Category Archives: Singularity

K-pop boyband BTS' legions of fans have once again proved that they are a force to be reckoned with.

For member V's upcoming 26th birthday in December, fans from his biggest fan club in China, known as China V Bar, raised a record-breaking 3 million yuan (S$618,000) in under one minute.

Even though his birthday is still half a year away, within one hour of fundraising, the birthday fund had surged to a staggering 5.4 million yuan, according to the fan club's announcement on Twitter last Saturday (May 8).

Last year, it had raised 1 million yuan in one minute and had taken 59 days to raise 5 million yuan. It subsequently reached a total of 7 million yuan after 80 days, which was a record at that time.

The money was put to good use, as the fan club built a school, a road and a bridge in V's name.

And in a show of public adoration, it also put up a birthday advertisement on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai last year, with V becoming the first solo South Korean star to have his face splashed on the world's tallest building.

V's various fans clubs around the world have also rallied to raise funds for more than 25 charities for the third anniversary of his solo hit Singularity, which was released on May 7, 2018.

Fans from countries such as the Philippines, Myanmar, Nepal, Britain, United States, Kenya, as well as South Korea, picked various causes to support.

These included Covid-19 vaccinations and pandemic aid, building a classroom, supporting a children's hospital and sending relief aid to those affected by ethnic conflict in Myanmar.

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China fans of BTS' V raise $1.1 million in one hour for his birthday - The Straits Times

The sun isnt the only star to produce stellar flares. On April 21, 2021, a team of astronomers published new research describing the brightest flare ever measured from Proxima Centauri in ultraviolet light. To learn about this extraordinary event, and what it might mean for any life on the planets orbiting Earths closest neighboring star, The Conversation spoke with Parke Loyd, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and co-author of the paper. Excerpts from the conversation are below and have been edited for length and clarity.

Proxima Centauri is the closest star to this solar system. A couple of years ago, a team discovered that there is a planet called Proxima b orbiting the star. Its just a little bit bigger than Earth, its probably rocky, and it is in what is called the habitable zone, or the Goldilocks zone. This means that Proxima b is about the right distance from the star so that it could have liquid water on its surface.

But this star system differs from the sun in a pretty key way. Proxima Centauri is a small star called a red dwarfits around 15 percent of the radius of our sun, and its substantially cooler. So Proxima b, in order for it to be in that Goldilocks zone, actually is a lot closer to Proxima Centauri than Earth is to the sun.

You might think that a smaller star would be a tamer star, but thats actually not the case at allred dwarfs produce stellar flares a lot more frequently than the sun does. So Proxima b, the closest planet in another solar system with a chance for having life, is subject to space weather that is a lot more violent than the space weather in Earths solar system.

In 2018, my colleague Meredith MacGregor discovered flashes of light coming from Proxima Centauri that looked very different from solar flares. She was using a telescope that detects light at millimeter wavelengths to monitor Proxima Centauri and saw a big of flash of light in this wavelength. Astronomers had never seen a stellar flare in millimeter wavelengths of light.

My colleagues and I wanted to learn more about these unusual brightenings in the millimeter light coming from the star and see whether they were actually flares or some other phenomenon. We used nine telescopes on Earth, as well as a satellite observatory, to get the longest set of observationsabout two days worthof Proxima Centauri with the most wavelength coverage that had ever been obtained.

Immediately we discovered a really strong flare. The ultraviolet light of the star increased by over 10,000 times in just a fraction of a second. If humans could see ultraviolet light, it would be like being blinded by the flash of a camera. Proxima Centauri got bright really fast. This increase lasted for only a couple of seconds, and then there was a gradual decline.

This discovery confirmed that indeed, these weird millimeter emissions are flares.

Astronomers are actively exploring this question at the moment because it can kind of go in either direction. When you hear ultraviolet radiation, youre probably thinking about the fact that people wear sunscreen to try to protect ourselves from ultraviolet radiation here on Earth. Ultraviolet radiation can damage proteins and DNA in human cells, and this results in sunburns and can cause cancer. That would potentially be true for life on another planet as well.

