One of the pioneers of artificial intelligence has warned the government is not safeguarding against the dangers posed by future super-intelligent machines. Professor Stuart Russell told The Times ministers were favouring a light touch on the burgeoning AI industry, despite warnings from civil servants it could create an existential threat. A former adviser to both Downing Street and the White House, Prof Russell is a co-author of the most widely used AI textbook and lectures on computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He told The Times a system similar to ChatGPT – which has passed exams and can compose prose – could form part of a super-intelligence machine which could not be controlled. “How do you maintain power over entities more powerful than you – forever?” he asked. “If you don’t have an answer, then stop doing the research. It’s as simple as that. “The stakes couldn’t be higher: if we don’t control our own civilisation, we have no say in whether we continue to exist.” In March, he co-signed an open letter with Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak warning of the “out-of-control race” going on at AI labs. The letter warned the labs were developing “ever more powerful digital minds that no one, not even their creators, can understand, predict or reliably control”. Prof Russell has worked for the UN on a system to monitor the nuclear test-ban treaty and was asked to work with the Government earlier this year. “The Foreign Office … talked to a lot of people and they concluded that loss of control was a plausible and extremely high-significance outcome,” he said. “And then the government came out with a regulatory approach that says: ‘Nothing to see here… we’ll welcome the AI industry as if we were talking about making cars or something like that’.” He said making changes to the technical foundations of AI to add necessary safeguards would take “time that we may not have”. “I think we got something wrong right at the beginning, where we were so enthralled by the notion of understanding and creating intelligence, we didn’t think about what that intelligence was going to be for,” he said. We've sort of got the message and we're scrambling around trying to figure out what to do Professor Stuart Russell “Unless its only purpose is to be a benefit to humans, you are actually creating a competitor – and that would be obviously a stupid thing to do. “We don’t want systems that imitate human behaviour… you’re basically training it to have human-like goals and to pursue those goals. “You can only imagine how disastrous it would be to have really capable systems that were pursuing those kinds of goals.” He said there were signs of politicians becoming aware of the risks. “We’ve sort of got the message and we’re scrambling around trying to figure out what to do,” he said. “That’s what it feels like right now.” The government has launched the AI Foundation Model Taskforce which it says will “lay the foundations for the safe use of foundation models across the economy and ensure the UK is at the forefront of this pivotal AI technology”. Read More ChatGPT creators try to use artificial intelligence to explain itself – and come across major problems Artificial intelligence could ‘transform’ heart attack diagnosis, scientists say Hackers aim to find flaws in AI - with White House help ChatGPT user in China detained for creating and spreading fake news, police say Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live

Rapidly melting glaciers in Asia’s Hindu Kush Himalayan region — home to the world’s highest mountains — are

(Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc on Thursday said it expects a jump in fourth-quarter revenue and profit, boosted by a holiday marketing

Taiwanese tech giant and key Apple supplier Foxconn predicts three-digit growth for its artificial intelligence server business due to robust demand for AI products such...

DULUTH, Ga.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 22, 2023--

'Some interviews on the show were done by other staffers, with [audio of 41-year-old Meghan's] questions edited-in afterward' it was revealed

Earth was once hit by an extreme solar storm that would devastate human civilisation if it happened today, tree rings show. Scientists were able to piece together the solar storm from ancient tree rings that were found in the French alps, and showed evidence of a dramatic spike in radiocarbon levels some 14,300 years ago. That spike was the result of a massive solar storm, the biggest ever found by scientists. If a similar event happened today, it could knock the power grid offline for months and destroy the infrastructure we rely on for communications, scientists have warned. The researchers behind the new study have urged that the extreme nature of the newly discovered event should be a warning for the future. “Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth. Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts lasting months,” said Tim Heaton, professor of applied statistics in the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds. “They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable. They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts.” Further work is needed to ensure that the world is protected from similar events happening again, scientists said. And more research is required to actually understand how and why they might happen. Scientists have found nine extreme solar storms, or Miayake Events, that happened in the last 15,000 years. The most recent of them happened in the years 993 AD and 774 AD, but the newly found one was twice as powerful as those. Researchers do not know exactly what happened during those Miyake Events, and studying them is difficult because they can only be understood indirectly. That makes it difficult for scientists to know how and when they might happen again, or if it is even possible to predict them. “Direct instrumental measurements of solar activity only began in the 17th century with the counting of sunspots,” said Edouard Bard, professor of climate and ocean evolution at the Collège de France and CEREGE. “Nowadays, we also obtain detailed records using ground-based observatories, space probes, and satellites. “However, all these short-term instrumental records are insufficient for a complete understanding of the Sun. Radiocarbon measured in tree-rings, used alongside beryllium in polar ice cores, provide the best way to understand the Sun’s behaviour further back into the past.”  The largest solar storm that scientists were able to actually observe and study happened in 1859, and is known as the Carrington Event. It caused vast disruption to society, destroying telegraph machines and creating a bright aurora so bright that birds behaved as if the Sun was rising. The Miayake Events like the newly found storm would have been vastly more powerful, however. They were discovered by slicing ancient trees that are becoming fossils into tiny rings, and then analysing the radiocarbon that was present in them. Their work is published in a new article, ‘A radiocarbon spike at 14,300 cal yr BP in subfossil trees provides the impulse response function of the global carbon cycle during the Late Glacial’, in the journal The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

