Category Archives: Singularity

For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that a universe like ours with three spatial dimensions could actually host a naked singularity - an event so intense, the laws of physics would fall apart.

Until now, researchers have only been able to place naked singularities in five-dimensional universes, but by proving that they could theoretically exist in three spatial dimensions, these physicists have found something that could challenge Einstein's general theory of relativity.

If you're not familiar with naked singularities, think of them like a black hole that's been turned inside-out - if you could take all the strangeness that's inside a black hole, and expose it to the Universe as a naked entity, that's what we're talking about here.

No one's ever detected a naked singularity in our Universe, but these hypothetical regions in space are predicted to form when huge stars collapse at the end of their lives, resulting inliterally infinite density - something that our laws of physics cannot handle.

That means if a black hole's unimaginably violent centre could potentially occur in open space, someone's going to have to explain why general relativity - something that's supposed to be universal - no longer applies.

"A naked singularity, if such a thing exists, would be an abrupt hole in the fabric of reality - one that would not just distort space-time, but would also wreak havoc on the laws of physics wherever it goes and lead to a catastrophic loss of predictability," Avaneesh Pandey from the International Business Times explains.

For decades, physicists thought that black holes and their mysterious internal singularities could exist in harmony with Einstein's general relativity due to something called the 'cosmic censorship conjecture.'

The basic idea is that whenever a singularity forms in the Universe, it will always be hidden away behind a black hole's event horizon, which means the laws of physics around the black hole can continue to function as normal.

"If true, cosmic censorship means that outside of black holes, these singularities have no measurable effect on anything, and the predictions of general relativity remain valid," Sarah Collins writes for Phys.org.

More recently, mathematical simulations of five-dimensional universes have predicted the existence of naked singularities that would throw the idea of cosmic censorship conjecture out the window.

That's not so bad - we've never even come close to finding another universe, especially one with five dimensions, so general relativity can go on its merry way.

Except that now UK physicists Toby Crisford and Jorge Santos from the University of Cambridge have simulated a universe with the same number of dimensions as our own, and lo and behold - it can host naked singularities too.

To be clear, the pair aren't saying they've simulated a naked singularity in our Universe per se - the universe they've simulated has three spatial dimensions and one time dimension like ours, but it's got a whole different shape.

While our Universe is thought to be fairly flat, Crisford and Santos's universe is 'saddle-shaped'.

General relativity allows for the existence of manydifferently shaped universes, and the pair worked with a specific type of curved universe calledAnti-de Sitter space, as seen below:

Krishnavedala/Wikimedia

One particular feature of this saddle-shaped universe is a point of no return, where light is actually reflected back onto itself.

It's a bit like putting space-time in a box, and at the walls of this box, the physicists were able to force theformation of a singularity.

So what does this mean for us?

Well, the good news is that no one's been able to prove that naked singularities exist in our Universe, which is just as well, because black holes are bad enough company as it is- space-time in a box as it is -imagine those cataclysmic death traps withoutan event horizon.

But by demonstrating that naked singularities are actually possible in a universe like ours with three spatial dimensions, Crisford and Santos have a promising new set-up for us to find quantum gravity - something that could one day merge general relativity with quantum mechanics as a universal 'theory of everything'.

"The naked singularity we see is likely to disappear if we were to include charged particles in our simulation - this is something we are currently investigating," Santos told Phys.org.

"If true, it could imply a connection between the cosmic censorship conjecture and the weak gravity conjecture, which says that any consistent theory of quantum gravity must contain sufficiently charged particles. In Anti-de Sitter space, the cosmic censorship conjecture might be saved by the weak gravity conjecture."

It's heady stuff, but if the strangeness of naked singularities can help us finally fill the gaps in modern physics,we're glad they exist (in theory).

The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

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Naked singularities can actually exist in a three-dimensional ... - ScienceAlert

2016 was a year of headlines in artificial intelligence. A top-selling holiday gift was the AI-powered Amazon Echo; IBM Watson was used todiagnosecancer; and Google DeepMinds system AlphaGo cracked the ancient and complex Chinese game Go sooner than expected.

And progress continues in 2017.

Neil Jacobstein, faculty chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Singularity University, hit the audience at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summitwith some of the more significant updates in AI so far this year.

DeepMind, for example, recently outlined a new method called Elastic WeightConsolidation (EWC) to tackle catastrophic forgetting in machine learning. The method helps neural networks retain previously learned tasks.

And a project out of Newcastle University is taking object recognition to the next level. The researchers have created a system thats hooked up to a robotic hand, which is learning how to uniquely approach and pick up different objects. (Think about the impact this technology may have on assembly lines.)

These are just two of a number of developments and advances moving AI ahead in 2017.

For those worried AI has become overhyped, we sat down with Jacobstein after his talk to hear firsthand about progress in the field of AI, the practical applications of the technology that hes most excited about, and how we can prepare society for a future of AI.

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Watch: Where AI Is Today, and Where It's Going in the Future - Singularity Hub

Technology has a funny habit: just when you think it cant get better, it does. Take 3D printing. The ability for a machine to spit out soft material in a precise pattern that almost simultaneously hardens into an actual thing you can use is pretty incredible.

But theres room for improvement. To date, low production speed and quality have limited 3D printing to prototyping. Now, additive manufacturing companyCarbonaims tochange all that with a fast 3D printer capable of printing finished products.