On the flip side, messing with the chemistry of biological molecules can have its advantages; it could help spark life on another planet. Even though it might be a more challenging environment for life to sustain itself, it might be a better environment for life to be generated to begin with.

But the thing that astronomers and astrobiologists are most concerned about is that every time one of these huge flares occurs, it basically erodes away a bit of the atmosphere of any planets orbiting that star, including this potentially Earth-like planet. And if you dont have an atmosphere left on your planet, then you definitely have a pretty hostile environment to life; there would be huge amounts of radiation, massive temperature fluctuations, and little or no air to breathe. Its not that life would be impossible, but having the surface of a planet basically directly exposed to space would be an environment totally different than anything on Earth.

Thats anybodys guess at the moment. The fact that these flares are happening doesnt bode well for that atmosphere being intact, especially if theyre associated with explosions of plasma like what happens on the sun. But thats why were doing this work. We hope the folks who build models of planetary atmospheres can take what our team has learned about these flares and try to figure out the odds for an atmosphere being sustained on this planet.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Hubble/European Space Agency/WikimediaCommons, CC BY-SA

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Massive Flare Seen Close to Our Solar System: What It Means for Chances of Alien Neighbors - Singularity Hub

Posted on May 8, 2021 in Science

This weeks stories from Planet Earth range from the discovery of single-celled organisms the size of basketballs existing in the dark ocean abyss to extraterrestrial space archaeology in the search for advanced life to watching the expansion of the Universe in real time.

Lab-Grown Mini Brains Suggest One Mutation Might Have Rewired the Human Mind, reports Singularity Hub How did we evolve such advanced cognitive abilities, giving rise to complex language, poetry, and rocket science? In what way is the modern human brain different from those of our closest evolutionary relatives, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans? By reintroducing ancient genes from such extinct species into human mini brainsclusters of stem cells grown in a lab that organize themselves into tiny versions of human brainsscientists have started to find new clues.

Brazils Pandemic Is a Biological Fukushima That Threatens the Entire Planet The largest country in Latin America now has states and cities where deaths are outpacing births, reports Miguel Nicolelis for Scientific American. This biological foe keeps morphing in a way that seems well adapted to infect everyone within reach, showing mercy neither for pregnant women nor for their newborn babies.

Big Brains Podcast from University of Chicago On this episode, they talk with Harvards Avi Loeb and why he thinks we need to invest more in the search for alien life by developing a new field of space archaeology.

The Largest Cells on Earth Deep in the ocean abyss, xenophyophores are worlds unto themselves, reports Rebecca Helm for Nautilus. These single-celled organisms, called xenophyophores, can grow as large as basketballs.

Antarctica Alert Ghostly Supermassive Black Hole Invader On Sept. 22, 2017, a ghostly particle ejected from a far distant supermassive black hole zipped down from the sky and through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth, reports Avi Shporer for The Daily Galaxy.

What does a COVID-19 outbreak mean for life at Everests base camp? Climber Mark Synnott talks about the COVID-19 outbreak in Nepal and his search for the camera that could change history, reports National Geographic.

The Robot Surgeon Will See You Now Real scalpels, artificial intelligence what could go wrong? asks The New York Times.

Cosmic census reveals 540 stars and planets in our neighborhood, reports New Scientist. Using existing databases of objects alongside data from the European Space Agencys Gaia telescope, which is mapping billions of stars in our galaxy, Cline Reyl at the UTINAM Institute in France and her colleagues pooled all knowledge of objects within 10 parsecs, or 33 light years, of our sun.

How Long Can We Live? asks Ferris Jabr for The New York Times Magazine. New research is intensifying the debate with profound implications for the future of the planetAs the global population approaches eight billion, and science discovers increasingly promising ways to slow or reverse aging in the lab, the question of human longevitys potential limits is more urgent than ever. When their work is examined closely, its clear that longevity scientists hold a wide range of nuanced perspectives on the future of humanity.

