ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 518
April 7, 2016
Illuminating the Effects of Light Pollution
Photo credit: Roslan Rahman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Nicholas St. Fleur
It is International Dark Sky Week, an annual event when stargazers around the world raise awareness of our diminishing night sky. In many bustling cities and towns, bright lights from towering high-rise buildings, houses and street lamps obscure views of the cosmos and contribute to an environmental problem called “light pollution.”
“Light pollution is any unintended consequence of our use of artificial light at night,” said John Barentine, an astronomer and program manager at the International Dark-Sky Association, the nonprofit group that helps to promote this week’s events and year-round awareness. Although measuring light pollution can be tricky, Dr. Barentine said it occurs when light is wasted either because no one is using it or because it’s superfluous.
But unlike many environmental issues, light pollution is a problem researchers say could disappear with the flick of a switch. Solutions include turning off unnecessary lights and putting shields on streetlights to direct beams downward.
Researchers want to mitigate urban illumination not just because it creates an annoyance for amateur astronomers but also because it can adversely affect wildlife and human health.
“Start thinking of a photon as a potential pollutant,” said Michael Justice, a behavioral ecologist who studies how artificial light affects insects. “Much like a chemical spill or gas leak, the photons being used to light your porch and street can unintentionally leak into surrounding areas and affect the local ecology at every level from plants to apex predators.”
Christopher Kyba, a physicist who studies skyglow, the hazy yellowish illumination of the night sky by artificial light, at the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany, traced the history: For billions of years, biology evolved in a world where light and dark was controlled by the length of the day. When the sun went down, celestial sources like the moon, stars, planets and Milky Way lit the sky. Life learned to operate under their glow. Only in the last 100 years or so — with the spread of artificial light — has that cycle largely gone away.
Here are ways researchers say that light pollution influences the world around us.
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When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime
Photo credit: Zohar Lazar
By John Markoff
In March when Alphago, the Go-playing software program designed by Google’s DeepMind subsidiary defeated Lee Se-dol, the human Go champion, some in Silicon Valley proclaimed the event as a precursor of the imminent arrival of genuine thinking machines.
The achievement was rooted in recent advances in pattern recognition technologies that have also yielded impressive results in speech recognition, computer vision and machine learning. The progress in artificial intelligence has become a flash point for converging fears that we feel about the smart machines that are increasingly surrounding us.
However, most artificial intelligence researchers still discount the idea of an “intelligence explosion.”
The idea was formally described as the “Singularity” in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction writer, who posited that accelerating technological change would inevitably lead to machine intelligence that would match and then surpass human intelligence. In his original essay, Dr. Vinge suggested that the point in time at which machines attained superhuman intelligence would happen sometime between 2005 and 2030.
Ray Kurzweil, an artificial intelligence researcher, extended the idea in his 2006 book “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” where he argues that machines will outstrip human capabilities in 2045. The idea was popularized in movies such as “Transcendence” and “Her.”
Recently several well-known technologists and scientists, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, have issued warnings about runaway technological progress leading to superintelligent machines that might not be favorably disposed to humanity.
What has not been shown, however, is scientific evidence for such an event. Indeed, the idea has been treated more skeptically by neuroscientists and a vast majority of artificial intelligence researchers.
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A world where everyone has a robot: why 2040 could blow your mind
Photo credit: Greygouar
By Declan Butler
In March 2001, futurist Ray Kurzweil published an essay arguing that humans found it hard to comprehend their own future. It was clear from history, he argued, that technological change is exponential — even though most of us are unable to see it — and that in a few decades, the world would be unrecognizably different. “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate),” he wrote, in ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’.
Fifteen years on, Kurzweil is a director of engineering at Google and his essay has acquired a cult following among futurists. Some of its predictions are outlandish or over-hyped — but technology experts say that its basic tenets often hold. The evidence, they say, lies in the exponential advances in a suite of enabling technologies ranging from computing power to data storage, to the scale and performance of the Internet (see ‘Onwards and upwards’). These advances are creating tipping points — moments at which technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), biology, nanotechnology and 3D printing cross a threshold and trigger sudden and significant change. “We live in a mind-blowingly different world than our grandparents,” says Fei-Fei Li, head of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in California, and this will be all the more true for our children and grandchildren (see ‘Future focus’).
Kurzweil and others have argued that people find this pace of change almost impossible to grasp, because it is human nature to perceive rates of progress as linear, not exponential — much as when one zooms in on a small part of a circle and it appears as an almost straight line. People tend to focus on the past few years, but pulling back reveals a much more dramatic change. Many things that society now takes for granted would have seemed like futuristic nonsense just a few decades ago. We can search across billions of pages, images and videos on the web; mobile phones have become ubiquitous; billions of connected smart sensors monitor in real time everything from the state of the planet to our heartbeats, sleep and steps; and drones and satellites the size of shoeboxes roam the skies.
