Category Archives: Futurism

The Earth is typically this busy. Hot Topic

A seeming barrage of volcanoes have erupted across the world this past week. Scenes hitting the news of a volcano in Mexico billowing smoke and ash, another in Italy spewing lava, an undersea volcano dredging up a whole new island in Japan, and a town in Iceland dramatically evacuated as steam hisses through cracks opened in the Earth, warning of an imminent eruption.

Taken together, it may seem rather apocalyptic, and some have speculated on social media that the volcanic activity is unusually high, as if hinting at some sort of geological conspiracy. But according to experts, there's nothing to be alarmed about; these levels of volcanism are pretty much par for the course.

"This is totally normal," said Janine Krippner, a physical volcanologist at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, on X-formerly-Twitter.

There are 46 volcanoes in "continuing eruption" as of 11 October 2023, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program, which means they are intermittently erupting at least every three months (and some, like the volcano in Mexico, have been erupting since 2005). The typical amount is between 40-50, with about 20 erupting on any given day.

Christopher Kilburn, a professor of volcanology and geophysical hazards at University College London, agrees it's not at all unusual for a dozen volcanoes to be erupting simultaneously.

"However, there may be an unusual increase in the number of reports that circulate in the media, especially if a volcano is near a populated area or when dramatic video is available showing an eruption in progress," Kilburn told Newsweek.

Jenni Barclay of the University of East Anglia was a little more blunt. "This is very much an instance of people noticing volcanoes erupting more than usual," she told the magazine.

To that end, the evacuation of the small Icelandic town Grandavik this week has provided plenty of spectacle. Footage shared in the news and online show the town's roads cleaved asunder from volcanic activity, and footage of its 3,500 or so residents hurriedly retrieving their belongings from their homes. Authorities fear a high likelihood of an eruption, though exactly when is unclear.

It's unsettling, to be sure, but Iceland and Grandavik's region in particular is a hotbed of volcanic activity, so this is hardly unprecedented for the Nordic nation.

Edward Llewellin, a volcanologist at Durham University in England, told Newsweek that Iceland's headline-making eruptions in the recent past, such as when the volcano Eyjafjallajkull blew its top in 2010 and significantly disrupted air travel, has led to "elevated interest" in the nation's volcanism, which is why the current activity near Grandavik "is making the news even though there is no eruption, yet."

In sum, it's good that more people are warming up to volcanism but let's not blow anything out of proportion.

More on Earthly happenings: Residents Alarmed When Pond Turns Bright Pink

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Wave of Volcanoes Erupting Around the World is Totally Normal ... - Futurism

Why does this keep happening? Got the Boot

As more details are revealed about the drama at OpenAI, insiders are coming forward with anonymous anecdotes about all manner of messiness from Sam Altman's past.

In an extraordinary expos, the Washington Post has revealed for the first time that Altman was not only fired from the tech incubator Y Combinator in 2019, but that the organization's founder Paul Graham was the one who did the sacking.

Though prior reports said only that Altman had "stepped down" from his role as young president of the incubator, three people familiar with the matter told WaPo that Graham, who was something of a mentor to the younger tech guru, flew from the United Kingdom to San Francisco to personally give his proteg the boot.

"It was the school of loose management," one ofWaPo's insiders said, "that is all about prioritizing whats in it for me."

Altman was also, curiously enough, fired by a close colleague at OpenAI on Friday. According to a timeline of events posted over the weekend by the company's former board president Greg Brockman, cofounder Ilya Sutskever sacked Altman in a Google Meet call far less personal than an international trip for a face-to-face discussion, but that's business in a post-COVID world.

The now-reinstated CEO was, as is now very public, fired by OpenAI's board for allegedly being less than candid when communicating with them, though the exact details remain a topic of intense speculation.

But this latest revelation about his termination at Y Combinator suggests shows that at the very least, the blowout wasn't unprecedented.