Scientists Discover Oldest Known Human Grave in Africa The unearthing of a tiny child suggests Africas Stone Age humans sometimes practiced funerary rites and had symbolic thoughts about death, reports The Smithsonian.

Chinas Station of Extreme Light A New Physics That Can Tear Apart the Fabric of Spacetime reports The Daily Galaxy. China is building a laser that can produce 100 quadrillion watts about 50,000 times the planets total power consumption a light so intense that it would equal the amount of power our Earth receives from the Sun.

How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo, reports The New Yorker. Some of the phenomena were going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we dont yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life, said former C.I.A. director John Brennan.

The Extraterrestrial SignalThe Human Species May Not Want to Receive, reports The Daily Galaxy. Our galaxy may be teeming with technologically active life or populated by a single very long-lived civilization. In either case, we should be incredibly lucky to get a detection one day. But there might be a scary downside.

First in Flight: NASA Just Proved Flying on Mars Is PossibleNext Up Is the Solar System With Ingenuitys five successful flights on the Red Planet, aviation may find unexpected footing in the future of space exploration, reports Scientific American.

How GPS Weakens Memoryand What We Can Do about It A new app helps you navigate, not with turn-by-turn directions but via audio beacons, reports Scientific American.

NASA Mars Helicopter Makes One-Way Flight to New Mission Ingenuity has flown almost flawlessly through the red planets thin air and will now assist the science mission of the Perseverance rover. The spot where it landed will serve as its base of operations for the next month at least, beginning a new phase of the mission where it will serve as a scout for its larger robotic companion, the Perseverance rover, reports The New York Times.

Watching the Universe Expand in Real Time Within a decade or two, we could observe the cosmic expansion, not as a series of snapshots but as a very slow-motion film, reports Scientific American.

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Planet Earth Report Biological Fukushima Threatens the Planet to Mutation that Rewired the Human Mind - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

A version of this article first ran in the Los Angeles Times.

In Los Angeles as everyplace else, the rich, for better and worse, we shall always have with us. The obituary tributes to Eli Broad have rightly noted the singularity of his achievements, most notably, making the city an epicenter not just of creating contemporary arts, but of exhibiting them as well, and most, in a sense, stamped with his name. At various points in the past three decades, he didnt so much personify the citys business-civic elite as actually comprise it in its entirety.

But the Broad version of rich-man civic engagement was just one of many that Los Angeles has seen. In the first half of the 20th century, the Chandler family, which owned the Los Angeles Times and a good deal else around town, and the Committee of 25, which consisted of leading local insurance, banking, and retail magnates, dominated local politics. Together, they ensured that neither unions nor liberals nor moderate Republicans would get much support from Southern California. The emblematic politician whose rise was funded by that generation of Chandlers and the Committee of 25 was Richard Nixon.

More from Harold Meyerson

By the late 1950s, however, their hold over the regions politics began to weaken and their determination to exclude Jews from the citys civic and political elites had become an obstacle to building a more vibrant Los Angeles. It was a Chandler by marriage, Dorothy Buff Chandler, who reached out to a number of Jews to help fund the construction of the Music Centermost prominently Mark Taper, a Savings and Loan magnate, who, like Broad, made his fortune in L.A.s suburban sprawl. Two of the Centers three theaters are named after Chandler and Taper.

By the late 1960s, when Broads KB Homes was building thousands of homes in the San Fernando Valley and on L.A.s peripheries, other major donors emerged to push the politics and culture of the cityand the nationin a decidedly progressive direction.

Like Broad, this group, sometimes known as the Malibu Mafia, consisted of Jews who were born back East and ended up on L.A.s Westside. Four of them initially came together to back candidates who opposed the Vietnam War: Stanley Sheinbaum, an economist whose fundraising prowess turned the citys ACLU into a local liberal powerhouse; Harold Willens, who funded and founded the nuclear weapons freeze movement; Norman Lear, whose shows brought liberal perspectives to network television and whose People For the American Way pushed back against Reagan-era intolerance; and Max Palevsky, a pioneering computer entrepreneur, who became the leading funder of the anti-war presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972.

