Category Archives: Transhuman News

What is Keanu Reeves planning to do with VR? The Other Blue Pill

The Matrix is everywhere. Even in video games.

Later this month, the fourth installment in Matrix series hits theaters. The Matrix Resurrections isnt a reboot, and will seemingly bring back stars Keanu Reeves as Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity. Before you see the movie in theaters, though, fans can play a surprise open-world game called The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience.

According to Kotaku, its more of an immersive experience than a playable game. All told, it sounds a fun exploration of virtual worlds and whats really real, which are classic topics from the Matrix franchise.

And riffing on that topic in a video interview with the Verge, the affable Reeves even went as far as to say that hed be open to VR porn in which fans could have sex with him without really having sex with him, of course.

Think of how much money is in porn, Reeves said in the interview.You wouldnt even have to be there, and people could have digital sex with your digital avatar.

Moss, however, was not on board.

I, on the other hand, say no thank you, Moss laughed.

Could we see raunchy, digitally-created porn with Reeves in the future? Well have to wait and see, but we know Reeves is likely to come up with some wild content since he already holds a bit of crypto, has a VR headset and is fascinated by VR storytelling and the Metaverse.

The real world is almost ahead of our science fiction, Reeves said in the video. Wow.

More on the Metaverse: AR Pioneer Warns that Metaverse Could Make Reality Dissapear

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

Link:
Keanu Reeves Says He'd Be Cool With Fans Having Sex With Him in VR - Futurism

"Its built to outlive us all."Apocalypse Cam

If or when human civilization collapses, what will remain? Maybe parts of some cities. Or the Statue of Liberty, a la Planet of the Apes. Overall, though, there might not be a lot of evidence left behind about what humanity accomplished or what resulted in its downfall.

One team of researchers wants to change that. Their solution? A massive, indestructible box thatll record scientific data to give future civilizations insight on how exactly humanity fell.

The project, dubbed Earths Black Box, will be an immense steel monolith installed in a remote location in Tasmania. Its akin to the black boxes that are designed to survive airplane crashes and provide investigators valuable data on what led to the disaster except on a planetary scale.

The project is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Tasmania, marketing agency Clemenger BBDO, and creative agency The Glue Society.

The team is designing the box to record climate data such as atmospheric CO2 levels, sea temperatures, and energy consumption levels. Itll also gather contextual information like news headlines and social media posts.

The idea is if the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible recording device will be there for whoevers left to learn from that, Jim Curtis, the executive creative director at Clemenger BBDO, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

The box itself will be made from three-inch-thick steel and cantilevered off granite. Inside will be a system of Internet-connected storage drives powered by solar panels on the boxs roof.

Its built to outlive us all, Jonathan Kneebone, cofounder of the Glue Society, told ABC. If the worst does happen, just because the power grids go down, this thing will still be there.

The biggest issue for the team now is how to help future civilizations access the information it contains. After all, theyll just find a mysterious monolith out in the middle of nowhere and we know how that worked out for us already.

READ MORE: Earth is getting a black box to record our climate change actions, and its already started listening [Australia Broadcasting Corporation]

More on doomsday boxes: Oreo Built a Doomsday Vault to Protect Its Cookies from a Harmless Asteroid

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See the original post here:
Scientists Are Building a "Black Box" to Record the End of Civilization - Futurism

Alphabets AI research company DeepMind has released the next generation of its language model,and it says that it has close to the reading comprehension of a high schooler a startling claim.

It says the language model, called Gopher, was able to significantly improve its reading comprehension by ingesting massive repositories of texts online.

DeepMind boasts that its algorithm, an ultra-large language model, has 280 billion parameters, which are a measure of size and complexity. That means it falls somewhere between OpenAIs GPT-3 (175 billion parameters) and Microsoft and NVIDIAs Megatron, which features 530 billion parameters, The Verge points out.

Such a system could allow us to safely and efficiently to summarize information, provide expert advice and follow instructions via natural language, according to a statement.

In a test, the model was able to score highly enough on a high school reading comprehension test to approach human-level performance, according to DeepMinds paper. Its math and reasoning skills, however, left something to be desired, showing less of an improvement.

The more parameters, the more accurate, generally speaking. But there are other issues, like reading comprehension or perpetuating harmful stereotypes, that are proving more difficult to overcome, despite the models sheer size.

Algorithms like Gopher have been used in the past for commercial products like digital assistants and translators. In a test, Gopher was able to have a full dialogue with a human with a surprising level of coherence, according to DeepMind.

But DeepMind isnt looking to commercialize its algorithm.

