Yesterday, Top 500 released the updated list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, and it revealed a rather worrying trend: Supercomputer performance is slowing down, rather than speeding up. When most of the world’s computing superpowers have announced their intentions to create exascale (1000 petaflops) supercomputers by 2020, this would appear to be a bit of a problem.
Google is moving quickly to establish a foothold in your home: After acquiring Nest Labs, it’s now acquiring Dropcam — a startup that makes cloud-based security cameras for your home — for $555 million in cash. The question now, of course, is whether people will be comfortable giving Google a potential pervasive peephole into their homes, rather than a small, innocuous startup taking a gander.
While the world’s only major fusion power effort — ITER — continues to trundle along, with an eventual first-fusion date of 2027 at a cost of more than $20 billion to taxpayers, there’s a small lab in New Jersey that says it can produce fusion power within a year, with a total spend of just a few million dollars. To be honest it sounds too good to be true — but rest assured that Focus Fusion, at least to my eyes, is the real deal. This isn’t some kind of magical, inexplicable witchcraft like cold fusion: Focus Fusion appears to be based on cold, hard science. This could actually be it.
64 years after the father of computer science, Alan Turing, proposed a method of testing whether a machine has obtained human-level intelligence, a 13-year-old AI boy called Eugene Goostman has finally become the first artificial intelligence to pass the Turing Test. Don’t worry, though, sentient computers aren’t about to take over the world: The Turing Test is actually rather flawed, and doesn’t really measure an AI’s capability for intelligent thought.
Stanford electrical engineer and biological implant mastermind, Ada Poon, has discovered a way of wirelessly transmitting power to tiny, rice-grain-sized implants that are deep within the human body. This could well be the breakthrough that finally allows for the creation of smaller pacemakers, body-wide sensor networks, and a new class of “electroceutical” devices that sit deep in the human brain and stimulate neurons directly, providing an alternative for drug-based therapies for depression, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological ailments.
Humans, despite our undoubted success, splendor, and total domination of this fair planet, have one major downfall: We’re incredibly self-centered. Whenever we discover something new, the first question is always how can it help us. Nearly all scientific endeavor is carried out with humanity’s continued success and well-being in mind. This isn’t to say that we don’t care about our environment, or the other animals that are unfortunate enough to share our planet, but it’s nearly always an afterthought. First we try to solve the problem — hunger, pestilence, death — and then we worry about how it might impact our botanical and zoological friends.
In a nod to the prescience of the Magna Carta and social expediency it spawned, a group of neurally-inclined futurists have begun to draft a similar constitution for ourselves. This new “Magna Cortica” has set for itself the task of defining a set of rights and restrictions to preempt potential abuses in the rapidly growing field of cognitive enhancement.
The US Department of Defense, working with top computer scientists, philosophers, and roboticists from a number of US universities, has finally begun a project that will tackle the tricky topic of moral and ethical robots. This multidisciplinary project will first try to pin down exactly what human morality is, and then try to devise computer algorithms that will imbue autonomous robots with moral competence — the ability to choose right from wrong. As we move steadily towards a military force that is populated by autonomous robots it is becoming increasingly important that we give these machines, these AIs, the ability to make the right decision. Yes, the US DoD is trying to get out in front of Skynet before it takes over the world. How very sensible.
Scientists have succeeded in creating the first organism with ‘alien’ DNA. In normal DNA, which can be found within the genes of every organism , the twin strands of the double helix are bonded together with four bases, known as T, G, A, and C. In this new organism, the researchers added two new bases, X and Y, creating a new form of DNA that has never occurred in billions of years of evolution on Earth or elsewhere in the universe. Remarkably, the semi-synthetic alien organism continued to reproduce normally, preserving the new alien DNA during reproduction. In the future, this breakthrough should allow for the creation of highly customized organisms — bacteria, animals, humans — that behave in weird and wonderful ways that mundane four-base DNA would never allow.
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