More on Altman: OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

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This Apparently Wasn't the First Time Sam Altman Was Dramatically ... - Futurism

Disastrous. Reverse, Reverse

Remember last week, when the alt-smartphone company Nothing pause for the sigh announced that it was releasing an app, dubbed Nothing Chats, that would allow its customers to send blue-bubbled iMessage sans iPhone? Well, forget about it. As Ars Technica reports, the messaging service didn't even make it a full 24 hours on Google Play before researchers discovered that the system was plagued with egregious privacy issues.

Sunbird, the platform on which Nothing Chats was built, promises to provide users with "end-to-end encryption" for their messages a claim that was reiterated by Nothing on its since-updated landing page for the Chats feature.

"Nothing Chats is built on Sunbird's platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted," the Nothing webpage read, "meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages youre sending and receiving."

But as it turns out, the app was anything butencrypted, with tech-savvy researchers quickly finding that Nothing and Sunbird were storing users' messages andattachment links in plain text. This would make the text data easily accessible to folks at Nothing, Sunbird, and anyone else who could gain access.

"Nothing Chats app (skinned Sunbird) is an absolute privacy nightmare that sends/stores ALL data unencrypted on firebase," one such researcher, who goes by "wukko" on X-formerly-Twitter, wrote in an X post on Saturday, adding that "for whatever reason" the app also sends "ALL messages and attachments" to Sentry, the crash-reporting cloud platform.

Wukko's allegations were corroborated by researchers over at 9to5Googleand Texts.com, who collectively concluded that Nothing and Sunbird were essentially storing user texts, images, and all other attachments PDFs, videos, you name it in broad daylight.

Nothing has since walked back the beta Chats feature, with its updated Chats webpage now noting that due to "several bugs," the startup will be "delaying the launch until further notice."

Gotta say, though: to call a massive privacy issue that a company definitely should have known about before partnering with a service like Sunbird a "bug" is a massive understatement. And rest assured, when Nothing took that "bug" announcement over to X, the ensuing community notes were nothing short of brutal.

"Contrary to Nothing's claim about fixing 'bugs' in their upcoming app, these issues are serious security & privacy lapses," reads the top note. "Falsely advertised as end-to-end encrypted, exposes user data in plain text."

Anyway. If you used this app, or any other Sunbird-supported messaging service out there, you should be wary of what data of yours might be out there. In the meantime, we're sorry to say that the sad, sad drumbeat of the green bubble march plays on.

More on privacy: Researchers Just Found Something Terrifying about Talking to AI Chatbots

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App That Turned Android's Texts Blue Taken Down After ... - Futurism

There's something really off about these videos. Singularity God

A TikTok account is churning out AI-generated videos of a talking Jesus and the uncanny Christ figure may be exemplifying the absolute worst of profit-driven proselytizing that prays on the vulnerable and gullible.

In an editorial forThe Conversation, religion scholar Brandon Dean of the University of Iowa pointed out that because of TikTok's video monetizing rules, the human behind the popular AI Jesus account Daily Believer may well be being paid by the Chinese-owned social platform.

With its more than 800,000 subscribers and high-performing videos that have been watched, in some cases, more than 22 million times, Daily Believer more than qualified for the TikTok Creator Fund, which until last week allowed users with at least 10,000 non-bot followers to apply for payouts on their videos. Though the website suspended the Creator Fund last week, it says that an upcoming or should we say second coming version of the feature will pay high-performing creators more than the two-to-four cents per 1,000 views it was previously giving them.

Welcome Jesus into Your Home This video brings a special visitor to you, straight from my home. He is someone I know very well, his name is Jesus Christ. He is ready to enter your life, bring protection to your family, and cleanse your heart with His love. #lordjesus #praise #jesusislord #orar #jesuschristislord #biblia #bible #jesusisking #jesuschrist #christ

Emotional - Bang Nono

Though it's unclear whether Daily Believer took part in the Creator Fund, the messages preached by its creepy Jesus simulacrum fall very much in line with what's known as the "prosperity gospel," which televangelists use to bilk their parishioners out of hard-earned cash.

Anyone who's ever tuned into "The 700 Club" is familiar with the prosperity gospel, even if they don't know it by name. The basic idea is that in order to gain good fortune think job opportunities, surprise checks, or better luck in love one need only pray to Christ and throw a few Washingtons towards the humble pastor.

