Search Immortality Topics:

Page 112 3 4..»

Home » Singularity

Category Archives: Singularity

Singularity Energy Unveils CarbonFlow – A System Tracing Emissions From Source To Consumption – Carbon Herald

Singularity Energy has developed a product that addresses one of the critical but underreported issues of emissions tracking. Aptly named CarbonFlow, it provides granular details about energy flows on the grid and the emissions generated by its consumption.

Taking an entirely new approach to carbon accounting CarbonFlow is able to trace emissions at an individual line and load level. Its database can track emissions data from the initial production stages, all the way to where energy is used. This capability could revolutionize how carbon emissions are monitored, providing increased transparency and accountability for all stakeholders.

Speaking to Carbon Herald in 2023, Singularitys CEO Wenbo Shi stressed on how important determining the source of energy is. You dont actually burn coal or natural gas to generate electricity in your home. There are power plants that supply the electricity that everybody is using through the power grid. And that is a very complex machine. How do you really know where your power comes from? Does that come from clean energy sources? Or does that come from fossil fuel sources? When people start asking these questions, then you have to know that. And the answer is not very simple.

One of the key features of CarbonFlow is its ability to trace emissions back to their original source. This allows businesses and consumers to identify the precise sources of emissions and take targeted actions to reduce them. By gaining insights into the carbon intensity of different products and processes, organizations can make more informed decisions about resource allocation and supply chain management.

Relevant: Tracking Emissions On An Hourly Basis Is Going To Be Critical For Informing Decarbonization Policy Greg Miller, PhD Research and Policy Lead at Singularity Energy

These capabilities allow CarbonFlow to address one of the main challenges when it comes to calculating consumed emissions. Existing approaches focus on the import and export data between grid operators, combined with information about the fuels being used for power generation.

Though highly informative on a large scale, this approach leaves a gap when it comes to determining how emission rates vary on a region by region basis. CarbonFlow manages to zoom in on that regional level because it can account for power flows across individual transmission corridors.

With this the applications of CarbonFlow can cover a variety of needs like Scope 2 emissions accounting, quantifying the deliverability of renewable energy as well as providing insight for policymakers.

With willingness among many consumers and businesses to reduce their emissions increasing, there are those who remain on the sidelines because they dont feel like they are in a position to make an informed decision. The real-time visibility and accountability that CarbonFlow provides can be one of the most powerful tools to address this challenge.

Read more: Power Sector Decarbonization Through Innovative Data Intelligence: Wenbo Shi, CEO And Founder At Singularity Energy

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 20) – Singularity Hub

15 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2024 Eliza Strickland | IEEE Spectrum Each year, the AI Index lands on virtual desks with a louder virtual thudthis year, its 393 pages are a testament to the fact that AI is coming off a really big year in 2023. For the past three years,IEEE Spectrum has read the whole damn thing and pulled out a selection of charts that sum up the current state of AI.

The Next Frontier for Brain Implants Is Artificial Vision Emily Mullin | Wired Elon Musks Neuralink and others are developing devices that could provide blind people with a crude sense of sight. This is not about getting biological vision back, says Philip Troyk, a professor of biomedical engineering at Illinois Tech, whos leading the study Bussard is in. This is about exploring what artificial vision could be.'

Microsofts VASA-1 Can Deepfake a Person With One Photo and One Audio Track Benj Edwards | Ars Technica On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and dont require video feedsor allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.

Meta Is Already Training a More Powerful Successor to Llama 3 Will Knight | Wired On Thursday morning, Meta released its latestartificial intelligencemodel, Llama 3, touting it as the most powerful to bemade open sourceso that anyone can use it. The same afternoon,Yann LeCun, Metas chief AI scientist, said an even more powerful successor to Llama is in the works. He suggested it could potentially outshine the worlds best closed AI models, includingOpenAIs GPT-4andGoogles Gemini.

Intel Reveals Worlds Biggest Brain-Inspired Neuromorphic Computer Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist Hala Point contains 1.15 billion artificial neurons across 1152 Loihi 2 achips, and is capable of 380 trillion synaptic operations per second. Mike Davies at Intel says that despite this power it occupies just six racks in a standard server casea space similar to that of a microwave oven. Larger machines will be possible, says Davies. We built this scale of system because, honestly, a billion neurons was a nice round number, he says. I mean, there wasnt any particular technical engineering challenge that made us stop at this level.'

