Category Archives: Futurism

The "Case of the Missing Space Tomatoes" has finally been solved. Tomat... Oh

Astronauts on board the International Space Station made a startling discovery: the husks of two old and dried-out tomatoes.

While the finding may sound more like the undesirable outcome of a deep kitchen cleaning, the two rogue tomatoes were the subject of a fierce debate among crew members, with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio initially being accused of eating his share of the space-grown harvest prematurely.

Now, NASA is ready to show off the smoking gun: an image of two, squashed and discolored, grape-sized tomatoes sealed inside an evidence bag.

In short, it's the riveting conclusion to a low-stakes, space-based whodunnit and we're here for it.

The tomatoes were part of the eXposed Root On-Orbit Test System (XROOTS) experiment, which involved growing plants hydroponically and aeroponically, meaning without any soil or other growth media.

Rubio, who spent a record-breaking 371 days aboard the station starting September 2022, somehow misplaced a portion of his share of the harvested tomatoes, triggering a station-wide hunt.

In a recently shared video on the "Case of the Missing Space Tomatoes," shared by NASA's Johnson Space Center, the astronaut recalled what had happened.

"We have, uh, one ripe tomato that just came loose," Rubio told ground control in the footage.

"I was pretty confident that I velcroed it where I was supposed to velcro it and then I came back and it was gone," he later recalled in an interview.

"I spent so many hours looking for that thing," he added. "I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future."

Given the latest evidence, that's exactly what seems to have happened.

"Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home [already], has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato," NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbelisaidduring a live streamcelebrating the station's 25th anniversary earlier this month.

"But we can exonerate him," she added. "We found the tomato."

More on the tomato: Space Station Astronauts Find Desiccated Tomato After Blaming Colleague for Its Theft

Continue reading here:
NASA Proudly Shows Off Desiccated Tomatos Lost in Space Station Crevice - Futurism

"It's just wrong to make money on that." AI Theft

A website has found itself the victim of a pernicious new online scheme that its perpetrators are shamelessly bragging about: an "SEO heist," the latest example of how generative AI is being used to accelerate the deterioration of the search engines that form the backbone of the Internet.

The website in question is Exceljet, a hub on everything to know about Microsoft Excel. Its owner David Bruns started noticing a dip in its traffic starting last year. This fall, he found out why. Someone was using an AI to imitate nearly all of his website's articles with inferior and often error-riddled copies designed solely to please search engines, hijacking Exceljet's traffic.

"It's one thing to get outranked by an article that is arguably better than the article that you wrote, but it's something else to get outranked by an article that was written by a machine that no human ever reviewed," Bruns told Business Insider. "It's just wrong to make money on that."

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, describes the tricks and tactics used to help rank websites higher in search results, which leads to more clicks. It serves a practical purpose, but the ruthless gaming of search engines, and of Google especially, has long taken a toll on the broader internet's functionality, ranking bogus results over useful ones.

Generative AI has further exacerbated the problem. By using large language models like ChatGPT, content strategists can quickly churn out a high volume of low-quality articles replete with all-important SEO keywords the only part that matters if your bottom line is clicks.

This is exactly what one such content strategist Jake Ward took advantage of to hijack Exceljet's readers.

"We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor," Ward boasted in an X thread explaining the feat last month. "We got 489,509 traffic in October alone."

As he explains it, Ward fed the URLs of Exceljet's some 1,800 pages into an "SEO-optimized" AI article writer called Byword. The bot automatically spat out articles based on Exceljet's successful headlines, and Ward then published these ersatz articles en masse, quickly diverting clicks to his own website and away from Exceljet. He doesn't believe he's done anything wrong.

"It's unusual that something acceptable, if done once, suddenly becomes unethical when reproduced at scale," Ward wrote on X, as spotted by BI.

The "heist" has hurt Bruns' website. But it's also potentially hurting readers who need real information. By his analysis, Bruns found that some of Ward's AI-generated articles contained blatant factual errors, in one case explaining an Excel feature that didn't exist.

