On the prediction site Metaculus, Robin Hanson and Matthew Barnett have a bet about whole brain emulation versus artificial general intelligence. The bet is that when US labor participation rate is less than 10% then em-like automation will contribute more to GDP than AGI-like. Robin Hanson wrote the book the Age of EM. The “Em” …
TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor) disclosed plans for an enhanced 7nm FinFET node using extreme ultraviolet lithography, a 12nm upgrade of its 16nm process and a 22nm planar technology — its answer to fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI). The foundry also described enhancements to its two chip-stacking techniques, advances in RF CMOS and work in transistors and materials, …
Experiments that let a paralyzed person swig coffee using a robotic arm, or that let blind people “see” spots of light, have proven the huge potential of computers that interface with the brain. But the implanted electrodes used in such trials eventually become useless, as scar tissue forms that degrades their electrical connection to brain …
University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers will use pressures greater than those found at the center of the Earth to potentially create as yet unknown new materials. In the natural world, such immense forces deep underground can turn carbon into diamonds, or volcanic ash into slate. The ability to produce these pressures depends on tiny …
Spacex and Elon Musk plan to spend $300 million on their first Red Dragon mission to Mars in 2018. This will be ten times more than NASA will spend If this leads to Spacex performing a series of mainly successful unmanned and then a manned mission to Mars around 2024 or 2026 then that manned …
Conventional passwords might soon be a thing of the past, or at least on devices running Android. Google announced at I / O last week that it’s pushing ahead with plans to replace passwords with “trust scores” that incorporate various data points about users to determine whether or not they’re legitimate. Its Trust API is …
NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered 1,284 new exoplanets, including nine rocky worlds that might be capable of supporting life as we know it, astronomers announced today (May 10). This is by far the largest haul of alien planets ever unveiled at one time. The total exoplanet tally now stands at about 3,200, and Kepler …
How can a net decipher and label patterns that change with time? For example, could a net be used to scan traffic footage and immediately flag a collision? Through the use of a recurrent net, these real-time interactions are now possible. The Recurrent Neural Net (RNN) is the brainchild of Juergen Schmidhuber and Sepp Hochreiter. …
Peter Thiel makes the case in the NY Times for policy to get aligned to enable new nuclear designs to be used to reduce the emissions associated with climate change Speaking about climate change in 2013, President Obama said that our grandchildren will ask whether we did “all that we could when we had the …
Of Japan’s 43 operable reactors, only seven are likely to be turned on in the next few years, down from 14 reactors the Reuters news agency predicted would return to operation in an analysis last year. The survey also found that nine reactors are unlikely to ever restart, while the fate of the remaining 26 …
According to DARPA, vacuum electron devices (VEDs) are critical components for defense and civilian systems that require high power, wide bandwidth, and high efficiency, and there are over 200,000 VEDs currently in service. While most VEDs in common use today (traveling wave tubes (TWTs), klystrons, crossed-field amplifiers, magnetrons, gyrotrons and others) were invented in the …