company received from restaurant chain White Castle, the first big restaurant chain to go all-in on the original Flippy.

So how is Flippy 2 different? The new robot can do the work of an entire fry station without any human assistance, and can do more than double the number of food preparation tasks its older sibling could do, including filling, emptying, and returning fry baskets.

These capabilities have made the robot more independent, eliminating the need for a human employee to step in at the beginning or end of the cooking process. When foods are placed in fry bins, the robots AI vision identifies the food, picks it up, and cooks it in a fry basket designated for that food specifically (i.e., onion rings wont be cooked in the same basket as fish sticks). When cooking is complete, Flippy 2 moves the ready-to-go items to a hot-holding area.

Miso Robotics says the new robots throughput is 30 percent higher than that of its predecessor, which adds up to around 60 baskets of fried food per hour. So much fried food. Luckily, Americans cant get enough fried food, in general and especially as the pandemic drags on. Even more importantly, the current labor shortages were seeing mean restaurant chains cant hire enough people to cook fried food, making automated tools like Flippy not only helpful, but necessary.

Since Flippys inception, our goal has always been to provide a customizable solution that can function harmoniously with any kitchen and without disruption, said Mike Bell, CEO of Miso Robotics. Flippy 2 has more than 120 configurations built into its technology and is the only robotic fry station currently being produced at scale.

At the beginning of the pandemic, many foresaw that Covid-19 would push us into quicker adoption of many technologies that were already on the horizon, with automation of repetitive tasks being high on the list. They were right, and weve been lucky to have tools like Zoom to keep us collaborating and Flippy to keep us eating fast food (to whatever extent you consider eating fast food an essential activity; I mean, you cant cook every day). Now if only there was a tech fix for inflation and housing shortages

Seeing as how thereve been three different versions of Flippy rolled out in the last four and a half years, there are doubtless more iterations coming, each with new skills and improved technology. But the burger robot is just one of many new developments in automation of food preparation and delivery. Take this pizzeria in Paris: there are no humans involved in the cooking, ordering, or pick-up process at all. And just this week, IBM and McDonalds announced a collaboration to create drive-through lanes run by AI.

So it may not be long before you can order a meal from one computer, have that meal cooked by another computer, then have it delivered to your home or waiting vehicle by a thirdyou guessed itcomputer.

Image Credit: Miso Robotics

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This Restaurant Robot Fries Your Food to Perfection With No Human Help - Singularity Hub

Another election, another shellacking. Democrats are returning to the political reality that predated the quantum singularity of Biden's anti-Trump coalition: adrift, ideologically divided and, as always, arguing over whether to chase swing voters or work hard to energize their progressive left base.

At the root of the Democrats' problem is rightward drift. The 50-yard line of American politics has moved so far right that Richard Nixon would be considered a liberal Democrat today. How did we get here? In part it's due to the moderates who control the party leadership not just because they don't fight for liberal values hard enough (though that's true) but because of an intended consequence few people focus upon: Their campaigning reinforces the right.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote an essay a few weeks ago that's still rattling around in my brain. It's about a topic that students of politics often wonder about: What's the smartest way forward for Democrats?

In general terms, McArdle takes up the mantle of the dominant moderates who argue that the party can't push for progressive policies, or push for anything at all, unless it holds the reins of power. Win first, improve people's lives later.

It's an old position. I've countered the wait-for-progress folks by pointing out that later rarely seems to come. When Democrats win, as Barack Obama did in 2009 he won the House and the Senate and even briefly achieved a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority they choose not to go big or push hard for purported liberal goals such as increasing the minimum wage, federally legalizing abortion or socializing health care. I agree with progressive strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio's answer to the attentistes: "The job of a good message isn't to say what is popular. The job of a good message is to make popular what we need said."

In other words, use the bully pulpit. Lead.

Still, I've never read or heard the mainstream position articulated quite as clearly as McArdle does. She quotes self-described progressive election analyst David Shor. "To me, Shor's vision sort your ideas by popularity, then 'Start at the top, and work your way down to find something that excites people' sounds less inspiring but more likely to help Democrats get and hold power," McArdle summarizes. "It doesn't require Democrats to persuade voters that, say, an Asian American assistant professor has exactly the same interests as a rural, White call-center worker or a Hispanic plumber and that only a conspiracy of the very rich prevents them from realizing it. Democrats merely have to learn what voters already want."