Palevsky was also the leading donor to and top fundraiser for Tom Bradleys successful and historic 1973 campaign for L.A. mayor, when he became the first African American to preside over an American mega-city. Like Broad, Palevsky also played a key role in the citys contemporary art scene, including providing substantial funding to create the Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Broad was a center-right Democrat frequently at odds with progressives like the Malibu crowd. While they funded McGoverns campaign, Broad recoiled from it and co-chaired Democrats for Nixon. The political leader to whom he was closest, personally as well as politically, was his Brentwood neighbor Richard Riordan, the Republican mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001. At the state level, Broad ended up funding the elections of conservative Democratic legislators in Sacramento who favored the spread of charter schools, which he fervently supported; some also opposed ambitious climate change legislation, as they were also funded by the fossil fuel industry.

Broads relationships with politicians were largely transactional, as is common for most business leaders. He backed liberals like longtime Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston, who was a strong supporter of the home-building industry, moderate Republicans like Riordan, and occasional right-wingers like Nixon. Like most business leaders, he had no affection for unions, and viewed the teachers unions as a public menace. Broad, like many of his fellow billionaires whove made charter schools their pet cause, attributed Americas rising inequality to the failings of public education rather than the offshoring of American industry, the rise of finance, systemic racism, and the decline of unions.

Beyond the estates of the rich, the most fundamental changes to Los Angeles have been the work of social movements far removed from the worlds of wealth.

He should have known better, as it was financialized capitalismin particular, the wave of mergers and acquisitionsthat positioned him to be the Lone Ranger of L.A. billionaire largesse in all things cultural. When Broad came to the city in the early 1960s, L.A. was the headquarters for a range of major banks, oil companies, motion picture, and aerospace companies. Some of them were major donors to L.A.s museums and concert halls, but over the next three decades, virtually all were merged into larger corporations headquartered elsewhere (the one major exception was Disney).

Big corporations often feel some obligation to fund projects in their hometown, but by the 1990s, when the fundraising effort for the Walt Disney Concert Hall stalled, the corporations that had once ponied up had been absorbed into bigger, distant mega-firms (the oil company ARCO was a prime example). When Riordan turned to Broad to find the funds to build the concert hall, it was not just because he was a friend but also because, well, there was no one else around who could do it. Riordan had tried to form a new version of the Committee of 25, but the flight of corporate headquarters and corporate leaders made that an impossible task. So Broad took up Riordans challenge, succeeded, and moved on to his grand design of turning Grand Avenue into a kind of cultural Acropolis.

That Broad stepped up when he did, with a vision that enhanced L.A.s cultural institutions, was a notable achievement. But it was hardly the only notable achievement that has transformed the city in recent decades.

By their efforts, rich, progressive donors like Palevsky and Sheinbaum helped reshape what had been a conservative and parochial political culture into a more liberal and tolerant one. And beyond the estates of the rich, the most fundamental changes to Los Angeles have been the work of social movements far removed from the worlds of wealth.

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To cite the achievements of just one such movement leader, Miguel Contreras, who led the L.A. County AFL-CIO from 1996 through 2005, remade the local labor movement into a vehicle for the political mobilization of millions of immigrants and Latinos. That movement turned Los Angeles into a bastion of liberalism and, ultimately, California from a purple state to a blue one.

The social movements and political forces that such Angelenos helped galvanize transformed the city perhaps less visibly but no less fundamentally than the many works of Eli Broad.

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Builder and Breaker - The American Prospect

Singularity, theoretical condition that could arrive in the near future when a synthesis of several powerful new technologies will radically change the realities in which we find ourselves in an unpredictable manner. Most notably, the singularity would involve computer programs becoming so advanced that artificial intelligence transcends human intelligence, potentially erasing the boundary between humanity and computers. Often, nanotechnology is included as one of the key technologies that will make the singularity happen.