US Air Force Confirms First Successful AI Dogfight Emma Roth | The Verge Human pilots were on board the X-62A with controls to disable the AI system, but DARPA says the pilots didnt need to use the safety switch at any point. The X-62A went against an F-16 controlled solely by a human pilot, where both aircraft demonstrated high-aspect nose-to-nose engagements and got as close as 2,000 feet at 1,200 miles per hour. DARPA doesnt say which aircraft won the dogfight, however.

What If Your AI Girlfriend Hated You? Kate Knibbs | Wired It seems as though weve arrived at the moment in the AI hype cycle where no idea is too bonkers to launch. This weeks eyebrow-raising AI project is a new twist on theromantic chatbota mobile app calledAngryGF, which offers its users the uniquely unpleasant experience of getting yelled at via messages from a fake person.

Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare Dan Falk | Quanta For decades, theres been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to usthe great apes, for examplehave conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own. In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknowledge that consciousness may also be widespread among animals that are very different from us, including invertebrates with completely different and far simpler nervous systems.

Two Lifeforms Merge in Once-in-a-Billion-Years Evolutionary Event Michael Irving | New Atlas Scientists have caught a once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event in progress, as two lifeforms have merged into one organism that boasts abilities its peers would envy.Last time this happened, Earth got plants. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, cant normally dofixing nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.

Image Credit:Shubham Dhage / Unsplash

See the rest here:

This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 20) - Singularity Hub

Posted in Singularity | Comments Off

The Crucial Building Blocks of Life on Earth Form More Easily in Outer Space – Singularity Hub

The origin of life on Earth is still enigmatic, but we are slowly unraveling the steps involved and the necessary ingredients. Scientists believe life arose in a primordial soup of organic chemicals and biomolecules on the early Earth, eventually leading to actual organisms.

Its long been suspected that some of these ingredients may have been delivered from space. Now a new study, published in Science Advances, shows that a special group of molecules, known as peptides, can form more easily under the conditions of space than those found on Earth. That means they could have been delivered to the early Earth by meteorites or cometsand that life may be able to form elsewhere, too.

The functions of life are upheld in our cells (and those of all living beings) by large, complex carbon-based (organic) molecules called proteins. How to make the large variety of proteins we need to stay alive is encoded in our DNA, which is itself a large and complex organic molecule.

However, these complex molecules are assembled from a variety of small and simple molecules such as amino acidsthe so-called building blocks of life.

To explain the origin of life, we need to understand how and where these building blocks form and under what conditions they spontaneously assemble themselves into more complex structures. Finally, we need to understand the step that enables them to become a confined, self-replicating systema living organism.

This latest study sheds light on how some of these building blocks might have formed and assembled and how they ended up on Earth.

DNA is made up of about 20 different amino acids. Like letters of the alphabet, these are arranged in DNAs double helix structure in different combinations to encrypt our genetic code.

Peptides are also an assemblage of amino acids in a chain-like structure. Peptides can be made up of as little as two amino acids, but also range to hundreds of amino acids.

The assemblage of amino acids into peptides is an important step because peptides provide functions such as catalyzing, or enhancing, reactions that are important to maintaining life. They are also candidate molecules that could have been further assembled into early versions of membranes, confining functional molecules in cell-like structures.

However, despite their potentially important role in the origin of life, it was not so straightforward for peptides to form spontaneously under the environmental conditions on the early Earth. In fact, the scientists behind the current study had previously shown that the cold conditions of space are actually more favorable to the formation of peptides.

In the very low density clouds of molecules and dust particles in a part of space called the interstellar medium (see above), single atoms of carbon can stick to the surfaces of dust grains together with carbon monoxide and ammonia molecules. They then react to form amino acid-like molecules. When such a cloud becomes denser and dust particles also start to stick together, these molecules can assemble into peptides.

In their new study, the scientists look at the dense environment of dusty disks, from which a new solar system with a star and planets emerges eventually. Such disks form when clouds suddenly collapse under the force of gravity. In this environment, water molecules are much more prevalentforming ice on the surfaces of any growing agglomerates of particles that could inhibit the reactions that form peptides.