"I started to look at the quality of the articles and realized that we're losing traffic to stuff that doesn't even make sense," he told BI.

Some of the onus is on Google, he argues, who haven't done enough to weed out SEO grifters.

"This is a big problem for Google," Bruns added. "If people keep finding crappy articles at the top of the search results, they're going to end up questioning whether Google's doing a good job, but the fact that the articles are near or they can be at the top of the result makes it seem like they're legitimate."

More on generative AI: Microsofts Stuffing Talking Generative AI Into Your Car

Read this article:
Man Horrified When Someone Uses AI to Reword and Republish All His Content, Complete With New Errors - Futurism

"To be very honest with you, we have hypotheses, but we dont know exactly why this works." Fun Times

DeepMind claims that for the first time, an AI has solved a famously difficult math problem with a solution that eluded human mathematicians which could be huge if it holds up to scrutiny.

In interviews with MIT Technology Review andThe Guardian, Google DeepMind researchers waxed prolific about their new AI tool, which they claim has generated a brand new solution to what's known as the "cap set problem," which involves plotting more and more dots without any of them ever forming a straight line.

The novel findings, which the researchers announced in a paper published in the journalNature, would mark the first time AI has made a unique scientific discovery which, because it was previously unknown, was not part of its training data. That would be a pretty big deal considering that AI is known for conjuring up nonsense and made-up junk even when its training data has the right answers.

DeepMind built the tool in question, called "FunSearch" in reference to mathematical functions (and not the other kind of fun) on the back of its AlphaZero AI, which solves math problems as if it were playing a game. The LLM it uses is called Codey, which is trained and honed on computer code and programmed to reject incorrect answers and feed correct ones back into its model.

Feeding code into an AI is one thing, but having it spit out a brand-new solution to a famous puzzle even though it took a few days, as MIT Tech points out is a different thing entirely.

"Its not in the training data," DeepMind research VP Pushmeet Kohli told the website. "It wasnt even known."

There is something of a mystical quality to what the DeepMind scientists are claiming: that the LLM managed to just maybe think for itself.

"To be very honest with you, we have hypotheses, but we dont know exactly why this works," DeepMind researcher scientist Alhussein Fawzi told MIT Tech. "In the beginning of the project, we didnt know whether this would work at all."

While there will obviously need to be lots more research to verify the claims and try to figure out exactlyhow FunSearch generated its novel solution to the cap set problem, its creators are clearly stoked.

"When we started the project there was no indication that it would produce something thats genuinely new," Kohli told The Guardian. "As far as we know, this is the first time that a genuine, new scientific discovery has been made by a large language model."

Read more from the original source:
DeepMind Says Its AI Solved a Math Problem That Humans Were Stumped By - Futurism

Image by Getty / Futurism

The effects of boozing can be detected in sperm for more than a month after cessation and can lead to some pretty serious birth defects, Texas A&M University scientists have found in at least in mice, though the research could be suggestive of risks for men who drink as well.

In a press release about the new research, Dr. Michael Golding said that alcohol's potential birth defect-inducing effects seem to be able to occur even while the diminutive daddies are withdrawing from drinking.

"When someone is consuming alcohol on a regular basis and then stops, their body goes through withdrawal, where it has to learn how to operate without the chemical present," Golding said. "What we discovered is that a fathers sperm are still negatively impacted by drinking even during the withdrawal process, meaning it takes much longer than we previously thought for the sperm to return to normal."

As the TAMU press release explains, drinking causes oxidative stress when free radicals and antioxidants go haywire, basically which leads to the body overproducing chemicals that create issues on a cellular level. As the new research suggests, the same effect occurs during alcohol withdrawal as well, and if conception occurs within that time frame, the offspring conceived could be born with defects in its brain or face.

