Calum Chace's Blog, page 5

Just $100bn to cure aging. A conversation with Andrew Steele

Andrew Steele is a Briton based in Berlin. At Oxford University he gained a PhD in physics, but then he switched to computational biology, and held positions at Cancer Research UK and the Francis Crick Institute. Along the way, he decided that aging was the single most important scientific challenge of our time. This led him to write the book “Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without...

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Pioneering Transhumanism: a conversation with Natasha Vita-More

It is nearly 40 years since Natasha Vita-More wrote the first version of the Transhumanist Manifesto. She was drawn to transhumanist ideas from an early age, but she felt they were too radical to gain widespread acceptance at the time. She was also disinclined to pursue the career in medicine which her family favoured, and went into the arts instead. She spent some time living with a group of...

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Why are UFOs still blurry? A conversation with David Brin

In recent years there has been a surge in reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). There are perhaps more now than at any time since the 1950s. But there are also many millions more cameras active on the earth than there were in the 1950s, and the cameras are far better, so why are the UFOs still blurry? One man who has some answers is the scientist and science fiction author...

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IBM and the grand challenges of AI and quantum computing

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and picture generating AI systems like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion have got a lot more people interested in advanced AI and talking about it. Which is a good thing. It will not be pretty if the transformative changes that will happen in the next two or three decades take most of us by surprise. One company that has been pioneering advanced AI for longer than most is IBM.

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The Fermi Paradox: Where is everyone? With Anders Sandberg

In the summer of 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi and some colleagues at the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico were walking to lunch, and casually discussing flying saucers – as you do – when Fermi blurted out “But where is everybody?” He was not the first to pose the question, and the precise phrasing is disputed, but the mystery he was referring to remains compelling. We appear to live in a vast...

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Forecasts for AI in 2023

This year was the tenth anniversary of the Big Bang in AI, when Geoff Hinton and some colleagues introduced deep learning, a relaunch of neural networks. Deep learning enabled the Big Tech firms in the US and China to build products and services which generated enormous amounts of money – the first time that AI was lucrative. This year was also the fifth anniversary of a second big bang in AI...

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Saudi Arabia is becoming a leading AI nation – without most people noticing

Vision 2030 is Saudi Arabia’s radical and ambitious plan to transform its economy, and the lives of its people. Its leaders have identified artificial intelligence as a vital tool to enable this transformation, so they have set themselves the goal of becoming one of the world’s top ten developers of AI systems within a decade. They are making remarkable progress with both AI and the overall...

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Responsible AI: the challenge of ensuring that AI systems work for all of us. With Ray Eitel-Porter

Concerns about artificial intelligence tend to fall into two buckets. The longer term concern is that advanced AI may harm humans. In its extreme form, this includes the Skynet scenario from the Terminator movies, where a superintelligence decides it doesn’t like us and wipes us out. But an advanced AI doesn’t have to be malevolent, or even conscious, to do us great harm. It just has to have goals...

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Responsible AI: the challenge of ensuring that AI systems work for all of us

Concerns about artificial intelligence tend to fall into two buckets. The longer term concern is that advanced AI may harm humans. In its extreme form, this includes the Skynet scenario from the Terminator movies, where a superintelligence decides it doesn’t like us and wipes us out. But an advanced AI doesn’t have to be malevolent, or even conscious, to do us great harm. It just has to have goals...

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From data analysis to decision intelligence. With Steve Coates

There seems to be something of a paradox in modern AI. In academia and within the tech giants of the US and China, research is galloping ahead, but the deployment of modern AI in industry and government organisations is advancing at a more stately pace. One of the people trying to change that is Steve Coates. Steve dropped out of college to become a chef, but he switched again and took a degree in...

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