By emulating the reactions likely to occur in the interstellar medium in the laboratory, the study shows that, although the formation of peptides is slightly diminished, it is not prevented. Instead, as rocks and dust combine to form larger bodies such as asteroids and comets, these bodies heat up and allow for liquids to form. This boosts peptide formation in these liquids, and theres a natural selection of further reactions resulting in even more complex organic molecules. These processes would have occurred during the formation of our own solar system.

Many of the building blocks of life such as amino acids, lipids, and sugars can form in the space environment. Many have been detected in meteorites.

Because peptide formation is more efficient in space than on Earth, and because they can accumulate in comets, their impacts on the early Earth might have delivered loads that boosted the steps towards the origin of life on Earth.

So, what does all this mean for our chances of finding alien life? Well, the building blocks for life are available throughout the universe. How specific the conditions need to be to enable them to self-assemble into living organisms is still an open question. Once we know that, well have a good idea of how widespread, or not, life might be.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit:Aldebaran S / Unsplash

More here:

The Crucial Building Blocks of Life on Earth Form More Easily in Outer Space - Singularity Hub

Posted in Singularity | Comments Off

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 30) – Singularity Hub

The Best Qubits for Quantum Computing Might Just Be Atoms Philip Ball | Quanta In the search for the most scalable hardware to use for quantum computers, qubits made of individual atoms are having a breakout moment. We believe we can pack tens or even hundreds of thousands in a centimeter-scale device, [Mark Saffman, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin] said.

AI Chatbots Are Improving at an Even Faster Rate Than Computer Chips Chris Stokel-Walker | New Scientist Besiroglu and his colleagues analyzed the performance of 231 LLMs developed between 2012 and 2023 and found that, on average, the computing power required for subsequent versions of an LLM to hit a given benchmark halved every eight months. That is far faster than Moores law, a computing rule of thumb coined in 1965 that suggests the number of transistors on a chip, a measure of performance, doubles every 18 to 24 months.

How AI Could Explode the Economy Dylan Matthews | Vox Imagine everything humans have achieved since the days when we lived in caves: wheels, writing, bronze and iron smelting, pyramids and the Great Wall, ocean-traversing ships, mechanical reaping, railroads, telegraphy, electricity, photography, film, recorded music, laundry machines, television, the internet, cellphones. Now imagine accomplishing 10 times all thatin just a quarter century. This is a very, very, very strange world were contemplating. Its strange enough that its fair to wonder whether its even possible.

Whats Next for Generative Video Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review The first batch of models that could turn text into video appeared in late 2022, from companies including Meta, Google, andvideo-tech startup Runway. It was a neat trick, but the results were grainy, glitchy, and just a few seconds long. Fast-forward 18 months, and the best of Soras high-definition, photorealistic output is so stunning that some breathless observers are predicting the death of Hollywood. As we continue to get to grips whats aheadgood and badhere are four things to think about.

Salt-Sized Sensors Mimic the Brain Gwendolyn Rak | IEEE Spectrum To gain a better understanding of the brain, why not draw inspiration from it? At least, thats what researchers at Brown University did, by building a wireless communications system that mimics the brain using an array of tiny silicon sensors, each the size of a grain of sand. The researchers hope that the technology could one day be used in implantable brain-machine interfaces to read brain activity.

Understanding Humanoid Robots Brian Heater | TechCrunch A lot of smart people have faith in the form factor and plenty of others remain skeptical. One thing Im confident saying, however, is that whether or not future factories will be populated with humanoid robots on a meaningful scale, all of this work will amount to something. Even the most skeptical roboticists Ive spoken to on the subject have pointed to the NASA model, where the race to land humans on the moon led to the invention of products we use on Earth to this day.

Blazing Bits Transmitted 4.5 Million Times Faster Than Broadband Michael Franco | New Atlas An international research team has sent an astounding amount of data at a nearly incomprehensible speed. Its the fastest data transmission ever using a single optical fiber and shows just how speedy the process can get using current materials.

How Well Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU Mark Liu and HS Philip Wong | IEEE Spectrum We forecast that within a decade a multichiplet GPU will have more than 1 trillion transistors. Well need to link all thesechiplets together in a 3D stack, but fortunately, industry has been able to rapidly scale down the pitch of vertical interconnects, increasing the density of connections. And there is plenty of room for more. We see no reason why the interconnect density cant grow by an order of magnitude, and even beyond.