This new finding, which was gleaned from mice studies and detailed in a new paper in the journalAndrology, builds on Golding's prior research into fetal alcohol syndrome as a result of fathers' alcohol consumption.

In a previous study published in April 2023 by the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the TAMU team reported that birth defects from alcohol in sperm can include brain and facial problem in infants which is a huge deal, given that the onus for fetal alcohol syndrome and other lifestyle-based birth defects has historically been placed solely on mothers.

"For years, theres really been no consideration of male alcohol use whatsoever," the professor said in the school's press release. "Within the last five to eight years, weve started to notice that there are certain conditions where theres a very strong paternal influence when it comes to alcohol exposure and fetal development."

As the school press release about the previous study indicates, the diagnostic criteria for fetal alcohol syndrome has heretofore only considered whether the mother drank during pregnancy. This is problematic, the TAMU research and a few other landmark studies have found, not only because paternal alcohol consumption can contribute, but also because men on average drink more and are more likely to binge drink than women.

On a more meta scale, Golding seems to suggest that he hopes these breakthroughs in prenatal research will shift the focus onto both parents.

"Research examining fetal health is overwhelmingly focused on maternal health," the professor said. "Im not saying that this is not appropriate; Im just saying its not the complete picture and we need some balance."

More on sperm studies: Cell Phone Use Linked to Low Sperm Count in Landmark Study

Read more from the original source:
Booze Affects Sperm More than a Month After Cessation in Mouse Research - Futurism

A giant list of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's alleged co-conspirators is about to drop, and there's a good chance some big tech names are going to be on it.

On Monday, a federal judge ruledthat the Epstein list gleaned from a settlement with accuser Virginia Giuffre and purportedly containing more than 170 names of both alleged associates and victims "should be unsealed in full."

Naturally, speculation about who's going to be implicated is rampant with a particular focus on the tech sector, where Epstein seemed particularly keen to cultivate powerful connections.

In an interview conducted the year prior to his arrest and published just a few days after his reported suicide in 2019, Epstein suggested to the New York Times' James Stewart that he not only had dirt on a bunch of powerful people, but had photographs to prove it.

"He said people in Silicon Valley had a reputation for being geeky workaholics, but that was far from the truth: They were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs," the reporter wrote. "He said he'd witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex."

While we won't know for sure which "prominent tech figures" he was referring to until the list is actually unsealed and presented to the public at some point next year, we do know that there are some major tech moguls who've been associated with the sex trafficker.

The list of known Epstein associates in the tech world includes some of the richest, most famous, and most powerful men in the world, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg (the latter of whom, to be fair, only met him at a dinner party).

Besides that infamous photo of Musk and Epstein's procure Ghislaine Maxwell, Gates' relationship to Epstein has become one of the most infamous of the dead billionaire's associations. Their friendship was the subject of ample reporting not only because the Microsoft founder knew of the convicted sex offender's crimes before meeting with him on several occasions, but also because his now-ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, seems to have factored it into her reasons for leaving him.

In an interview withCBS'Gayle King in March 2022, the tech titan's ex sounded off on Epstein, who she referred to as "evil personified" and "abhorrent."

She told King that she met Epstein just once and at her own behest because she "wanted to see who this man was."

"I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door," she recounted. "I had nightmares about it afterwards."

Along with rubbing shoulders with the biggest names in tech, Epstein also had interactions with other industry bigwigs.

According to one upsettingWall Street Journal expos, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman not only knew Epstein and introduced him to other elites in Silicon Valley, but also spent a night on Little St. James, the billionaire's private island where a lot of his underage orgies were said to have taken place.

Two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology VIPs were also deeply implicated in the Epstein upset: Joi Ito, the head of the school's Media Lab who resigned in disgrace following the revelation of the billionaire's donations to the project, and Marvin Minsky, the so-called "father of artificial intelligence" who Giuffre named alongside Britain's Prince Andrew as one of the men she was forced to have sex with on Little St. James.