To be clear, the various talking Jesuses posted by the Daily Believer account don't seem to be asking people for money in the vein of its evangelical predecessors, but the videos do ask viewers for something almost as good and well within TikTok's rules: comments, subscriptions, and shares, a sort of unholy trinity [!!!] for the streaming set.

Those who believe in God, the robotized white Jesus tells viewers, will get everything their heart desires as long as they comment "I believe" and send videos to friends.

And if they don't, they may be subject to God's wrath, because as John the Baptist said in the Book of Michael and one of the Daily Believer's animated Jesuses reminds viewers in its most popular video "Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

Talk about reaching out and touching faith.

More on robots and religion: Iranian Authorities Say AI Could Help Issue Fatwas Faster Than Ever Before

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People Are Doing Something Very Dark With AI-Generated Jesus ... - Futurism

Why so secretive? Secret Summit

Last week, before the axis of the artificial intelligence world veritably shifted with OpenAI's ongoing leadership shakeup, a group of AI and military leaders met in a secretive three-day retreat in the Utah mountains.

AsBloomberg reports, the AI Security Summit not to be confused with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's AI Safety Summit earlier in November was hosted by the startup Scale AI, a contractor that offers data security to everyone from OpenAI to the US Army.

At the rented-out luxury hotel located somewhere near-ish to Park City, Utah, the summit's assembled AI and military insiders were given the chance to speak candidly no direct attribution was allowed from attendees or press about issues facing the industry, even as President Joe Biden and China's President Xi Jinping held their own tte--tte800 miles away in San Francisco to discuss, among other things, regulations on AI.

During the three-day event, Scale AI's invite-only guests picked out bespoke cowboy hats, ate coffee-rubbed bison steaks, made s'mores, and undoubtedly had top-shelf spirits during fireside chats about all manner of big-deal issues like the pace of AI advancement and the possibility that the tech may advance to the level of artificial general intelligence or AGI, in which it could perform at a human level or even surpass us.

Interestingly, as Bloomberg indicates, there didn't appear to be any prior knowledge of OpenAI's then-forthcoming Red Wedding that took place just a day or two after the summit, which featured executives from the firm.

While we know some general information about the secretive event, such as the topics of panel discussions that included US-China AI relations and a deep dive into the chips that power the technology, most of what went on at the summit remains a mystery becauseBloomberg's Rachel Metz seems to have been the only press working at the summit, and she agreed not to quote anyone or anything she heard directly.

The journalist did, however, manage to sneak in one unsourced quote that took place during an archery lesson where guests unskilled in the art learned to shoot bows and arrows.

"He didnt need a lot of training data," a guest joked after a teammate made a good shot on the bullseye made up to look like a furious bear, per Bloomberg's reporting.

The summit, of course, was definitely not all fun and games but in the tech world that AI leaders and their military contractors occupy, work and play are often very enmeshed.

More on AI: This Might Be the Reason OpenAI Fired Sam Altman

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AI and Military Leaders Gathered for Mysterious Event in Utah - Futurism

Join renowned interdisciplinary theorist Prof. Karen Barad and visionary artists, Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa of Black Quantum Futurism, for an evening of conversation and sound exploring material quantum temporalities.

Through the lens of their practice and in celebration of shared points of convergence, Rasheedah and Karen reclaim the radical potential contained within quantum physics. In doing so they trouble the dominant narratives and violence shaping the present, from the next iteration of quantum technologies to Black experience and life more broadly. Accompanied by sound created by Camae, Karen and Rasheedah will highlight the im/possibility for erasure and how the past and future can be redeemed within the present.

This event is curated by Lucy Rose Sollitt and commissioned by the Goethe-Institut in San Francisco, Ireland (Dublin), London and Beijing. It takes place with the generous partnership of Gray Area. Tuning into the Quantum is the last event of the Living in a Quantum State programme which this year transitioned into Studio Quantum A new international events and artist-in-residence programme from the Goethe-Institut, exploring emerging quantum technologies through the lens of art.

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Gray Area Grand Theater: Tuning into the Quantum: A Vibrational ... - Mission Local