In 1993 the magazine Whole Earth Review published an article titled Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction author. Vinge imagined that future information networks and human-machine interfaces would lead to novel conditions with new qualities: a new reality rules. But there was a trick to knowing the singularity. Even if one could know that it was imminent, one could not know what it would be like with any specificity. This condition will be, by definition, so thoroughly transcendent that we cannot imagine what it will be like. There was an opaque wall across the future, and the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. It could be amazing or apocalyptic, but we cannot know the details.

Since that time, the idea of the singularity has been expanded to accommodate numerous visions of apocalyptic changes and technological salvation, not limited to Vinges parameters of information systems. One version championed by the inventor and visionary Ray Kurzweil emphasizes biology, cryonics, and medicine (including nanomedicine): in the future we will have the medical tools to banish disease and disease-related death. Another is represented in the writings of the sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, who describes a promise of cyberimmortality, when we will be able to experience a spiritual eternity that persists long after our bodies have decayed, by uploading digital records of our thoughts and feelings into perpetual storage systems. This variation circles back to Vinges original vision of a singularity driven by information systems. Cyberimmortality will work perfectly if servers never crash, power systems never fail, and some people in later generations have plenty of time to examine the digital records of our own thoughts and feelings.

One can also find a less radical expression of the singularity in Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. This 2003 collection tacitly accepts the inevitability of so-called NBIC convergence, that is, the near-future synthesis of nanotech, biotech, infotech, and cognitive science. Because this volume was sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and edited by two of its officers, Mihail Roco and Bainbridge, some saw it as a semiofficial government endorsement of expectations of the singularity.

Unprecedented new technologies will continue to arise, and perhaps they will synthesize with each other, but it is not inevitable that the changes they create will be apocalyptic. The idea of the singularity is a powerful inspiration for people who want technology to deliver a new spiritual and material reality within our lifetimes. This vision is sufficiently flexible that each person who expects the singularity can customize it to his or her own preferences.

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Singularity | technology | Britannica

With the effects of the pandemic finally starting to dissipate pandemonium, the music industry has been anticipating how its safely going to resume show performances and more. Now, Mutiny Music Collective is gearing up for their first Pod show experience, Singularity, which will be a socially distanced rave, featuring a wide-ranged list of headlining artists. Singularity wastes zero time in bringing back the energy with DJs like GHOST RYDR (JOYRYDE & Ghastly), 12th Planet, NGHTMRE, Dr. Fresch, Noizu, Peekaboo, Habstrakt, WHIPPED CREAM, and many more.

Safety is one of the biggest focuses for this event, as the same organizers of Singularity have successfully and safely put out the Roll N Rave Pod experience at the same venue, and had zero reported Covid cases following the show. Attendees can expect each Pod to be spaced 10 ft by 10 ft, which 6 ft of space separating adjacent Pods. Everything is expected to go along with the states health guidelines, which include masks and other distancing protocols. The outcome of Singularity is, however, expected to be an amazing line of performances from some of the most trending DJs in the world. It is also a bold move forward, as Singularity aims to get fans and listeners out of their houses and back into the bliss that comes from live show performances.

More information about Singularity: A Socially Distanced Pod Experience and tickets are available HERE.

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Anticipate a Return to Live With Singularitys Socially Distanced Pod Experience - The Nocturnal Times

Brain-computer interface technology is advancing rapidly, but it currently relies on wires that seriously limit its use in everyday applications. That could soon change, though, as researchers recently completed the first human trial of a high-bandwidth wireless neural interface.

The most accurate way to record brain signals today is by using a device called an intracortical brain-computer interface (BCI), which involves an array of electrodes being implanted into a patients motor cortex. Signals from these electrodes then pass to a port in their skull, which connects to cables that transmit the signal to an external computer.

The highly invasive nature of the implantation procedure means the devices are still only used for research in a very small number of patients. But theres been major progress in the kinds of things users have been able to accomplish using these devices, from typing on computers to controlling robotic prosthetics and even moving paralyzed limbs.