Although Minsky died before he was able to face the music, the rest of these tech movers and shakers are very much alive and anyone named in the list is going to have some explaining to do.

More on weird tech guys: That Millionaire With the Bizarre Health Regimen Is Doing Something Strange to His Genitals

See the article here:
There May Be Some Big Tech Names on the Unsealed Epstein List - Futurism

Yikes. Accident Prone

It's not just you as it turns out, Teslas are astonishinglyprone to being involved in accidents.

According to a recent analysis of 30 car brands by online lending marketplace LendingTree, Tesla drivers have the highest accident rate out of all of them. Between November 2022 and November 2023, based on tens of millions of insurance quotes, Tesla drivers were involved in 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram truck drivers were a close second, at 22.76.

The award for worst overall drivers, however, went to Ram, which had the highest incident rates counting accidents but also DUIs, speeding tickets, and other citations overall, with Tesla being a close second.

The news comes as two million Tesla vehicles recently had to be recalled over safety concerns related to the company's infamous driver assistance software called Autopilot. The feature has already been under scrutiny by regulators for years with critics pointing out that Tesla's misleading marketing may give drivers a false sense of security and fool them into thinking their vehicles can drive by themselves.

LendingTree's data isn't entirely conclusive as to the exact cause of the accidents,and it also doesn't delve into questions of who was at fault.

Nonetheless, its conclusion about the Elon Musk-led EV maker shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Tesla actively seeks to attract thrill seekers who are after sports car-level acceleration. Insuring these vehicles can also be extremely expensive.

"Most people who drive minivans seem more interested in getting their kids around town safely than they are in zipping around in a high-horsepower vehicle," said LendingTree insurance expert Rob Bhatt in a statement.

According to the analysis, the car brand with the most DUIs was BMW and it wasn't even close. The number of DUIS was 3.13 per 1,000 drivers, compared to just 1.72 for Ram, the second highest DUI rate. In that category, Tesla drivers did great, coming in at number 20.

More on Tesla: National Forest Service Trolls Tesla After Cybertruck Gets Stuck in Forest

Go here to see the original:
Teslas Crash More Than Any Other Brand, Analysis Finds - Futurism

"Generative AI is going to add an emotional layer to interaction with the car." Car Talk

Remember those talking GPS monitors from the early-to-mid-2000s? They're back with a vengeance and will soon be AI-enabled, even though it's unclear who asked for that.

In a press release, the GPS company TomTom announced that it's teaming up with Microsoft to equip cars with a generative AI assistant named "Tommy" that will, for some reason, let people converse with their cars.

"If youve ever dreamed of being able to talk to your car as if it were KITT," the statement reads,making a deep-cut reference to 80s television,"your dream might soon be reality."

Using various Microsoft AI services, including its Azure OpenAI large language models (LLM), TomTom's new offering sounds like it will be like a yassified Siri or Alexa for your vehicle, enabling drivers to look up directions and other "infotainment" tools.

Curiously enough, the companies had beef before they ever collabed. Back in 2009, when GPS monitors were still a huge thing, Microsoft sued TomTom for allegedly violating Linux software patents. In response, the GPS company filed a countersuit claiming Microsoft had violated its patents. To settle the dispute, TomTom went ahead and bought the initial offending software, and by 2016, the duo announced an official collaboration.

Like many companies that have invested or perhaps over-invested in AI, TomTom's people have given some pretty telling soundbites about how excited they are to be working with robots.

"Generative AI is going to add an emotional layer to interaction with the car," Gianluca Brugnoli, the company's VP of design, said in the press release. "It will know where youre driving, your physical [well-being] and will adapt the driving experience and the technology in the cabin to match the experience each driver seeks."

As with everything else in the so-called "AI revolution," it's hard to imagine who asked for an AI assistant that lets one talk to their car "Knight Rider" style, and it's more difficult still to try to parse why TomTom seems to be indicating that it wants to create a vehicular, vibes-based FitBit when that is so far outside the realm of consumer wants or needs that it's nearly laughable.