[This is] what we've been dreaming of for 30 yearsto go directly from design...to end use parts, said Valerie Buckingham at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summit in Boston last week. That truly is what we consider the future of manufacturing.

In short, for polymer parts, Carbon thinks 3D printing can finally break into mass manufacturing and bring all the benefits of going digital along with it.

Seeing their mind-bending technology in action is like something out of science fiction. Buckingham, who's VP of Marketing at Carbon, described the tech as a digital light projector shining through an oxygen-permeable optics layer a little bit like a contact lens, into a vat of UV-sensitive liquid programmable resin above.

Translation: light is shined into a big bucket of ooze and makes something thats then lifted out of the ooze to be used in our everyday lives.

Since coming out of stealth in 2015, Carbon has raised $221 million in venture capital, and the company just unveiled its SpeedCell system in March. The system features printers that have twice the build area of the previous model and can interface with robots.

Buckingham shared her observations about the current state of additive manufacturing and the emerging trends she thinks are most important for product companies. Below are three focal points Carbon has centered its technology and processes around, and theyre points well likely see take root across the broader manufacturing spectrum in the months and years ahead.

Traditional 3D printing creates an object by depositing material layer by layer. But those same layers can cause mechanical weaknesses. Carbons layer-free method, said Buckingham, makes products that have the same mechanical characteristics in all three dimensions and have great surface finish and resolution, the kind youd expect from final quality polymer parts.

3D printing can be thought of as essentially stacking many tiny parts of a material on top of itself then having those parts stick together. Carbons continuous liquid interface production technologyCLIP for shortis like taking one big chunk of that material and chiseling it into the same product.

What's really important, Buckingham added, is that we can do it incredibly quickly. If youve ever watched a 3D printer do its thing, fast is probably not a word youd use to describe it. Carbons CEO says the CLIP method is 25 to 100 times faster than other industrial 3D printers.

In a comparison to how little the manufacturing sector has changed with digitization compared to most every other aspect of our lives, Buckingham noted that most production processes still involve design followed by prototyping and analog tooling. Carbons printers are one of the first technologies to change that and go directly from design to end use parts.

One of the critical factors of this technology is that it really places the designer at the center. And it makes it possible for them to manifest their vision directly into the world without a lot of these constraints, Buckingham said.

The company announced a partnership with Adidas just last month, in which Carbons technology will be used to make the mid-soles for a line of shoes called Futurecraft. The athletic wear company has expressed interest in mass-customizing its shoes; a person who weighs 120 pounds and wears a size 9 needs a differently-built shoe than a 180-pound size 9.

We've announced we're going to be making 100,000 pairs of these shoes next year, Buckingham said. That's a really big deal. That's not a science project. That's real final part production.

Products used to be a physical, static output of a process. But additive technology is changing that, and leading companies are figuring out how to design for the process. By digitizing production, you cut out the middle man and go from design to end use is, Buckingham said.

Finally, Buckingham emphasized the importance of provenance, or knowing exactly where a product comes from. This is crucial for highly-regulated industries like medical products. Parts created with additive technology are going to carry their born-on data with them, or, as Buckingham put it, You're going to be able to know when it was made, what the resin batch was, who the operator was, and how long it sat in the loading dock for.

That means product failures wont require mass recalls, where companies essentially guess what went wrong and end up wasting thousands of units of product so as to err on the side of playing it safe.

Embedded provenance data will let manufacturers pinpoint what went wrong, when, and where, making it easier to identify and solve the problem. This is going to really change how we think about risk and data when it comes to physical goods, Buckingham said.

Image Credit: Carbon/YouTube

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Carbon's Bold Mission to Finally Dematerialize Manufacturing - Singularity Hub

If terrorism is a crime against humanity, then it shouldnt matter where an atrocity takes place. We should feel as wounded if the atrocity takes place in Madras or Manila as if it happens in Manchester. And yet we know its not like that. Bomb attacks, random acts of mindful violence, have an acute sense of place.

We know those cafes in Paris. We see the news footage and imagine ourselves having a caf creme and a pastry there. We feel the pain, and it stays with us. The bus station in Baghdad, or the shopping centre in Nairobi are remote to us, in every sense of the word. We watch, momentarily stunned, and move on quite quickly. We cant help it: we understand that the right to live in peace is universal, but when a truly terrible action is visited on a place thats familiar to us, the anger that wells up, the despair that pervades, is something we just cant control.

On listening to accounts of that awful night at the Manchester Arena, I could picture the very streets those terrified people were running down, away from the scene of the carnage, I know the hotels in which they sought refuge, I could put faces to the Mancunian voices who talked about offering lifts home and rooms for the night. I imagined the CIS building, the citys first skyscraper and our proud symbol of the swinging Sixties, looking down impassively on the mayhem. That familiarity, together with the glottal-stop accents of the young people being interviewed, was heart-wrenching in the extreme.

The morning after the incident on Westminster Bridge in March, I wrote in this newspaper that the idea of Londoners standing shoulder to shoulder was a romantic fiction. The capital is an atomised, diverse, individualistic and materially imbalanced city, and the concept of a Londoner is a moot one anyway. Its a polyglot city like few others, and we all come to London for a mixture of reasons, but mainly in search of employment.

I have lived in London many more years than I lived in Manchester, but when someone asks where I come from, I always reply Manchester. And the city of my birth, also racially diverse and with its own share of urban blight, really does have a definable character, a personality, and a civic pride that is actually quite humbling.