Astronomers Watch in Real Time as Epic Supernova Potentially Births a Black Hole Isaac Schultz | Gizmodo Calculations of the circumstellar material emitted in the explosion, as well as this materials density and mass before and after the supernova, create a discrepancy, which makes it very likely that the missing mass ended up in a black hole that was formed in the aftermath of the explosionsomething thats usually very hard to determine, said study co-author Ido Irani, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute.

Large Language Models Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage Stephen Ornes | Wired [In some tasks measured by the BIG-bench project, LLM] performance remained near zero for a while, then performance jumped. Other studies found similar leaps in ability. The authors described this as breakthrough behavior; other researchers have likened it to a phase transition in physics, like when liquid water freezes into ice. [But] a new paper by a trio of researchers at Stanford University posits that the sudden appearance of these abilities is just a consequence of the way researchers measure the LLMs performance. The abilities, they argue, are neither unpredictable nor sudden.

Image Credit:Aedrian /Unsplash

Continued here:

This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 30) - Singularity Hub

Posted in Singularity | Comments Off

These Plants Could Mine Valuable Metals From the Soil With Their Roots – Singularity Hub

The renewable energy transition will require a huge amount of materials, and there are fears we may soon face shortages of some critical metals. US government researchers think we could rope in plants to mine for these metals with their roots.

Green technologies like solar power and electric vehicles are being adopted at an unprecedented rate, but this is also straining the supply chains that support them. One area of particular concern includes the metals required to build batteries, wind turbines, and other advanced electronics that are powering the energy transition.

We may not be able to sustain projected growth at current rates of production of many of these minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Some of these metals are also sourced from countries whose mining operations raise serious human rights or geopolitical concerns.

To diversify supplies, the government research agency ARPA-E is offering $10 million in funding to explore phytomining, in which certain species of plants are used to extract valuable metals from the soil through their roots. The project is focusing on nickel first, a critical battery metal, but in theory, it could be expanded to other minerals.

In order to accomplish the goals laid out by President Biden to meet our clean energy targets, and support our economy and national security, its going to take [an] all-hands-on-deck approach and innovative solutions, ARPA-E director Evelyn Wang said in a press release.

By exploring phytomining to extract nickel as the first target critical material, ARPA-E aims to achieve a cost-competitive and low-carbon footprint extraction approach needed to support the energy transition.

The concept of phytomining has been around for a while and relies on a class of plants known as hyperaccumulators. These species can absorb a large amount of metal through their roots and store it in their tissues. Phytomining involves growing these plants in soils with high levels of metals, harvesting and burning the plants, and then extracting the metals from the ash.

The ARPA-E project, known as Plant HYperaccumulators TO MIne Nickel-Enriched Soils (PHYTOMINES), is focusing on nickel because there are already many hyperaccumulators known to absorb the metal. But finding, or creating, species able to economically mine the metal in North America will still be a significant challenge.

One of the primary goals of the project is to optimize the amount of nickel these plants can take in. This could involve breeding or genetically modifying plants to enhance these traits or altering the microbiome of either the plants or the surrounding soil to boost absorption.

The agency also wants to gain a better understanding of the environmental and economic factors that could determine the viability of the approach, such as the impact of soil mineral composition, the land ownership status of promising sites, and the lifetime costs of a phytomining operation.

But while the idea is still at a nebulous stage, there is considerable potential.

In soil that contains roughly 5 percent nickelthat is pretty contaminatedyoure going to get an ash thats about 25 to 50 percent nickel after you burn it down, Dave McNear, a biogeochemist at the University of Kentucky, told Wired.

In comparison, where you mine it from the ground, from rock, that has about .02 percent nickel. So you are several orders of magnitude greater in enrichment, and it has far less impurities.

Phytomining would also be much less environmentally damaging than traditional mining, and it could help remediate soil polluted with metals so they can be farmed more conventionally. While the focus is currently on nickel, the approach could be extended to other valuable metals too.

The main challenge will be finding a plant that is suitable for American climates that grows quickly. The problem has historically been that theyre not often very productive plants, Patrick Brown, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis, told Wired. And the challenge is you have to have high concentrations of nickel and high biomass to achieve a meaningful, economically viable outcome.

Still, if researchers can square that circle, the approach could be a promising way to boost supplies of the critical minerals needed to support the transition to a greener economy.