TomTom, a vestige of the dot-com era, is clear trying to claw back relevance in a world where everyone has maps on their smartphones and for some reason believes "Tommy" will take them there.

More on AI-enabled cars: Teslas Crash More Than Any Other Brand, Analysis Finds

View post:
Microsoft's Stuffing Talking Generative AI Into Your Car - Futurism

At this point, the texts have become commonplace someone asking for a veterinarian, and when you tell them they have the wrong number, the sender apologizes before introducing themselves and trying to start a conversation.

For most who receive them, the messages go largely ignored, but for those who fall victim, they end up being bilked out of their hard-earned money. While awareness-raising articlesand public service announcements have helped to an extent, the scammers are apparently often in a dire plight of their own: by and large,they appear to have been victims of human trafficking.

In an expos gleaned from eyewitness accounts and documents from Neo Lu, a 28-year-old man sold into servitude to a Chinese gang, the New York Times reports that the conditions these trafficked individuals are forced to live under make those "wrong number" texts all the more chilling.

Lu's terrifying ordeal began when he responded to an ad for a translator job in Bangkok. Everything from the listing itself to the horror that awaited him after he was smuggled over the border between Thailand and Myanmar had been expertly concocted and executed by the masterminds behind the scheme that the United States Institute of Peace calls a "criminal cancer."

As theNYT explains, the details, documents, and images Lu shared with the newspaper from his seven months in that Myanmar work camp align with other accounts from people who were trafficked for similar scams in other Southeast Asian countries like Cambodia and Laos.

Like other scams before it, the "pig butchering" scheme thus named because the person on the other end of the messages spends weeks pulling in lonely people, like fattening a pig for the slaughter generally involves tricking targets into investing in crypto rackets and then snatching their real cash, never to be seen again.

While Americans have been conned out of billions of dollars in these swindles, the trafficked scammers are broken physically and mentally, the newspaper reports. Those who disobey are beaten, and those who comply are duly convinced that they'll be arrested if they return to their home countries for their complicity and anyway, their passports and visas are often stolen by their captors, making escape all but a moot point.

As Lu told theTimes, he and his fellow captives were given small cuts of what they scammed to spend on distractions like sex, drugs, or gambling in the compound where they were held. That "payment" was another way they were kept in line.

"The scam groups need to give trafficking victims the illusion that they could work their way out of this system," Lu said. "Eventually the donkey goes from trying to avoid getting whipped to chasing after the carrot dangled in front of them."

Lu, who ended up working as an accountant for his incarcerators in an ultimately and violently denied bid to be released, contacted the NYT while still in captivity. After some amount of back-and-forth, he went silent, and claims that during that time he was subject first to regular beatings and then to torture after it was revealed that he'd sent incriminating information and photos both to American journalists and to his family back home in China.

In one particularly harrowing description, the meme "the beatings will continue until morale improves" took literal meanings, with Lu describing one time period where his captors attempted to convince him between beatings to give up on his attempts to leave.

"These Chinese gangs are spreading a form of modern slavery," Lu told the newspaper. "I want the whole world to know."

More on pig butchering: Crypto Company Says Oops, Its Coin Was Being Used in a Human Trafficking Scam

See more here:
Those Scam Texts You're Getting Are Sent By Victims of Human Trafficking - Futurism

They both died on the scene. Grand Deathed Auto

A man in Los Angeles has been ordered to pay more than $23,000 in restitution after killing two people with his Tesla back in 2019 while using Autopilot.

As Fortune reports, it's possibly the first time US prosecutors have brought felony charges against a motorist who was using driver assistance software.

It's also one of over a dozen deadly collisions currently being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which culminated in the recall of more than 2 million Tesla vehicles last week.

The latest court case could set a precedent for the future use of driver assistance software like Autopilot especially because$23,000 is an arguably pitifully small price to pay given the well-documented dangers of Tesla's driver-assistance software.