Thats not the focus right now, Koray Kavukcuoglo, DeepMinds vice president of research,told Fortune.

In an attempt to get ahead of criticism that its algorithm regurgitated ethnic or gender stereotypes often a product of the texts these algorithms were fed DeepMind published an accompanying paper about the steps researchers took to maintain ethical integrity.

For instance, the team built a tool called Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer, a massive two trillion word database to cross-reference its sources.

But even then, the DeepMind team admitted that research on how language models perpetuate harmful stereotypes is still in early stages.

As AI tools become better and better at interpreting text, researchers are increasingly turning to stickier problems, like the potential for spreading misinformation or propaganda.

Even with all the texts on the internet, helping language models like Gopher read between the lines is proving much harder than many AI researchers like to admit.

READ MORE: DeepMind debuts massive language A.I. that approaches human-level reading comprehension [Fortune]

More on AI tools: Researchers Create Narc Neural Network to Help Cops Predict New Designer Drugs

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

Read the rest here:
DeepMind Says Its New AI Has Almost the Reading Comprehension of a High Schooler - Futurism

China has succeeded in literally changing the weather, a new study claims.

As the South China Morning Post reports, researchers say that during the Chinese Communist Partys centennial celebration over the summer, weather authorities successfully modified the weather above Beijing to clear the sky and reduce pollution for the tens of thousands gathered for a commemorative ceremony in Tiananmen Square.

They did so using cloud seeding technology, a long-studied but controversial process that involves shooting silver iodide particles into the clouds, with the idea of attracting water droplets to modify the weather.

The paper, by researchers at Chinas Tsinghua University, comes a year after reports that China was dramatically expanding its weather modification program to a test area of a whopping 5.5 million square miles by the year 2025. As Futurism noted last December, thats bigger than the entire country of India, and could end up raising serious issues with Chinas neighbors.

Though this isnt the first time China has used cloud-seeding technology its been dabbling since as early as the months leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics this appears to be both one of the most successful and also largest-scale tests conducted not just by the CCP, but in the world.

It was also not publicized, and part of the Tsinghua researchers paper focused on the evidence they found that cloud seeding had actually taken place, which included eyewitness reports of rockets being launched into the sky from the mountains outside of of Beijing before the July 1 centennial, and accounts of rocket debris after the fact.

According to theSCMP, there were a number of hurdles that weather officials had to jump to have successfully changed the weather. Pollution leading up to the CCP centennial was especially bad, the report noted, and it was Chinas wettest recorded summer as well. Nevertheless, reports indicated that Beijings pollution on July 1 went from moderate to good, and the mid-day rain did in fact appear to be artificial.

Though areas of the United States and other countries have tried to use cloud seeding technology to change the weather, professional China-worriers have expressed concern that the CCP may use it for nefarious military ends even though the US military has been trying to make it rain since at least 1967.

This successful and large-scale operation in Beijing does, however, raise important questions both about potential military usage of the tech. If one country is able to control its own weather, it could in theory do so elsewhere which is unwelcome news for anyone who isnt invested in forever wars.

Moreover, while cloud seeding is often touted as a potential solution for the megadroughts of the not-so-distant-future, the technology hasnt been successful for long enough to measure how it affects natural weather patterns, nevermind its impact on climate change.

For now, though, lets just marvel at the fact that it now seems possible to literally make it rain on command.

READ MORE: China modified the weather as Communist Party marked centenary in Beijing [South China Morning Post]

More on cloud seeding:A Bunch of US States Are Now Using Weather Modification Technology

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

See the original post:
Scientists Say They Caught China Successfully Changing the Weather - Futurism

The feds are looking intro cryptocurrencies, and apparently have been since the Trump administration.

This revelation came during the Wall Street Journals uberhyped CEO Summit on Monday, whereasVicereported, CIA Director William Burns admitted that his agency has a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency.

He went on to say that he inherited the agencys crypto maneuvers from his predecessor, a likely reference to the ghoulish Gina Haspel, who was the last to lead the CIA during Donald Trumps presidency.

My predecessor had started this, but had set in motion a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency and trying to look at second- and third-order consequences as well and helping with our colleagues in other parts of the U.S. government to provide solid intelligence on what were seeing as well, Burns said.

Translation: the CIA is surveilling crypto networks and platforms, and trying to figure out how important a priority it is for so-called national security.

Burns fedspeak admission came in response to an audience question about the growing problem of ransomware attacks, which are an admittedly very real and serious threat that partially led to a real-life gas shortage,the alleged death of a newborn infant, and possibly even issues with the US beef supply chain.