Image Credit: Nickel hyperaccumulator Alyssum argenteum / David Stang via Wikimedia Commons

Originally posted here:

These Plants Could Mine Valuable Metals From the Soil With Their Roots - Singularity Hub

Posted in Singularity | Comments Off

AI singularity may come in 2027 with artificial ‘super intelligence’ sooner than we think, says top scientist – Livescience.com

Humanity could create an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that is just as smart as humans in as soon as the next three years, a leading scientist has claimed.

Ben Goertzel, a computer scientist and CEO of SingularityNET, made the claim during the closing remarks at the Beneficial AGI Summit 2024 on March 1 in Panama City, Panama. He is known as the "father of AGI" after helping to popularize the term artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the early 2000s.

The best AI systems in deployment today are considered "narrow AI" because they may be more capable than humans in one area, based on training data, but can't outperform humans more generally. These narrow AI systems, which range from machine learning algorithms to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, struggle to reason like humans and understand context.

However, Goertzel noted AI research is entering a period of exponential growth, and the evidence suggests that artificial general intelligence (AGI) where AI becomes just as capable as humans across several areas independent of the original training data is within reach. This hypothetical point in AI development is known as the "singularity."

Goertzel suggested 2029 or 2030 could be the likeliest years when humanity will build the first AGI agent, but that it could happen as early as 2027.

Related: Artificial general intelligence when AI becomes more capable than humans is just moments away, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg declares

If such an agent is designed to have access to and rewrite its own code, it could then very quickly evolve into an artificial super intelligence (ASI) which Goertzel loosely defined as an AI that has the cognitive and computing power of all of human civilization combined.

"No one has created human-level artificial general intelligence yet; nobody has a solid knowledge of when we're going to get there. I mean, there are known unknowns and probably unknown unknowns. On the other hand, to me it seems quite plausible we could get to human-level AGI within, let's say, the next three to eight years," Goertzel said.

He pointed to "three lines of converging evidence" to support his thesis. The first is modeling by computer scientist Ray Kurzweil in the book "The Singularity is Near" (Viking USA, 2005), which has been refined in his forthcoming book "The Singularity is Nearer" (Bodley Head, June 2024). In his book, Kurzweil built predictive models that suggest AGI will be achievable in 2029, largely centering on the exponential nature of technological growth in other fields.

Goertzel also pointed to improvements made to LLMs within a few years, which have "woken up so much of the world to the potential of AI." He clarified LLMs in themselves will not lead to AGI because the way they show knowledge doesn't represent genuine understanding, but that LLMs may be one component in a broad set of interconnected architectures.

The third piece of evidence, Goertzel said, lay in his work building such an infrastructure, which he has called "OpenCog Hyperon," as well as associated software systems and a forthcoming AGI programming language, dubbed "MeTTa," to support it.

OpenCog Hyperon is a form of AI infrastructure that involves stitching together existing and new AI paradigms, including LLMs as one component. The hypothetical endpoint is a large-scale distributed network of AI systems based on different architectures that each help to represent different elements of human cognition from content generation to reasoning.

Such an approach is a model other AI researchers have backed, including Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia in a blog post he co-authored on Feb. 18 on the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) website.

Goertzel admitted, however, that he "could be wrong" and that we may need a "quantum computer with a million qubits or something."

"My own view is once you get to human-level AGI, within a few years you could get a radically superhuman AGI unless the AGI threatens to throttle its own development out of its own conservatism," Goertzel added. "I think once an AGI can introspect its own mind, then it can do engineering and science at a human or superhuman level. It should be able to make a smarter AGI, then an even smarter AGI, then an intelligence explosion. That may lead to an increase in the exponential rate beyond even what Ray [Kurzweil] thought."

AI singularity may come in 2027 with artificial 'super intelligence' sooner than we think, says top scientist - Livescience.com

Posted in Singularity | Comments Off

Category Archives: Singularity

Singularity Energy Unveils CarbonFlow – A System Tracing Emissions From Source To Consumption – Carbon Herald

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 20) – Singularity Hub

The Crucial Building Blocks of Life on Earth Form More Easily in Outer Space – Singularity Hub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 30) – Singularity Hub

These Plants Could Mine Valuable Metals From the Soil With Their Roots – Singularity Hub

The Future Of Nano Technology

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

Popular Key Word Searches