TL;DR: As of July 22, get the Outdoor Movie Bundle: Wemax Go Portable Projector with

FORT MILL, S.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 15, 2023--

By Ludwig Burger and Alexander Hübner FRANKFURT/MUNICH German technology groups have warned they are being hit by delays

Apollo, a popular client app for Reddit, is shutting down. Reddit had required that Apollo pay an unsustainable amount of money to be able to access the data required to make the app run, according to its developer Christian Selig. In recent weeks, Reddit announced that it was making changes to its API, the technology that allows other apps to communicate with its forum. It said that it had been required to make the move because providing that data was proving too expensive, and that it was currently unfair for Reddit to be paying for busy apps. Shortly after, it announced that it would be pricing access to that API at such a rate that it would cost the developer of Apollo some $2 million per month, and that the new rates would go into effect in 30 days. Mr Selig said that would make running the app impossible. That led to outcry across Reddit, with many forums on the site announcing that they would go dark in protest against the company’s actions. Some of the most popular subreddits on the site joined the boycott, and some indicated they would never come back if the company did not change the terms of access on the pricing. Now, Mr Selig has announced that the situation has become untenable and that the app will shut down at the end of June. “It’s been an amazing run thanks to all of you,” he wrote in a long post on Reddit. In that same post, Mr Selig gave a long explanation of the situation with the site, and how he had come to the decision to shut down the app. He also included recordings of conversations with Reddit, which he said contradicted some of the site’s public statements about how it had behaved. He said that he had considered a host of other options, including increasing the price and changing the way the app works. But many users are already subscribed for a year, he said, and it would not be possible to alter the app enough in the time before the new terms go into effect. Mr Selig also noted that many users had asked whether he would build an alternative to Reddit. “While I’m very flattered, that’s not something I’m interested in doing,” he wrote. And he said that he supported the protests “abundantly”, noting that Reddit is largely run by people who moderate the site for free and so he understood their “anger and frustration”. “While I haven’t personally mobilized anyone to participate in the blackout out of fear of retaliation from Reddit, the last thing I want is for that to feel like I don’t support the folks speaking up. I wholeheartedly do,” he wrote. Apollo was previously one of the most well-regarded apps in the App Store. It was even featured in Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote this week, where it was mentioned by software boss Craig Federghi and included on a list of apps that would work on the company’s upcoming Vision Pro headset. Mr Selig said that was likely a “coincidence” given the amount of preparation that was required for those keynotes. The app should keep working until 30 June, he said, when the new pricing goes into effect and the app will be switched off from Reddit. He said that he would release an explanation and a tool to export data from the app before then. In recent months, Twitter has also made changes to its API that have led to prohibitive costs for access to its data and the closure of a number of well-respected Twitter clients. Mr Selig has suggested that those changes at Twitter could have helped inspire Reddit’s decisions around its own pricing. Read More Millions of Reddit users face a blackout over pricing revolt Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Can Apple make us love virtual reality? | You Ask The Questions Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Can Apple make us love virtual reality? | You Ask The Questions Instagram has stopped working properly

Orsted A/S’s chief Mads Nipper dismissed two top executives as the company fights to recover from huge writedowns