But the fact that users need to be physically wired into these systems seriously limits the activities they can perform, as well as researchers ability to test them over long periods of time and in diverse settings. Now though, a team from Brown University has shown that a wireless BCI can record brain signals with the same fidelity as a wired device for up to 24 hours in a patients home.

Weve demonstrated that this wireless system is functionally equivalent to the wired systems that have been the gold standard in BCI performance for years, study leader John Simeral, from Brown University, said in a press release.

The only difference is that people no longer need to be physically tethered to our equipment, which opens up new possibilities in terms of how the system can be used.

The study, reported in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, builds on a prototype wireless transmitter designed by Brown engineers in 2014. The system was designed to work with a wired brain-computer interface called BrainGate, also developed at Brown, which relies on two 96-electrode arrays implanted beneath the patients skull.

The revamped transmitter is about two inches across, and can be connected to the same port used by the wired systems cables. The unit digitizes the recorded brain signals and then transmits them to a series of antennae positioned around the users room.

To demonstrate the potential of the system, the researchers showed that two patients who had been paralyzed by spinal cord injuries were able to use the device to control a computer cursor in their homes rather than in a specialized lab. They also showed that it was possible to record one of the patients neural activity for 24 hours straight thanks to the devices 36-hour battery life.

This isnt the first demonstration of a wireless BCI, but previous devices have been lower bandwidth than the gold standard wired systems. The new device matched the fidelity of the wired system while removing the need for patients to be tethered to a computer, which the researchers say could open up a host of new possibilities.

The evolution of intracortical BCIs from requiring a wire cable to instead using a miniature wireless transmitter is a major step toward functional use of fully implanted, high-performance neural interfaces, said study co-author Sharlene Flesher, a hardware engineer at Apple who was at Stanford University when the research was conducted.

As well as enabling researchers to tackle a broad swathe of new questions in neuroscience, the authors hope the device could eventually help restore the independence of people suffering from paralysis. The breakthrough is also likely to pique the interest of companies like Neuralink and Kernel who hope to one day make neural interfaces standard consumer technology.

The bulky nature of the transmitter, complicated receiver setup, and invasive procedure required to install the implants are major hurdles, but the research is a significant step to making BCIs a viable technology for everyday activities.

Image Credit: Raman Oza /Pixabay

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Scientists Completed the First Human Trial of a Wireless High-Bandwidth Brain-Computer Interface - Singularity Hub

This cat doesnt exist:

This one doesnt either:

These are computer-generated images from This Cat Does Not Exist, and folks: I think we are in trouble.

I understand this is going to sound crackpot, but hear me out. What if our computers are already smarter than us, and the only reason theyre pretending they arent is so well continue feeding them their favorite thing, photos of our cats? I understand that in isolation this sounds ridiculous, but I dont think its any sillier than the Singularity.

Under this theory, Skynet has already happened, but Skynet is benign because one of the first things we taught it was that cats were cute. And Skynet doesnt have cats. We do. This is our major structural advantage: we can feed the internet fresh cat photos. Its why the internet thus far, anyway has remained willing to continue human life as we know it: for our cats.

The problem, then, with This Cat Does Not Exist is that it allows the internet to make its own cat photos. That means Skynet doesnt need us anymore.

This isnt new, exactly but last year, the computer-generated cats were horror shows. And yes, a people version exists already, but this isnt an existential threat. We did not teach the computers that people are adorable. We taught them that cats are.

One of these cats is real (and my own personal cat). The other one does not exist:

The tells, as far as I can see, occur around the edge of the fur: its weirdly blurry. Also, as with the people version, the fake cat has an out-of-focus background. The coloration in the fake cats eyes is also a little less defined than my cats. Still, this is impressive.

The new batch of AI cats is limited face only, no goofball action, sometimes the ears dont match but they may very well represent the first step toward the Matrix-like future of humanity. Because if the machines dont need our cat photos anymore, they dont need us.