Crypto, Burns said, could have enormous impact on the heists because one of the ways of getting at ransomware attacks and deterring them is to be able to get at the financial networks that so many of those criminal networks use and that gets right at the issue of digital currencies as well.

AsVice noted, Burns, ahem, cryptic remarks have reinvigorated blockchain bro rumors that Bitcoins mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto was an intelligence asset, though asVice noted, that line is mostly just a meme.

While it will likely remain unclear what exactly the CIA and other alphabet soup intelligence agencies are looking at with regards to crypto, this admission is stunning if for no other reason than that its yet another example of a normally-cagey government agency confirming longstanding rumors about its work after years of a steady declassification drip from the Defense Department confirming the existence of UFOs.

Indeed, former CIA acting director Michael Morrell said back in April that the blockchain is a boon for surveillance in a white paper meant to encourage governments to embrace crypto.

We probably wont know for decades what the CIA and its fellow intelligence agencies are up to with crypto, but at least we now know that theyre up tosomething.

READ MORE: The CIA Is Deep Into Cryptocurrency, Director Reveals [Vice]

More on government and crypto:The U.S. Government Has Held Over $1 Billion in Seized Cryptocurrency

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

Continued here:
The Head of the CIA Says It's Been Doing Mysterious Cryptocurrency Work - Futurism

Hes been talking about it for years now but nobodys listening.Inching Toward Extinction

Theres no question things are a bit dire right now when it comes to climate change but there is some good news: a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist says were on the brink of mass extinction.

Wait, no. Thats horrible news.

Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at MIT, has spoken about his predictions of a new mass extinction event in the past. He reiterated his Cassandran concerns in a recent interview with The Times of Israel, saying that human disruptions to the carbon cycle will ultimately result in calamity.

Every time there has been a major event in the history of life, there has also been a major perturbation of the environment, Rothamn told the newspaper. These things tend to come together.

Rothman reached his conclusions by observing past mass extinction events, during which there was an increased rate in carbon cycle change. In short, he says, theres only so much carbon that can be injected into the atmosphere and oceans in a geological time frame before we reach an extinction-level tipping point.

For example, according to his calculations, the threshold for carbon in the ocean is roughly 300 gigatons which is disconcerting because humans are on track to add up to 500 gigatons of carbons into the oceans by 2100. In his analysis, that puts the Earth squarely on the path towards a mass extinction event.

Luckily, there is some hope. Global leaders are beginning to take the issue of climate change more seriously than ever before. International efforts such as the recent UN Climate Change Conference are a big step in the right direction.And there have already been some rudimentary steps toward geoengineering.

Still, theres a lot more that countries can and should be doing to deal with the greatest existential threat of our time.

Its, I think, frankly a more difficult problem than the sort of stuff I work on because Im just trying to figure out what the truth is, Rothman told the newspaper. One would like to see more but good people are doing their best.

READ MORE: Headed for a sixth mass extinction? MIT geophysicist warns oceans are on the brink [The Times of Israel]

More on extinction: Scientist Says That Humans Are Almost Certainly Going Extinct

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

Continue reading here:
MIT Scientist Says We're on the Brink of a Mass Extinction Event - Futurism

Looks like he's already packing his bags for Mars.No Homes

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has officially sold off his last remaining home, for a cool $30 million. That means his only official abode is a small, $50,000 prefab hes renting at his space companys headquarters near Boca Chica, Texas.

Back in June, Musk tweeted that hed decided to sell my last remaining house. Just needs to go to a large family who will live there.

Its a special place, he added.

Initially, he put the house, a massive California mansion that used to belong to Gene Wilder, on sale for $37.5 million which turned out a little steep, even for the one percent. He tried again with a different agent in October, Insider reports,where itfinally sold.

Musk is,ostensibly, fully committed to building a city on Mars. And that means he needs cash and lots of it. Earlier this year, Musk said that hewas selling almost all physical possessions, in an effort to devote myself to Mars and Earth.

His plans couldnt be more ambitious.The concept is for afleet of 1,000 Starship spacecraft to populate a Martian metropolis with one million people by the year 2050.

Musk is looking to invest heavily in the venture himself.And even if real estate is only a tiny piece of that pie, its something.

I want to be able to contribute as much as possible to the city on Mars, he told Mathias Dpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, last year. That means just a lot of capital.

READ MORE: Elon Musk sold a San Francisco mansion, which was his last remaining home, for $30 million [Insider]

More on Elon: Elon Musk Says That Immortality Tech Would Be Very Dangerous

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

Continued here:
Elon Musk Just Sold His Final Home to Live in a Small Prefab Box - Futurism