Tag: technology

A chatbot that lets you talk with Jesus and Hitler is the latest controversy in the AI gold rush

It’s a classic parlor game: Which three people from history would you invite to dinner? 

Now, a new app brings the experience to your phone with help from an artificial intelligence chatbot, allowing users to have text conversations with robots meant to simulate the perspectives of notable people from history, from Babe Ruth to Adolf Hitler. 

The app, called Historical Figures, has begun to take off in the two weeks since it was released as a way to have conversations with any of 20,000 notable people from history.

But this week, it sparked viral controversy online over its inclusion of Hitler, his Nazi lieutenants and other dictators from the past. 

“Are neo-Nazis going to be attracted to this site so they can go and have a dialogue with Adolf Hitler?” asked Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the director of global social action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. 

The app, created by a 25-year-old Amazon software engineer, is part of the latest rush in tech to build on top of AI software such as ChatGPT, an advanced chatbot prototype that burst onto the scene less than two months ago. 

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Scientists Have Successfully Reversed Signs of Aging in Mice for the First Time

Two research groups in the US were able to stop mice from getting old by fixing their DNA.

In a recent study published in Cell on Jan. 12, Harvard scientists showed that they could manipulate and reverse the aging process in mice by generating DNA repairs.

The results of a 13-year, international study show for the first time that breakdown in epigenetic information accelerates aging in mice and that repairing the epigenome can reverse those signs of aging.

“For about the past 50 years, popular theory has held that the process of aging is caused in large part by an accumulation of mutation. There’s growing evidence, however, that aging has a significant epigenetic component. That is, the process by which stretches of DNA or the genes are turned on and off,” said the paper’s senior author, David Sinclair, professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.

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Former Intelligence Director says UFO report raises concern U.S. behind on military technology

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe is suggesting a new Pentagon report on UFOs should raise concerns about more than alien life, saying it might highlight possible weaknesses in America’s current military technologies.

“I know everyone gets caught up on the alien life and all of that, but my concern as the director of national intelligence was, if anyone, foreign adversary, regardless of how you define foreign adversary, have technologies that the United States don’t have, we need to find out more about that,” Ratcliffe stressed during an interview with Fox & Friends on Sunday. 

Ratcliffe said he disclosed the existence of an unidentified aerial phenomenon task force to the Senate Intelligence Committee because “I wanted there to be greater transparency to the American people about the number of sightings of things that are unexplained.” 

He explained that during his time as DNI the government he learned that “Navy pilots and Air Force pilots were discouraged from reporting” UFO sightings because they thought that it would ruin their careers.

“We need to have information if there are technologies out there, and very clearly, as this most recent report reveals, the sightings are increasing, which is a good thing, because that means we’re getting more honest reporting from our Navy and Air Force pilots,” Ratcliffe said. “But it gives us more information… there very clearly are now hundreds of unexplained sightings, meaning that there’s no natural phenomenon involved.”

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What Privacy? This AI Can Identify You by Your Computer Habits

The world of privacy is a constant battlefield. It’s not a static decision where once you’ve done this one single step, you’re now good until the end of time. Instead, you have to stay abreast of the research, studying the ways that privacy is constantly being diminished so that you can then take the appropriate steps to respond.

If you’ve read through a privacy policy for an app, website, or contract in the past, you’ve likely noticed that they state they may sell your data to third parties. Exactly who these third parties are, you never know, nor what your information is being used for in the first place.

But sometimes you find the privacy policy tries to add a feel-good clause here, saying something to the extent that “our data about you is completely anonymous.”

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ARPA-H: The Nosy Love Child of DARPA and the NIH

On March 15, 2022, President Biden signed a law allowing for the creation and funding of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency received $1 billion for fiscal year 2022.

ARPA-H’s stated mission is  to“accelerate better health outcomes for everyone by supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems.”  So, the federal government is tossing another billion into the black hole that is the American health care system.  Okay.

We’re already spending a fortune on healthcare.

Let’s think about this for a minute.  The U.S. already spends far more per capita than any other nation in the world.  We spend an average of $11,495 per person, per year.  Most other First World countries hover between $5000 and $6000.  (source)

Health care in the U.S. represented 17.7% of the economy as of 2018, and has been projected to increase to 19.7% in 2028.  That means that more than 1 in 6 dollars spent in the U.S. is being spent on healthcare.

So, is this paying off?  Are Americans the healthiest people in the world?

No.  We’re sick and have been getting sicker.  Our life expectancy dropped again last year, to 76.4 years, which is the lowest since the 1990s.  Meanwhile people in dozens of other countries can expect to live into their 80s on average, American life expectancy just continues to drop. I don’t think we’re getting what we pay for.

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Artificial Intelligence-Powered ‘Robot Lawyer’ to Represent Human in Court Next Month

A robot powered by artificial intelligence is set to become the world’s first “robot lawyer” and will take on speeding ticket cases in court next month, its creators have said.

Joshua Browder, the CEO of Startup DoNotPay, which bills itself as “the home of the world’s first robot lawyer” confirmed the news on Twitter on Monday.

Browder said the company is offering to pay any lawyer or person $1 million to use the AI lawyer in an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court.