There issuch a thing as a Mancunian, in all shades and colours and persuasions, and in the ensuing days, as the gruesome story of Monday night unfolds, well hear an awful lot more about how many saw this as an assault on their city, its values, its sense of fun, its amiability, its brotherhood. Thats why people didnt have to think twice about offering assistance: its what we do. And what many Mancunians will know now as Liverpudlians have discovered, repeatedly is that there is a flip side to that sense of belonging: there are occasions when it hurts, too.

Im not saying that Manchester is unique in these respects, but its history, from its importance as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution to its cultural significance in contemporary Britain, provides the city with a self-assurance, a swagger even, that gives it a certain singularity.

There is a lot of guff talked about individual places having a spirit, but thats indeed what Manchester has. You can see it on the streets of the city every Saturday night, when young people, dressed as if theyre in Ibiza, queue up in search of good times. You can take it from our lyrical expressions of the vagaries of life (and Heaven knows were all miserable now). You can experience it in ordinary, everyday connections with strangers, ready with a joke, and very hard to impress. And you can extract it from what the Bishop of Manchester said the morning after: The key to Manchesters success over centuries, he said, is that its a vibrant city where people have come to learn to trust each other and to live together.

That spirit has not been crushed by the events of Monday night. If anything, it is shown up in an even sharper relief against the barbarity of the offence. Manchester has been here before, of course. In June 1996, the biggest bomb in Britain since the end of the war was detonated by the IRA in the city centre, tearing apart the Arndale Shopping Centre, but miraculously not taking any lives. In the subsequent years, as Manchester rose from the wreckage and was transformed into the snazzy, modern centre it is today, Mancunians would joke that the IRA did us a favour in allowing us to rebuild the city.

There will be no jokes in years to come about what happened in the Manchester Arena this week. Children have not been allowed to grow up. Families are scarred for ever. The one solace relatively tiny though it is is that the wheels and motors that propel this great city, and the people who imbibe its spirit, will surely overcome.

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Mancunians in all their singularity and swagger have already prevailed against terror - iNews

Not long ago, your parents mightve noticed a kid staring at a smartphone in their front yard. There wasnt anything there. The kid was justhanging out. What they didnt know? Said kid was gazing through a digital window and seeing a mythical beast in their well-manicured roses.

This youngster was playing an augmented reality smartphone sensation called Pokmon Go that swept the online masses before fading back. But dont confuse ephemerality for significance. Pokmon Gos simple yet viral appeal suggests AR is going to be huge.

The reason I'm inspired by this? I don't think Pokemon Go is the pinnacle of AR. It's kind of like the Solitaire for Windows 3. It's a killer app at a certain time, a big milestone, John Werner said at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summit in Boston.

Formerly an innovator at MIT Media Lab, Werner is now VP of strategic partnerships at augmented reality company Meta, the maker of a head-mounted AR display of the same name.

Since the beginning, Werner said, weve interacted with computers in a number of different ways, each iteration simplifying and improving on what came before it. First, it was punch cards. Later, it was the keyboard, mouse, and graphical user interface. More recently mobile technology brought us touchscreens.

Whats next?

Augmented reality is part of a new wave of tech that includes the related (and sometimes confused) fields of virtual reality and mixed reality. And the biggest names in the industry, from Google to Microsoft, are jumping into all of these areas for good reason. This is the birth of the next great computer interface, according to Werner. But it doesnt actually have a name yet.

If you look at the players that did well on the different waves, you see a number of them going into VR, AR, MR, Werner said. And I think those are just placeholders. We haven't figured out what to really call this next wave of interacting with technology.

Augmented reality isnt all that new, Werner pointed out. Weve been overlaying digital information on the real world for a while. Pilots use it to keep track of digital gauges, and NFL broadcasts include a digital yellow line on the field to show how far teams have to go for a first down.

But his vision goes far beyond Pokmon Go and yellow lines on a football field.

The rapidly falling cost and convergence of the underlying technologies are conspiring to make AR more usable, comfortable, and suitable for the mainstream. Most importantly, whereas AR is now largely constrained to 2D screens, its becoming immersive and wearable.

When it comes of age, Werner thinks itll merge with VR and change how we use computers.

People see AR and VR as two separate things, Werner said. But eventually, it's going to converge. And VR's going to be a feature of this strip of glass where you can just dive into something [for full immersion] or you can pull back.

You can see an early example of this futuristic vision by looking at his companys Meta 2.

Werner described the device as a light AR headset with a fully immersive 90-degree field of view. Theyre striving to make an operating system with zero learning curve. Expected applications include product design, as a new partnership with Dell, Nike, and Ultrahaptics shows off.

The Meta 2 isnt the only head-mounted augmented reality device in the works. Theres also Microsofts HoloLens, which is being sold as a developers kit for $3,000. The much-hyped and secretive Magic Leap has attracted some $1.4 billion. Most of whats known about the device is via insider accounts and rumor, and theres no definite date for when it will go public.

But if Google Glass, an early step toward rudimentary augmented reality, taught us anything, its that its easy to get carried away and dream of the faraway potential of a new interface technology before its ready. This is standard hype-curvelore in technology.

Virtual reality, for example, is further along than augmented reality. There are now affordable, consumer VR devices on the market. But the excitement around VR has cooled. Next steps will be more practical as it matures and finds real market appeal.

This cycle applies to head-mounted augmented reality too. Only for AR, its earlier still.