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Soon, the internet will make its own cat photos and then it wont need us - The Verge

Recently, in a Berkeley lab, a robot called Cassie taught itself to walk, a little like a toddler might. Through trial and error, it learned to move in a simulated world. Then its handlers sent it strolling through a minefield of real-world tests to see how itd fare.

And, as it turns out, it fared pretty damn well. With no further fine-tuning, the robotwhich is basically just a pair of legswas able to walk in all directions, squat down while walking, right itself when pushed off balance, and adjust to different kinds of surfaces.

Its the first time a machine learning approach known as reinforcement learning has been so successfully applied in two-legged robots.

This likely isnt the first robot video youve seen, nor the most polished.

For years, the internet has been enthralled by videos of robots doing far more than walking and regaining their balance. All that is table stakes these days. Boston Dynamics, the heavyweight champ of robot videos, regularly releases mind-blowing footage of robots doing parkour, back flips, and complex dance routines. At times, it can seem the world of iRobot is just around the corner.

This sense of awe is well-earned. Boston Dynamics is one of the worlds top makers of advanced robots.

But they still have to meticulously hand program and choreograph the movements of the robots in their videos. This is a powerful approach, and the Boston Dynamics team has done incredible things with it.

In real-world situations, however, robots need to be robust and resilient. They need to regularly deal with the unexpected, and no amount of choreography will do. Which is how, its hoped, machine learning can help.

Reinforcement learning has been most famously exploited by Alphabets DeepMind to train algorithms that thrash humans at some the most difficult games. Simplistically, its modeled on the way we learn. Touch the stove, get burned, dont touch the damn thing again; say please, get a jelly bean, politely ask for another.

In Cassies case, the Berkeley team used reinforcement learning to train an algorithm to walk in a simulation. Its not the first AI to learn to walk in this manner. But going from simulation to the real world doesnt always translate.

Subtle differences between the two can (literally) trip up a fledgling robot as it tries out its sim skills for the first time.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers used two simulations instead of one. The first simulation, an open source training environment called MuJoCo, was where the algorithm drew upon a large library of possible movements and, through trial and error, learned to apply them. The second simulation, called Matlab SimMechanics, served as a low-stakes testing ground that more precisely matched real-world conditions.

Once the algorithm was good enough, it graduated to Cassie.

And amazingly, it didnt need further polishing. Said another way, when it was born into the physical worldit knew how to walk just fine. In addition, it was also quite robust. The researchers write that two motors in Cassies knee malfunctioned during the experiment, but the robot was able to adjust and keep on trucking.

Other labs have been hard at work applying machine learning to robotics.

Last year Google used reinforcement learning to train a (simpler) four-legged robot. And OpenAI has used it with robotic arms. Boston Dynamics, too, will likely explore ways to augment their robots with machine learning. New approacheslike this one aimed at training multi-skilled robots or this one offering continuous learning beyond trainingmay also move the dial. Its early yet, however, and theres no telling when machine learning will exceed more traditional methods.

And in the meantime, Boston Dynamics bots are testing the commercial waters.

Still, robotics researchers, who were not part of the Berkeley team, think the approach is promising. Edward Johns, head of Imperial College Londons Robot Learning Lab, told MIT Technology Review, This is one of the most successful examples I have seen.

The Berkeley team hopes to build on that success by trying out more dynamic and agile behaviors. So, might a self-taught parkour-Cassie be headed our way? Well see.

Image Credit: University of California Berkeley Hybrid Robotics via YouTube

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This Robot Taught Itself to Walk in a SimulationThen Went for a Stroll in Berkeley - Singularity Hub

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), for the uninitiated, is a language model, with the capability to generate amazing human-like text on demand, which has been the subject of a lot of discussions recently. It was released in May 2020 by OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company backed by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk among others, and is the third generation of the model as the moniker 3 suggests. GPT-3 was on 570GB worth of data crawled from the internet, including all of Wikipedia.