LA-based Tesla driver Kevin Aziz Riad pleaded not guilty last year to two counts of vehicular manslaughter. He was initially facing seven years in prison.

His vehicle, which had its Autopilot feature turned on at the time of the accident, struck a Honda Civic on December 29, 2019 while driving 74 mph. The Civic's two occupants died at the scene.

Aziz Riad is still facing two civil lawsuits filed against him by the families of the deceased, as Fortune reports.

Last week's recall, which was addressed through an over-the-air software update, was the result of the NHTSA deeming Tesla's Autosteer feature to be too easily misused.

"The remedy will incorporate additional controls and alerts to those already existing on affected vehicles to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility whenever Autosteer is engaged," the regulator's recall notice reads, "which includes keeping their hands on the steering wheel and paying attention to the roadway."

The recall may have come just under four years too late in the case of Aziz Riad.

"The recently announced recall, if it limits the use of Autopilot to controlled access highways, would likely have prevented this tragic incident," lawyer Donald Slavik, who is representing one of the victim's families, told Fortune.

More on Autopilot: Feds Blast Tesla for Massive Autopilot Issue in 2 Million Cars

Link:
Tesla Driver Forced to Pay After Killing Two People on Autopilot - Futurism

This is eerie. Not Fake News

An upcoming news outfit called Channel 1 is launching its own network in February that it says will present the news almost entirely with AI-generated news anchors that it's presenting as strikingly capable and photorealistic.

The tech startup announced the launch date on Tuesday, sharing a 20-minute video demo on X-formerly-Twitter. It kicks off in much the same way your typical cable news channel might, but overlaying real images alongside AI-generated ones, and cutting between different AI personalities.

One stiffly assures the viewer that Channel 1's output is "not fake news." Rather than creating its own stories, says the AI anchor assuming the form of a man in a suit, Channel 1 will rely on content gathered from human-made, "trusted news sources" around the world, repackaged and personalized to each viewer's tastes and interests.

Even more strangely, Channel 1 will use AI to generate images and videos of events where "cameras were not able to capture the action." It likens this to how a courtroom sketch "is not a literal depiction of actual events" but helps audiences understand them.

In its demo program, Channel 1 uses mostly real news footage and b-roll taken from other sources. When an AI-generated image is shown, it's clearly indicated with a disclaimer that appears in the top right of the screen.

More impressively, the technology is leveraged to translate speech while keeping the voice of the speaker. One example shows a man explaining something in French in the original footage, and then afterwards speaking English in a convincing synthesized voice that sounds a lot like his own.

Another fake presenter in the video heralds Channel 1's "unique new way" to instantly gauge public sentiment through its "emoji meter." It uses the upcoming release of Tesla's Cybertruck as its guinea pig.

"I quickly read the most recent 30,000 tweets posted to X about the Cybertruck," says the fake presenter, showing a breakdown of all the emojis used in the tweets. "Sentiment on the vehicle is indeed very mixed."

The platform will debut on X and other streaming platforms as what sounds like a somewhat traditional program based on different regions and languages.

The ultimate goal, however, is to release a smartphone app that will allow Channel 1 to be fully personalized for each user, who can choose their favorite topics and even favorite fake news personalities. This stage of release is set for next summer.

Channel 1's reporting won't be run completely hands-off. Human editors and producers will be involved "in checking the stories for accuracy and clarity at every step of the process." If Channel 1 eventually achieves the levels of personalization it purports it will, around the clock fact-checking sounds like a tall order for its behind-the-scenes staff.

All told, what we've seen so far is undoubtedly interesting but it's worth noting though that this wasn't a live demo, so we don't know how well the finished product will hold up during its actual live "broadcasts."

More on AI: Sam Altman Says Hes Fascinated With the Terminator

Go here to see the original:
Channel 1 Says It'll Use AI-Generated News Anchors - Futurism