The wearable AR devices weve seen are yet a bit clunky, and they arent likely to sweep away todays computer interfaces right away. But they are light years beyond the earliest devices from decades ago. Werner noted how one of the first VR devices, called the Sword of Damocles, was so heavy it would kill the user should it, heaven forbid, come loose of its moorings.

Today, AR devices are light enough to wear on your head, without breaking it. And there are a few converging forces that Werner thinks will accelerate development in coming years. These include advanced voice recognition (think Amazon Echo and Google Now), real-time modeling of three-dimensional spaces (Google Tango), ever-faster connection speeds (5G), laser-based displays (instead of pixel-based screens), and AI.

The end result as Werner sees it is an experience more like interacting with the real world, in which our computers adapt to us, instead of the other way around.

The way our keyboards are arranged, he said, descends from movable type, a centuries-old technology. But this is how we type and tweet.

"We're held hostage by this arrangement...Our eye can take in 10^8 bits per second of information, and yet this is how we're communicating with technology."

Turns out Werner isnt the only one thinking about how AR and VR will merge. Google featured both technologies at its annual Google I/O developers conference last week.

In a blog post before the conference, head of Google VR Clay Bavor mused on how the two relate. He suggested AR and VR are points on a spectrum between the real and digital worlds. On one end, its all real, on the other its all virtual. And in between, its both.

He suggested a few namescomputing with presence, physical computing, perceptual computing, mixed reality, and immersive realitybefore landing on immersive computing. Of course, just because Google calls it immersive computing doesnt mean the name will stick. Perhaps well cycle through other options, or simply expand what we have to include the whole category.

Whats clear, Bavor writes, is that through history, computer interfaces have become more intuitive by removing layers of abstraction. As a result, they've become more accessible to more people doing more things. AR and VR will make the digital world more like the world we evolved to interact with. How long it will take isnt clear, but the trend is.

With immersive computing, instead of staring at screens or constantly checking our phones, well hold our heads up to the real and virtual worlds around us, Bavor writes. Youll have access to information in context, with computing woven seamlessly into your environment. Its the inevitable next step in the arc of computing interfaces.

Image Credit: Dell/YouTube

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The Next Great Computer Interface Is EmergingBut It Doesn't Have a Name Yet - Singularity Hub

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Ask Ethan: What Happens When A Black Hole's Singularity Evaporates? Forbes It's hard to imagine, given the full diversity of forms that matter takes in this Universe, that for millions of years, there were only neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium gas. It's perhaps equally hard to imagine that someday, quadrillions of years ...

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Ask Ethan: What Happens When A Black Hole's Singularity Evaporates? - Forbes

Circumstances are making it hard to see what's in the little plastic cylinder molecular biologist Meow-Ludo Meow-Meow is waving in his hand, with somewhat ironically given his moniker the air of an exuberant puppy.

For starters we're on Skype and his room in Sydney's inner west is dimly lit. Then there's his vaping smoke wafting over everything.

"That," says Meow-Meow, with a triumphant rattle of the tube as the mist clears, "is an Opal card for going on public transport."

"But I've got to get it implanted first."

Meow-Meow, Bachelor of Molecular Genetics, former Science Party candidate and co-founder of Sydney's Biofoundry is a grinder, someone embedded deep in the Mad Max-esque world of biohacking for whom putting Sydney's equivalent of the Myki under your skin is just one more step on the road to transhumanism.

"The rules say it remains the property of CityRail," says Meow, fingering the chip in a bottle. "I'm worried they could confiscate it now. But if it's under my skin, good f---ing luck to them."

Meow-Meow already has a chip in his thumb that can open a door and tell his smart phone it's him, but there's a new venture in the world of implants that makes Meow's invisible hardware seem tame, and it's brought to you by that entrepreneur with a habit of making mad science real.

In March the Wall Street Journal breathlessly announced that Elon Musk, billionaire purveyor of Tesla cars and Powerwall batteries, and whose SpaceX outfit recently brought Mars colonisation closer with the first ever launch of a "re-usable" rocket, was hiring for a new company.

Elon Musk predicts AI will surpass human intelligence "by a lot" but a brain computer interface could help us keep up. Photo: AP

Neuralink will build a brain computer interface (BCI) or "neural lace" that will eventually "upload thoughts" to the internet but, along the way, deftly heal those with epilepsy, Parkinson's and depression, and restore function to people with stroke and brain injury for good measure.

Neural lace, says Musk, will add a digital layer to the brain that can wirelessly beam data from our noggins to connected devices and the cloud.

Anyone else would be accused of overreach, but Musk's track record commands a certain respect, and the job descriptions on his Neuralink website are sufficiently techno-opaque to suggest a very advanced team.

Elon Musk's Neuralink aims to build a brain computer interface that can "upload thoughts" to the internet. Photo: Susana Gonzalez

So it's not unicorn-chasing to wonder why Musk thinks it's a good idea to re-engineer our grey matter and, for that matter, just how the finished product will work.

The back story is that Musk sides with the transhumanist sentiment that, to steal futurist Ray Kurzweil's book title, "the singularity is near".

Futurist Ray Kurzweil warns of the singularity the point at which artificial intelligence starts teaching itself. Photo: Trevor Collens

That's the point where AI starts teaching itself, prompting an exponential leap in machine smarts that will make humans look, in Meow's words, "like the Amish", and in Musk's parlance, like "house cats".