“We have upcoming cases in municipal (traffic) court next month. But the haters will say ‘traffic court is too simple for GPT.’ So we are making this serious offer, contingent on us coming to a formal agreement and all rules being followed,” Browder wrote.

The CEO did not provide further details regarding the defendants in the case or the location of the court.

According to DoNotPay’s official website, the company uses artificial intelligence to “help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and suing robocallers.”

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The dark web’s criminal minds see Internet of Things as next big hacking prize

John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, likens his job to studying criminal minds through a soda straw. He monitors cyberthreat groups in real time on the dark web, watching what amounts to a free market of criminal innovation ebb and flow.

Groups buy and sell services, and one hot idea — a business model for a crime — can take off quickly when people realize that it works to do damage or to get people to pay. Last year, it was ransomware, as criminal hacking groups figured out how to shut down servers through what’s called directed denial of service attacks. But 2022, say experts, may have marked an inflection point due to the rapid proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

Attacks are evolving from those that shut down computers or stole data, to include those that could more directly wreak havoc on everyday life. IoT devices can be the entry points for attacks on parts of countries’ critical infrastructure, like electrical grids or pipelines, or they can be the specific targets of criminals, as in the case of cars or medical devices that contain software.

“What I wish is that the vulnerabilities of cybersecurity could never negatively affect human life and infrastructure,” says Meredith Schnur, cyber brokerage leader for US & Canada at Marsh & McLennan, which insures large companies against cyberattacks. “Everything else is just business.”

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Scientists Say They’re Now Actively Trying to Build Conscious Robots

2022 was a banner year for artificial intelligence, and particularly taking into account the launch of OpenAI’s incredibly impressive ChatGPT, the industry is showing no sign of stopping.

But for some industry leaders, chatbots and image-generators are far from the final robotic frontier. Next up? Consciousness.

“This topic was taboo,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

Consciousness is one of the longest standing, and most divisive, questions in the field of artificial intelligence. And while to some it’s science fiction — and indeed has been the plot of countless sci-fi books, comics, and films — to others, like Lipson, it’s a goal, one that would undoubtedly change human life as we know it for good.

“This is not just another research question that we’re working on — this is the question,” the researcher continued. “This is bigger than curing cancer.”

“If we can create a machine that will have consciousness on par with a human, this will eclipse everything else we’ve done,” he added. “That machine itself can cure cancer.”

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What’s Inside the Budget for the Secretive DARPA?

The Economist has called DARPA the agency “that shaped the modern world,” and listed weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which “DARPA can claim at least partial credit.” These technologies were originally invented for the military aims of the Pentagon. 

DARPA was providing funding and technical support to Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology since at least 2013. DARPA also had long-time associates and partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

A look at their new budget provides a glimpse at what the U.S. Military sees as part of the future of warfare. 

Using machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate information or human behavior seems to be a priority for DARPA judging by the budget. 

A project named AAI aims to further the “facilitation of operator-machine interface, knowledge management and dissemination, and social context-informed AI forecasting.” The project also aims to include a “focus on measuring and aggregating preconscious signals and how these can be used to determine what people believe to be true.” 

Project SemaFor is being earmarked for hundreds of millions of dollars and will use AI “to identify false information, its origin, and its intent [emphasis added]. A project named ASED is developing “counter-social engineering bots.” A little description of this project is given. 

Once thought to be a thing of only movies and television shows, DARPA plans to further its development of a type of “ray gun.” Project Warden is being earmarked millions of dollars to “amplify the range and lethality of high-power microwave systems and weapons.” 

The World Economic Forum idea of Fourth Industrial Revolution technology, which is partly defined as the merging of the digital, technical and biological systems is also highlighted in the DARPA budget. 

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Could a zombie virus frozen in the remains of a woolly mammoth leak from a Russian lab and spark a new pandemic? Scientists aim to extract cellular material containing the viruses that killed Siberian beasts for testing

The majestic creature had lain silently in the permafrost for more than a million years. But all it took was a curious scientist, tinkering with its long-dead body, to unleash a terrible new pandemic on the world.

No, it’s not the plot of a woolly mammoth sequel to Jurassic Park, nor another theory on the origins of Covid-19 — though the result of this scientific investigation could be horribly similar.

It’s the story of how, right now, Russian researchers are unearthing the bodies of long-dead mammals in an attempt to ‘reawaken’ Stone Age viruses.

Such viruses are thought to have remained dormant for millennia in the frozen remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species in northeast Siberia.

Like the virus that caused Covid-19, these prehistoric ‘paleoviruses’ are unfamiliar to the human body and, were they ever to find their way across the species barrier, catastrophe could follow. We would, after all, have no natural defence.

The woolly mammoths that roamed the Siberian steppes — until the last one died some 10,000 years ago — were fearsome creatures. The size of an elephant, they had sharp tusks that could spear a human unwise enough to get near.

For biologists, they seem to hold an enduring fascination. Last year, a project called Colossal was launched, aiming to tweak the genetic code of the mammoth’s closest living relative, the Asian elephant, to create a hybrid animal that could survive in the Arctic Circle.

This latest project — carried out by Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector — aims to extract cellular material containing the viruses that killed these frozen beasts, and take it back to the lab for experimentation.

What could possibly go wrong? To conjure up the all-too-real nightmare scenario, you only have to hear the history of Vector.

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