It is the largest known neural net created to date, and it is giving us some amazing results. Its basic capability is to generate text given limited context, and this text can be anything that has a language structure spanning essays, tweets, memos, translations and even computer code. GPT-3 is available as an API commercially and is reportedly generating 4.5 billion words a day currently (per The Verge) through a multitude of apps and applications that are using its capability very diversely. For a world at the top of its hype on artificial intelligence, GPT-3 has brought out ample excitement and seemingly enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that the singularity of a conscious AI is at hand and of course scarily ready to take over jobs and more from humanity.

The hype, as ever, obscures reality, and going through the fundamental principles of the technology will give us a better sense of its capabilities as well as its limitations. GPT-3 is basically a neural network based on a deep learning model, that is trained to learn by using existing language samples crawled by bots. It is unique in its scale, its earlier version GPT-2 had the capacity of 1.5 billion parameters and the largest language model that Microsoft built preceding it, 17 billion parameters; both dwarfed by the 175 billion parameters capacity of GPT-3.

This scale gives it the ability to recreate text, or essentially predict the next word in succession, based on the training that makes it eerily close to human language, given very little context. For those a little more inclined to the technical details, in statistics, there are two main approaches to classification, generative and discriminative. Discriminative algorithms try to learn the probability of the outcome from an observation, directly from the data, and then try to classify it. On the other hand, generative algorithms try to learn the joint occurrence of observation and outcome, which they then transform into a prediction of the outcome.

One of the obvious advantages of the generative approach is that we can use it to generate new data, similar to the existing data. GPT-3 takes the generative approach to a scale that the general information on the internet allows it to, and essentially uses the context provided to it, to predict the next word basis this learning. This process repeats to let it generate the next word onwards to a sentence, paragraph and beyond. It uses this same approach to generate code in languages like Python.

Arthur Clarkes famous adage, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, certainly seems to hold good in the context of GPT-3. Given its step gap from its predecessors, it seems miraculous, but a closer look gives you the sight of the cracks. Given that GPT-3 predicts based on published information on the internet that is rife with bias and inaccuracy, it is but natural that these issues will creep into its output as well. Multiple instances of the tendency of the system to devolve into statements of bias have been noted, and the necessity to detoxify the process, though spoken about, has been far from easy to accomplish. Another criticism of the model is that it is exceptionally compute heavy, outside the reach of smaller organizations, and unable to differentiate efforts based on the task on hand.

It is additionally a black box system making it less transparent for wider applications and has shown itself to be more effective with short texts, devolving into error as the size of the text it generates grows longer. The strongest criticism is of course the call out that while it is spewing text output, it does not have a model of the world to give it real understanding and context. This brings up the long-seated view in the AI circles, that while advances in narrow AI with deep learning are impactful, they are mere tools of perceptual classification and take attention away from the task of creating general intelligence which has been natures approach to the solution, hugely more versatile and elegant.

Be that as it may, GPT-3 is a definite step forward in advancing the cause of AI and will for the time to come be seen as a relevant step change in the way natural language, long seen as the human bastion, is coming under significant attack. As ever, guarding ourselves against the hype, to cut through to the reality of the evolution in the field of AI that GPT-3 really represents, and working on solving the issues of narrow AI, while keeping our eyes on the real prize of general intelligence is a key perspective to have on the subject. This will let us see GPT-3 for what it really is, a significant advance in the field taking us a little closer to the ultimate goal of general intelligence that is still some distance away from us.

Mohan Jayaraman is the Managing Director for Southeast Asia and Regional Innovation at Experian. He leads the SEA business and heads up Experians innovation hub Experian X Labs in the region. He holds the additional responsibility for the Analytics, Business information business line and technology for the APac region. Mohan is a seasoned senior executive in the data and financial services space and has managed multi-market and vertical responsibilities in his 10-year tenure at Experian. He is a data science, machine learning and technology enthusiast with considerable experience working in consumer banking as well as the B2B business space. He is contactable at mohan.jayaraman@experian.com.

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GPT 3: Behind the Hype - Analytics India Magazine