Actually, it's worse than that.

Here's what Musk said in Tim Urban's epic April blog post on Neuralink: "A house cat's a good outcome, by the way.

"AI is obviously going to surpass human intelligence by a lot There's some risk at that point that ... the AI goes rogue."

Neural lace will, according to Musk, head off AI armageddon by plugging us into evolving machine intelligence and keeping us ahead of the game.

Of course, as Maureen Dowd noted recently in Vanity Fair, Musk's dark prophecy could well be tinged with the entrepreneur's supreme marketing flair hi-tech cross-branding with a thought uploader won't hurt Tesla's image one bit.

Even sceptics, however, can't ignore feats such as DeepMind's (the Google AI system) 2016 trouncing of world champion Lee Sedol in AlphaGo, the board game many thought was an impregnable bastion of human intuition.

But if Musk is really concerned about an AI uprising, why start out by curing a bunch of sundry, albeit devastating illnesses, rather than crack on with supersizing human brain power?

The reasons are deeply practical. To implant an experimental device you need approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, and that's only going to happen if you're treating a serious illness.

Moreover, as Gerwin Schalk, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Adaptive Neurotechnologies in Albany, New York, told me, each experiment with a brain implant for human use costs tens of millions. And Musk is, after all, a businessman.

"At some point in the future, brain implants will fundamentally change humanity. But at present, the sexy stuff is not it," says Schalk, referring to the scant foreseeable returns on implantable superintelligence.

"Even Elon is not going to have the amount of resources that it would take to basically ignore economic realities."

Gerwin Schalk of the National Centre for Adaptive Neurotechnologies says treating disease is the first goal. Photo: Mike Wren

Those realities lie firmly within the perimeter of disease, believes Schalk, who sees stroke rehabilitation as a frontrunner application for any commercially viable neural lace.

So what could Musk's lace possibly look like?

The basic brief for any BCI is to record the electrical activity of brain cells and sometimes squirt back a little voltage to stimulate those same cells.

EEG records brain waves from outside the skull, but high fidelity means getting up close, generally by draping an array of 100-200 electrodes over the dura, the brain's hard outer layer, or plunging electrodes directly into the squishy stuff.

These deeper brain dives have, already, produced some astounding results.

Deep brain stimulation has helped people with uncontrollable tremor from Parkinson's hold a cup of coffee. In epilepsy, the NeuroPace device senses an impending fit and heads it off with a judicious surge of current. A DARPA program culminated in a paralysed woman using her thoughts to control a robotic arm and gently shake hands with an incredulous interviewer.

And a February article reports that a woman paralysed with Lou Gehrig's disease used the BrainGate device to type at a record eight words per minute. With her thoughts.

There is, however, a big problem with sticking things in the brain.

"You have an electrode that's hard and artificial, it's made of metal and it's spiky. And on the other side is the brain that's soft, chemical, electrical and pliable. Those two things don't work together all that great," says Schalk, with neuroscientist deadpan.

Brains get traumatised, scar tissue forms around electrodes, the signal degrades, the body rejects the device, and so on.

Which is why the work of a young Melbourne neurologist named Tom Oxley has the tech world slightly aquiver.

Last year Oxley published a groundbreaking proof of concept paper in Nature Biotechnology for a BCI that could record hi-definition brain activity without having to open the skull.

His technique was to wend a device, the "Stentrode," up the jugular of anaesthetised sheep and plonk it in one of the large veins that lies against the brain, where it sat happily for up to 190 days as the sheep, now awake, went about their business.

In April, Oxley's company Synchron nabbed $US10 million in funding for a first-in-human trial slated to start in Melbourne next year, with the ultimate aim of having paralysed people walk again by controlling an exoskeleton with their thoughts.

Oxley's short term goals are more modest, however, and focus on software to decode thoughts and let people drive a wheelchair or control heating, cooling and appliances in the home.

Oxley's take is decidedly more pragmatic than Musk's "thought upload" mantra.

"You can get a bit philosophical about it but the thoughts in themselves are only useful in so much as they are recognised by the computer reading the program, at which point an output is triggered. Think about it as uploading a real time command control system."

Oxley's vision of "brain as remote control" means we need to be able to switch bits of the Jello on and off. And there is one region particularly well suited to the task.

"You can activate different parts of your motor cortex by thinking about moving particular parts of your body in ways you have grown up all your life doing," says Oxley.

Then the trick is programming the computer to see that brain activity as a signal to do another task.

For a person with tetraplegia, bumping up the central heating could, theoretically, be just a matter of thinking about kicking a footy, and take your pick of other imagined movements to switch on the microwave

Musk has hinted that his device could also use a vascular route to reach the brain, and so the Stentrode may well give us a peek into what a neural lace could look like.

But the Stentrode's current command and control interface seems clunky compared to the specs needed for what Musk has in mind.

The tech magnate thinks humans have an "output" problem our senses import swags of data (think how much you take in with a single visual sweep of a bustling city street) but we transmit at the slovenly speed of two thumbs tapping (try texting everything you saw to a friend).

Musk's vision calls for outputting data to devices at the speed of thought, and that's where Schalk's research may well be on the money.

Schalk monitors people with epilepsy who have had brain electrodes inserted to detect where seizures start and to guide neurosurgical treatment.