If the pace of change is exponentially speeding up, all those advances could begin to look trivial within a few years. Take ‘deep learning’, a form of artificial intelligence that uses powerful microprocessor chips and algorithms to simulate neural networks that train and learn through experience, using massive data sets. Last month, the Google-owned AI company DeepMind used deep learning to enable a computer to beat for the first time a human professional at the game of Go, long considered one of the grand challenges of AI. Researchers told Nature that they foresee a future just 20 years from now — or even sooner — in which robots with AI are as common as cars or phones and are integrated into families, offices and factories. The “disruptive exponentials” of technological change will create “a world where everybody can have a robot and robots are pervasively integrated in the fabric of life”, says Daniela Rus, head of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
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Six Platoons Of Self-Driving Trucks Just Drove Thousands Of Kilometers Across Europe
Photo credit:
The Scania self-driving trucks. EU Truck Platooning
Several platoons of self-driving trucks just made their way across Europe. Welcome, as they say, to the future.
Although Google and Tesla are normally the companies that get most of the media’s attention when it comes to autonomous driving, it seems that manufacturers Volvo, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, DAF and Scania have just demonstrated that they’re hardly novices in this rapidly evolving field.
New Study Reveals The Most Effective Way To Handle A Psychopath
Photo credit:
Darth Vader, a well-known manipulative psychopath, wasn't happy to hear the news. Carlos/Flickr; CC BY-NC 2.0
It’s not always a hindrance to be a psychopath. Normally associated with lying, cheating, recklessness and impulsivity, manipulative psychopathy can be a boon for those who are good negotiators, good with charm, and those who are highly ambitious.
Atheist Student Murdered by Islamists in Bangladesh, Center for Inquiry Demands Action
Photo credit: AP
By Center for Inquiry
The Center for Inquiry is saddened and outraged to learn that a university student in Bangladesh has been killed in an attack by suspected Islamic extremists. Najimuddin Samad, a 28-year-old law student at Jagannath University, was hacked to death and shot by several assailants as he was returning home from classes last night. CFI, which has been working to rescue secularists in Bangladesh who have been targeted for killing, demanded that the Bangladeshi government take affirmative steps to protect its people and their right to criticize Islam.
It has been reported that the killers chanted “Allahu Akbar” as they hacked Samad with machetes. CFI can confirm that Samad was an atheist, as well as an activist who advocated for secularism and criticized radical Islam. This is the first such attack of 2016, following a spasm of murders in 2015 that began with Bangladeshi-American secular activist Avijit Roy, a friend and ally of the Center for Inquiry in the fight to defend free expression around the world, and which has also impacted Hindu, Christian, and Shia minorities.
“It is both heartbreaking and maddening to think that this bright and passionate young student, with his whole life ahead of him, was so brutally and callously murdered, almost certainly by Islamic extremists, all because he spoke out for secularism and reason. All of us at the Center for Inquiry extend our deepest condolences to his friends and family,” said Michael De Dora, CFI’s director of public policy and main representative to the United Nations.
Samad had been organizing campaigns for secularism on Facebook, and a day before the murder, Samad posted about his concerns over the “deterioration of law and order” in the country, calling it a “public disgrace.”
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April 6, 2016
American Rooftops Can Supply Almost Twice As Much Power As Previously Thought
Photo credit:
The roofs of America could supply almost 40 percent of its electricity without technological advance. Ssuaphotos/Shutterstock
Another obstacle to a future powered by clean energy has been removed. A new assessment of the potential of America's rooftops for solar power shows that they can make a much larger contribution to electricity requirements than previously recognized.
Supermassive Black Holes Could Be More Common Than Thought
Photo credit:
NGC1600 and companion galaxies. The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey
A bizarre supermassive black hole in an isolated part of the universe has forced scientists to rethink how rare these cosmic phenomena really are.
Global Diabetes Cases Have Quadrupled In Just Three Decades
Photo credit:
Diabetes can result in abnormal blood glucose levels if it is not treated. Piotr Adamowicz/Shutterstock
The number of people worldwide suffering from diabetes increased almost four-fold between 1980 and 2014, according to a new report released by the World Health Organization (WHO). This alarming spike in diabetes cases appears to be driven largely by lifestyle changes, particularly in middle- and low-income countries, where the increased availability to fatty and sugary foods has transformed people’s diets for the worse.
The World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Is Being Upgraded
Photo credit:
As the electrons move through the superconductors, they emit X-rays. SLAC
Construction is underway to upgrade the world’s brightest X-ray laser at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. This exceptional machine is used to capture images of individual atoms and molecules at a fast rate, which allows scientists to create stop-motion videos of chemical reactions.
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