For most of us, email is a necessary evil of modern working life. Unfortunately, it

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 8, 2023--

Oracle Corp. reported cloud sales growth that slowed in the quarter, dimming enthusiasm about the software maker’s expansion

Canadian news outlets have been blocked on Facebook and Instagram because of a dispute with the Canadian government

Haru Invest has paused deposits and withdrawals “until further notice” on its high-yielding digital asset management platform, citing

Apple’s next earnings report is just a few weeks away. It’s likely to post a fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue declines.

Scientists have discovered a ghost-white shark with a rare condition. The predator was accidentally hooked by fishermen dedicated to catching sole. They were working from the coastal area of Los Chimus in Peru and informed authorities of the find. At the time of its capture, the shark had injuries to its gill slits as a result of being caught up in the net last month. The marine animal was transferred to the Peruvian Institute of the Sea (IMARPE) in Chimbote to undergo tests. Scientists discovered that the shark had leucism, which causes partial loss of pigmentation. The condition differs to albinism, which is a complete lack of melanin - a substance in the body that produces hair, eye and skin pigmentation. Albinos often have pink or red eyes but while leucism often makes an animal’s skin white, it does not affect their eye colour. IMARPE said this is the first known case of a shark in Peruvian waters having this condition. The fish was a young female that measured 89cm in length. Sexual maturity in females takes place when they are around 220cm in length. The predatory species sits high on the trophic food chain and mostly feeds on other sharks, rays, cetaceans and sea lions. Broadnose sevengill sharks are known to hunt in packs to bring down large prey. They are recognisable by their seven gill slits as most shark species have five. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

A century after the US set aside a broad swath of northwest Alaska to be used as an

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., looking to take advantage of the demand for generative artificial intelligence tools, introduced a

KENT, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 19, 2023--

In the ‘Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows’, a group of small birds come up with a plan to capture an owl egg and raise the chick as their servant. “How easy life would be,” they say, if the owl could work for them, and they could live a life of leisure. Despite warnings from members of their flock that they should first figure out how to tame an owl before they raise one, the sparrows devote all their efforts to capturing an egg. This tale, as its title suggests, does not have an ending. Its author, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, deliberately left it open-ended as he believes that humanity is currently in the egg hunting phase when it comes to superhuman AI. In his seminal work on artificial intelligence, titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, the Oxford University professor posits that AI may well destroy us if we are not sufficiently prepared. Superintelligence, which he describes as an artificial intelligence that “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”, may be a lot closer than many realise, with AI experts and leading industry figures warning that it may be just a few years away. On Monday, the creator of ChatGPT echoed Professor Bostrom’s 2014 book by warning that the seemingly exponential progress of AI technology in recent years means that the imminent arrival of superintelligence is inevitable – and we need to start preparing for it before it’s too late. OpenAI boss Sam Altman, whose company’s AI chatbot is the fastest growing app in history, has previously described Professor Bostrom’s book as “the best thing I’ve seen on this topic”. Just a year after reading it, Mr Altman co-founded OpenAI alongside other similarly worried tech leaders like Elon Musk and Ilya Sutskever in order to better understand and mitigate against the risks of advanced artificial intelligence. Initially launched as a non-profit, OpenAI has since transformed into arguably the leading private AI firm – and potentially the closest to achieving superintelligence. Mr Altman believes superintelligence has the potential to not only offer us a life of leisure by doing all the majority of our labour, but also holds the key to curing diseases, eliminate suffering and transforming humanity into an interstellar species. Any attempts to block its progress, he wrote this week, would be “unintuitively risky” and would require “something like a global surveillance regime” that would be virtually impossible to implement. It is already difficult to understand what is going on inside the ‘mind’ of AI tools currently available, but once superintelligence is achieved, even its actions may become incomprehensible. It could make discoveries that we would be incapable of understanding, or take decisions that make no sense to us. The biological and evolutionary limitations of brains made of organic matter mean we may need some form of brain-computer interface in order to keep up. Being unable to compete with AI in this new technological era, Professor Bostrom warns, could see humanity replaced as the dominant lifeform on Earth. The superintelligence may then see us as superfluous to its own goals. If this happens, and some form of AI has figured out how to hijack all the utilities and technology we rely upon – or even the nuclear weapons we possess – then it would not take long for AI to wipe us off the face of the planet. A more benign, but similarly bleak, scenario is that the gulf in intelligence between us and the AI will mean it views us in the same way we view animals. In a 2015 conversation between Mr Musk and scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, they theorised that AI will treat us like a pet labrador. “They’ll domesticate us,” Professor Tyson said. “They’ll keep the docile humans and get rid of the violent ones.” In an effort to prevent this outcome, Mr Musk has dedicated a portion of his immense fortune towards funding a brain chip startup called Neuralink. The device has already been tested on monkeys, allowing them to play video games with their minds, and the ultimate goal is to transform humans into a form of hybrid superintelligence. (Critics note that even if successful, the technology would similarly create a two-tiered society of the chipped, and the chipless.) Since cutting ties with OpenAI, the tech billionaire has issued several warnings about the imminent emergence of superintelligence. In March, he joined more than 1,000 researchers in calling for a moratorium on the development of powerful AI systems for at least six months. That time should then be spent researching AI safety measures, they wrote in an open letter, in order to avert disaster. It would take an improbable consensus of leading AI companies around the world, the majority of which are all profit-seeking, in order for any such pause to be impactful. And while OpenAI continues to spearhead the hunt for the owl’s egg, Mr Altman appears to have at least heeded the warnings from Professor Bostrom’s fable. In a 2016 interview with the New Yorker, he revealed that he is a doomsday prepper – specifically for an AI-driven apocalypse. “I try not to think about it too much, he said, revealing that he has “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water [and] gas masks” stashed away in a hideout in rural California. Not that any of that will be much use to the rest of us. 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Greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s top meat and dairy producers increased further this year, highlighting the urgent