He's developed a computer algorithm that can work out what people are reading aloud, JFK's inauguration speech for example, just by analysing their brain waves. And in a 2016 article, he used a similar technique to discern words, including "cowboys", "swimming", and "python", that people were merely imagining saying.

The mind-boggling potential is that a computer could read your thoughts just by analysing your brainwaves, a game-changer for people "locked in" by paralysis so severe that thoughts are their only option for controlling the environment.

But Schalk says there's a conceptual road block to his "brain to text" algorithm linking thoughts and machines any time soon.

"You are not thinking in mental sentences," he says.

"Language isn't captured as a series of characters you can somehow find in the brain. It's a combination of many experiences and many emotions that together realise language in all its complexity."

Take "red rose" says Schalk. It could be a flower, but it could also be the first movie you saw with your girlfriend (if you like Hindi thrillers) or the name of a forest you once visited that evokes tinkling streams and the chirp of birds.

And if Urban's blog post is a guide, Musk really is aiming at getting this kind of "all over" thought up into the cloud.

Imagine, writes Urban, you're on a hike and want to share it with your hubby.

"No problem just think out to him to request a brain connection ... now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he's there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze."

Back in the present, however, there is an elephant in the room full of would-be transhumans.

Musk himself says we're "already cyborgs" our smartphones do much of what is promised by his "digital extra layer" so why not just share that hike by uploading a video to Instagram? What's the big deal about bringing the hardware on board?

Meow has struggled to come up with good reasons why he couldn't just have his chip on a ring.

"At a practical level, having it under your skin means it's waterproof. You don't want to wear jewellery at a public pool or a beach," says Meow, who also envisages one day bringing up his daily diary remotely on a "smart mirror", while taking a shower.

But the most obvious benefits are, again, for the disabled.

Oxley points out that tasks most of us take for granted, such as moving a computer cursor, may use up a paralysed person's last remaining function, if they have to manipulate a joystick with their mouth, for example.

"There is a vast region in the cortex that is still functioning tissue, but it is not being used," says Oxley.

The neurologist sends me a video from a 2015 article in Science showing a man who has repurposed some of that cortex to move a cursor with his thoughts, freeing up his mouth to chat with the woman next to him.

"That is world changing for a patient with severe paralysis," says Oxley.

But brain implants are also lifting the lid on an ethical Pandora's Box.

"Some patients seem to experience self-estrangement. They don't recognise themselves after being implanted," says Frederic Gilbert, a philosopher at the University of Washington.

Gilbert interviewed a woman with epilepsy whose symptoms improved with an implant, but who felt worse. Having a 24/7 brain box monitor gave her the miserable feeling of being a "full time" epileptic, something she was previously only reminded of intermittently, after a seizure.

Others were weirdly drawn to think they had superpowers.

Gilbert recounts a woman in her 50s who had improved with an implant for Parkinson's, but one day decided she'd move the pool table all by herself, injured her back, and ended up in a wheelchair for two months.

And, echoing the insubordinate computer HAL in 2001, Gilbert also worries about when "the device will be allowed to kick you out of the decision loop". Imagine, he says, a military pilot who experiences depressurisation but thinks he is still competent to control the weapon system. The BCI begs to differ and overrides to fire the missiles.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle for Musk's vision, articulated in a recent MIT Technology Review piece, is more prosaic: who, after all, is going to get brain surgery to send an email?

"I would. F---ing oath I would," chips in Meow, a self-described neophile.

"I want this technology to succeed, so I'm happy to be a beta tester. As long as I'm happy with the safety."

Why? In the short term Meow is enamoured with "frictionless interaction with technology". But longer term, he's with Musk.

"We have to convince robots and AIs that we are worthy of joining the singularity with them. If we don't join with machines now they're going to overtake us and we're going to be like a cockroach to them ... we're doomed."

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Elon Musk building brain-computer interface to protect against AI ... - The Sydney Morning Herald

Everything is changing again. But this time, its happening faster.

In his talk at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summit in Boston, Deloittes Digital Transformation Leader Geoff Tuff gave the audience some great tips for understanding todays business environment and taking advantage of its opportunitieswithout falling prey to its exponential speed.

The latest round of quick automation and exponential change is being dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to Tuff, though, thats a misnomerit sounds like something thats happening to us, when really its something we need to shape and react to. The problem is that the pace of change is so rapid, businesses cant react like they have in the past; they need new models for innovation and growth. Without these, they arent likely to stick around long term.

The Golden Ratio of Innovation, established by his team just five years ago, already seems outdated, Tuff says. The rule statesalthough Tuff says it wasnt intended to be so universalthat to stay competitive, companies should allocate 70 percent of their resources to innovating within their core business, 20 percent to the space adjacent to their core business, and just 10 percent to the transformational space, which means discovering brand new customer needs.

A 2012 study of companies in the industrial, technology, and consumer goods sectors showed that companies that allocated their resources according to this ratio outperformed their competitors.

But sticking to this model now yields surprising returns. In fact, it yields something close to inverse returns, with 10 percent coming from core business investments and up to 70 percent from the transformational space. What companies need to do, today more than ever, is invest even greater resources in non-core areas, working across a wide spectrum of innovation.

But what does that mean, and how can companies adapt?

Tuff recommends starting by dividing your business into known or knowable opportunities, which can be planned for and tackled, and unknown opportunities, which must be discovered or developed.

Asking existing business units to discover unknown opportunities wont workthat will take different people, metrics, and funding mechanisms. Start a team, a digital foundry, and task them with this.