She attacks "the young idealists who staff campaigns and newsrooms" who "sustain a rarefied bubble where divisive slogans such as 'defund the police' can be questioned only with great delicacy, while significantly more popular propositions like 'use the military to help police quell riots' cannot be defended at all." Pointing out that only a third of American voters have a bachelor's degree, she concludes: "Democrats cannot afford to cater only to that hyper-educated class (of young, urban, educated idealists)."

Leftists can easily agree that ignoring less-educated voters is a prescription for electoral defeat. More importantly, everyone deserves representation for the left, "everyone" especially includes the poor and working-class, who are less likely to be highly educated. But her assumption that (for lack of a better word) the underclasses are inherently reactionary, cannot be organized behind a slate of progressive policy goals, and that this state of affairs must be accepted is fundamentally flawed and ideologically self-sabotaging.

We are thinking of pre-election campaigning, the election and post-election governing as discrete phases. Actually, they're highly intertwined. For example, political campaigning is itself a self-reinforcing mechanism that affects not merely a race's outcome but the ideological reality under which the winner must govern.

Democrats, McArdle says, must win first before they can improve things. But what's the point of winning if you go to make things worse?

The above presents a classic example of single-mindedly seeking Pyrrhic victory at the polls. If Democrats abandon "defund the police" in favor of "use the military to help police quell riots" as per McArdle's counsel, they might win more elections. But to what end? Victorious law-and-order Democrats will further militarize policing, increase shootings and beatings of civilians and hasten creeping authoritarianism. "Defund the police" is a tone-deaf slogan, but the idea of shifting resources away from violence-based law enforcement into programs that reduce crime by strengthening communities is a good one. We need a better slogan, not adding armed goons to city streets.

Bill Clinton won twice, but his signature legislation welfare reform, NAFTA-GATT and the crime bill included right-wing wish list items that could have just as easily been signed into law by George W. Bush. With Democrats like that, who needs Republicans?

You can win with a political bait-and-switch. Joe Biden did. He ran as Not Donald Trump, the ultimate centrist compromiser who bragged that he was friends with every Republican senator, even the racist ones. But you can't govern after you pull one off. Biden's attempt to pass infrastructure and social spending bills are being shredded by centrists who point out that he didn't run on policies inspired by Bernie Sanders. I love those policies. But where's the electoral mandate for these changes?

More subtly, but I think more importantly, running right is a lose-lose proposition. If you win, you can't pass the progressive agenda you claim to really want. If you lose, you've validated and endorsed hard-line Republicans. Win or lose, polls should provide prompts for smarter messaging and framing, not selling out. A party that claims to represent the left has to run to the left.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, "The Stringer." Order one today. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.

More here:

Democratic Moderates Aren't the Answer to Right-Wing Republicanism; They're the Cause, by Ted Rall - Creators Syndicate

The idea of technological singularity, and what it would mean if ordinary human intelligence were enhanced or overtaken by artificial intelligence.

The idea that human history is approaching a singularitythat ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or bothhas moved from the realm of science fiction to serious debate. Some singularity theorists predict that if the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop at its current dizzying rate, the singularity could come about in the middle of the present century. Murray Shanahan offers an introduction to the idea of the singularity and considers the ramifications of such a potentially seismic event.

Shanahan's aim is not to make predictions but rather to investigate a range of scenarios. Whether we believe that singularity is near or far, likely or impossible, apocalypse or utopia, the very idea raises crucial philosophical and pragmatic questions, forcing us to think seriously about what we want as a species.

Shanahan describes technological advances in AI, both biologically inspired and engineered from scratch. Once human-level AItheoretically possible, but difficult to accomplishhas been achieved, he explains, the transition to superintelligent AI could be very rapid. Shanahan considers what the existence of superintelligent machines could mean for such matters as personhood, responsibility, rights, and identity. Some superhuman AI agents might be created to benefit humankind; some might go rogue. (Is Siri the template, or HAL?) The singularity presents both an existential threat to humanity and an existential opportunity for humanity to transcend its limitations. Shanahan makes it clear that we need to imagine both possibilities if we want to bring about the better outcome.

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The Technological Singularity | The MIT Press