Now youre ready to find a tech solution to transform your business, right? Not according to Tuff.

New outcomes and improved efficiency arent possible without people changing their behavior. Choosing your technology first wont get you very far if no one wants to use that technology. The trick is to identify behavioral shifts that will create value, then use data to track those shifts. The insights you gain from that process should then be a guidepost to decide what technologies you want to use.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but youll get greater return on your digital innovation by putting behavior first and technology second rather than the other way around. This will help you sort through the thousands or tens of thousands of digital solutions and startups on the market.

As youre probably aware, we humans tend to be creatures of habit, and changing our behavior on a large scale is no easy task. We can look to three large manufacturing companies to see how they looked at behaviors they wanted to target first and then found the right tech for the job.

At Nissan, a rapidly aging workforce compelled management to ask, How do we stop our employees from doing the repetitive tasks that are harder for them as they age and may even harm them? The answer was to stop them from having to do difficult physical maneuvers without taking them out of the production process entirely. The company came up with cobots, or collaborative robots, which work in tandem with people by taking over some of the physical tasks. The company saw higher output levels and improved efficiency in both time and cost.

Caterpillar just completed the acquisition of Yard Club, a market-making app that connects people who own construction machines with potential renters. Caterpillar wants people to be able to rent their machines instead of having to buy them, letting the company derive value from selling tools, attachments, and parts in addition to large machines. To drive usage of their machines, they need to create an efficient market for those machines. Having witnessed the explosion of Uber, Airbnb, and other apps that interface supply and demand, its undeniable that the right app can powerfully change consumer behavior.

UTC Aerospace Systems understood that they could drive better use of their systems in airline customers if they could get users to work more efficiently, increase on-time performance, and get more information into the hands of pilots and crew. They created an app called OpsInsight that gives pilots access to live data, allowing them to adjust aircraft operations in real time. The apps creation was driven by a desired behavior in the end market; giving customers tools to improve their own outcomes will improve company outcomes toodouble win.

Its a complex time to be a manufacturerthe landscape is changing so fast its hard to keep up, and traditional business models and systems arent yielding the same results they used to.

But the good news is, manufacturers sit right in the middle of the value chain, with the ability to influence suppliers, downstream customers, and even customers customers. Shedding outdated ways of thinking and adapting your operations to our exponential times will make all the difference to success or failure.

In closing, Tuff acknowledged that while its not certain Charles Darwin actually said this, the words certainly do apply to doing business in the 21st century: It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

Image Credit: Pond5

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How to Stay Innovative Amid the Fastest Pace of Change in History - Singularity Hub

The robots of reality are starting to get a lot closer to the robots of our imagination, said Sarah Bergbreiter, an image of a fast-moving, multi-jointed search and rescue robot displayed on the big screen behind her.

In her talk on advanced robotics at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summit in Boston, Bergbreiter elaborated on how modern robots have already come to resemble the most fantastic robots humans have imagined over the past few decades. She also shared her vision of whats ahead.

Bergbreiter joined the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Systems Research. She received the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008, the NSF CAREER Award in 2011, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award in 2013 for her research on engineering robotic systems down to sub-millimeter size scales.

Below are four key areas Bergbreiter thinks roboticists need to hone to make sure their robots add maximum value to our jobs, our homes, and our lives.

At the Tesla plant in Fremont, California, there are dozens of robots, but theyre all caged off from people, with robots and employees performing completely separate tasks. Robots programmed to perform a task or series of tasks over and over are already widespread, but enabling robots to work with people is a still a major manufacturing challenge.

Robots need to be able to understand what people are doing, and vice-versa. How do we get robots to understand social cues and display them back to us?

The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute (ARM Institute) focuses on collaborative robotics, or robots complementing a persons job to enhance productivity. The institutes mission is to lower the barriers for companies to adopt robotics technology, and in the process, bring currently off-shored production back onshore.

Robots that work with people rather than instead of people will not only save jobs, theyll bring new advances in efficiency and innovationbut we need to keep people in the equation as we develop them.

When you picture a robot, whether it currently exists or is a product of your imagination, youre most likely picturing a rigid machine with a lot of right angles and not much squishiness or pliability. Thats because the field of soft robotics is just starting to take off, with the first-ever completely soft autonomous robot unveiled in December 2016.

One of the problems with traditional robots is that they tend to be clunky and heavy and their movement is limited. Soft robots can do things rigid robots cant, like more precisely manipulate objects, climb, grow, or stretch.

Having robots perform these actions is useful across a variety of settings, from exoskeletonswhich are beginning to be used to augment people in a manufacturing contextto rescue robots that could grasp and turn a valve or climb through rubble in places humans cant access.

Soft robots are also more compliant and safer around humans; if you can touch a robot, theres a lot more you can do in terms of programming it. And the best part is, making robots soft actually lowers their cost. This will enable robotic manufacturing in places that couldnt do it before.

Soft robots have a lot of advantages over rigid ones, but theyre still stuck with one major drawback: theyre harder to control. Soft sensors are thus a crucial research area in robotics right now.

San Francisco startup Pneubotics makes robots out of fabric and air, with the goal of making robots that can interact with and react to the world. Their robots move by shifting air around to different compartments inside the fabric. To improve their precision and reactive capability, theyll be equipped with sensors tailored to their function or task.

And there is some progress there. Recently, University of Minnesota researchers said theyve created a process to 3D print flexible sensors. Something like this may act as a kind of skin for future robots.

Sensors will allow soft robots with their expanded capabilities to take on the precision of rigid robots, bringing the best of these two robotics worlds together for completely new applications.

When we think of robots putting together cars or zooming around a warehouse to find a product, we often assume each individual robot is smart. That doesnt have to be the case, though.

Robots can now network and interact with the cloud, eliminating the need for individual robots to be smart. The computation for the 45,000 robots Amazon uses in their warehouses happens in a central system, meaning not all 45,000 bots need to house all that computation inside their own headsthey just need to be able to coordinate with the system.

Especially for large-scale operations like this, its cheaper and more efficient to have dumb robots taking instructions from one, centralized, in-charge bit of software than equipping all the robots with more advanced software and hardware of their own.

We are moving towards a manufacturing environment where robots will both work closely with humans and be able to do things in less-structured environments without human intervention.

As Bergbreiter said in closing, Its a fascinating time for robots.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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4 Keys to Making the Robots of Our Imagination a Reality - Singularity Hub

Manufacturing is about robots and assembly lines, supply chains and finished products. Its about the roof over your head, the car you drive to work, and the computer you stare at all day. We live in a cocoon of modern industrial products. And today, we make more than ever.

But really, at its roots, manufacturing is about energy. Without energy the robots freeze, the assembly lines grind to a halt, the supply chain breaks, and thats it. No more stuff.

Of course, weve derived power from a number of sources over the last few centuries, and that mix has continuously evolved. For businesses, where margins are thin already, the cost of energy is crucial. And from the global view on down to early industrial Britain or modern Shanghai, we know the cleaner, the better. The best of both worlds, however, has eluded us.

But according to Ramez Naam, speaking at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summit in Boston this week, that's changing.

The world currently uses about 14 cubic kilometers of oil, or oil equivalent in oil, gas, and coal, Naam says. But that is actually dwarfed by the continual influx of energy from the fusion reactor 8.3 light-minutes away. Our sun bombards our planet with 10,000 times the energy we use from all sources combined.

Naam, who spent 13 years at Microsoft working on machine learning, AI, and big scale systems, is perhaps best known as the writer behind the science fiction series, the Nexus Trilogy. Hes also researched, written about, and is a big believer in the sneaky power of renewable energy.

Wind was a footnote in the energy mix 10 years ago, he says. Today, it makes 6% of all electricity in the US. That might not sound like much, but its the pace thats notablewind power usage is up 10x in the last eleven years. And Naam expects growth to continue. As new materials and designs make turbines bigger and taller, theyll harvest wind more efficiently.

But hes more excited about solar.

Solar power has grown by 100 in the last 13 years, Naam says. Its averaged around 35 to 40 percent annual growth over the last 20 years. Im a solar optimist, and I was wrong, he says. Solar prices are plunging even faster than those who are wildly optimistic [expected].

In the last year, according to Naam, weve seen crossover in the solar power market. In the sunniest parts of the world, unsubsidized solar is becoming the cheapest form of energy.

In the US, natural gas is the cheapest energy at around five or six cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). A deal in Palo Alto, California late last fall was signed for 3.6 cents per kWh(5.1 cents removing subsidies, according to Naam). A deal signed in India was less than the price of coal there. No subsidies. In Chile, solar bids won a dozen auctions, one of which was the lowest we had yet seen at 2.9 cents a kWh.

Now, that was not just the cheapest price for solar ever assigned, that was the cheapest unsubsidized contract for electricity of any sort on planet Earth with any technology ever in history, Naam says.

That record lasted for about a month, when a deal in Dubai was signed for 2.4 cents a kWhless than half US natural gas prices and lower than natural gas in the Middle East or Africa.

And it wasn't just one company with an unusually aggressive bid, Naam says. There were four companies that came with bids of less than three cents in this auction.

You might notice a trend here. Sun. Lots of it. The disclaimer: This is all heavily regional. That means solar isnt the answer everywhere yet. It may grow to be more of the total energy mix, but it makes the most practical economic sense in the sunniest parts of the world.

Storage and batteries are still key to making all this work, and they are often pointed to as the sticking point. The sun doesnt always shine, even in sunny places. And for less-than-sunny places and at night, batteries are the vital link, storing away sunlight for later use.

But batteries, Naam says, are also improving faster than you might expect.

Over a 15-year slice of time, the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries tripled, and the energy cost per unit of energy you could store, dropped by a factor of 10, he says. And there are a number of other more "exotic" battery technologies on the horizon.

While Naam is clearly very bullish on renewable energy, his reasoning tends toward the practical. Subsidies and mandates have played and continue to play a role in renewable energy. But he says innovation and benefits will prove to be more inexorable forces.

He thinks electric cars, currently a tiny fraction of the market, are set for fast growth. Why? They have 90% fewer moving parts, offer a better driving experience, and will soon be cost-competitive with combustion engine cars. Similarly, renewable energy will continue its growth, not just because policy dictates it, but because innovation will make it the cheapest option.

If you follow all these trends, we've always assumed that clean energy would be the most expensive energy, right, and we should do it for moral reasons, cut pollution, Naam says. But if you look at the ever-declining cost of technology, you start to assume that, hey, if this trend holds, clean energy will ultimately be the cheapest.

Image Credit: Pond5

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Solar Is Now the Cheapest Energy There Is in the Sunniest Parts of the World - Singularity Hub