All posts tagged: artificial

Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence turns 25. Here’s why the movie still feels unsettling today

Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence turns 25. Here’s why the movie still feels unsettling today

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter A quarter of a century ago, Steven Spielberg released one of the most unusual films of his career: A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a futuristic fairytale about a robot boy programmed to love. Yet the movie’s origins lay not with Spielberg but another giant of cinema. For more than two decades, Stanley Kubrick had wrestled with the project, convinced it contained questions about technology, humanity and what it means to be loved. He never managed to bring it to the screen, though. Released in 2001, A.I. arrived years before smartphones, social media and the boom in artificial intelligence. Yet today, as AI systems become woven into everyday life, the film feels newly relevant – not because it accurately predicted ChatGPT or generative AI, but because it explored the emotional and ethical questions that emerge when people form relationships with machines. Yet the movie’s …

The path to artificial superintelligence

The path to artificial superintelligence

Published by skeptic

“The gap is architectural, not a prompting problem,” Pandey adds. “Without the right coordination layer, naive multi-agent setups can perform worse than a single agent. The step change is that team of agents converging on its own, on a new problem, with no human stitching the seams.” To reach this goal, Pandey says Outshift has built a connectivity layer called AGNTCY, an open-source project now under the Linux Foundation. AGNTCY allows agents across different systems, companies, and platforms to find each other, prove identity, and exchange messages through open, standardized protocols. And, as Pandey explains, this allows the Internet of Cognition thesis to take a step further. It creates a semantic layer that allows agents to align goals (share intent), pool institutional knowledge and compound memory (share context), and make collective trade-offs (share reasoning). Pandey likens this progression to that of humans: “For hundreds of thousands of years humans got individually smarter, and the gains died with each person who made them,” he explains. “Around 70,000 years ago that changed, when humans learned to share …

Millions of planned satellites could create a bright artificial ring around Earth making the night sky 4 times brighter

Millions of planned satellites could create a bright artificial ring around Earth making the night sky 4 times brighter

Published by Jenni Sidey

Proposed orbital data centers and space mirrors could create bright, concentrated satellite bands that cross the sky at dawn and dusk, making Earth appear ringed. Astronomers warn that these spacecraft could brighten the night sky, produce persistent trails and seriously disrupt observations, including searches for potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids. Current U.S. licensing rules may not adequately address visible-light pollution, leaving uncertainty over which agency should evaluate satellites’ effects on astronomy and public safety. Orbital computing also carries environmental and safety risks, including rocket emissions, difficult cooling requirements, re-entry pollution, radiation damage, collisions and potentially cascading space debris. Astronomers warn that a bright band of satellites could one day cross the twilight sky, brighter than every star and planet. These proposed orbital data centers and space mirrors may turn Earth into an artificial ringed planet. More than a million data-center satellites have been proposed, alongside plans for tens of thousands of mirrors designed to redirect sunlight toward Earth. If the largest constellations move forward, many spacecraft would occupy similar dawn-dusk orbits exposed to sunlight for long …

New artificial eyes could bring human-level vision to robotics and self-driving cars

New artificial eyes could bring human-level vision to robotics and self-driving cars

Published by Jenni Sidey

Machines can now recognize faces, read signs, and guide cars through busy streets. Yet even the most advanced systems still struggle with a simple challenge. Changing light can confuse them. A bright headlight or a deep shadow can blur details that humans see with ease. A new study led by researchers at Penn State offers a promising solution. The team has developed a tiny device that adjusts to light much like the human eye. Their findings suggest that future cameras and robots could see more clearly in complex environments. The breakthrough centers on a component called a photomemristor. This small device can sense light and store information at the same time. More importantly, it can change how it responds based on its surroundings. Why Machines Struggle With Light Artificial vision systems rely on sensors and algorithms to interpret the world. These systems often perform well under stable lighting. However, real environments rarely stay consistent. The bioinspired vision-adaptive optoelectronic synapse designed for image recognition in mixed-light environments. (CREDIT: Nature Communications) A nighttime road offers a clear …

How artificial intelligence is transforming space situational awareness

How artificial intelligence is transforming space situational awareness

Published by skeptic

As orbital activity continues to grow, artificial intelligence is becoming an essential tool for detecting, tracking, and understanding the increasingly complex space environment The number of objects orbiting Earth has increased dramatically over the past decade. Thousands of operational satellites now share the space environment with spent rocket bodies, inactive spacecraft, and millions of fragments of orbital debris. At the same time, society has become increasingly dependent on space-based infrastructure. Navigation, communications, weather forecasting, Earth observation, scientific research, and national security all rely on satellites operating safely and reliably in orbit. Monitoring this increasingly complex environment is the role of Space Situational Awareness (SSA). Modern SSA systems combine observations from optical telescopes, radar networks, and space-based sensors to detect, track, and identify Resident Space Objects (RSOs), building an evolving picture of activity in Earth orbit. However, as the number of space objects and observations continues to grow, so too does the volume of data that must be processed. Utilising artificial intelligence for SSA data processing is possible, but the challenge lies in extracting meaningful information …

Tell us your experiences of living near AI datacentres in the UK | AI (artificial intelligence)

Tell us your experiences of living near AI datacentres in the UK | AI (artificial intelligence)

Published by Sam Flores

There are around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI. There is much debate about how datacentres affect their local areas, with concerns raised by nearby residents about land use, pollution, noise, and the “heat island effect”. As part of our coverage, we would like to hear from people living near AI datacentres about their experiences. Do you have any concerns? Share your experience You can tell us your experience using this form. Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. We will only use the data you provide us for the purpose of the feature and we will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this purpose. For alternative ways to get in touch securely please see our tips guide. Tell us about your experience of living near a datacentre Please include as much detail as possible. Do you have any concerns? Please include …

MIT scientists develop a new way to grow artificial blood vessels

MIT scientists develop a new way to grow artificial blood vessels

Published by Jenni Sidey

Artificial tissues can mimic muscle, liver, kidney and skin, but they still face a basic survival problem: cells need blood vessels. Without a dense vascular network, oxygen and nutrients cannot reach deep into engineered tissue, and waste cannot escape. MIT engineers have now shown that mechanical stretching can help solve that problem. By repeatedly pulling on a lab-grown vessel, they increased the growth of new capillary-like sprouts and guided the direction those sprouts followed. The work, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, introduces a vessel-on-a-chip platform that uses magnets to apply controlled strain inside a three-dimensional tissue model. The system lets researchers adjust how strongly, how often and in which direction a vessel is stretched. “Healthy tissues depend on organized blood vessel networks, but state-of-the-art protocols don’t enable fabricating such networks within engineered tissues,” said Ritu Raman, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and the study’s co-lead author. “The ability to program blood vessel growth with physical cues may enable reproducible and scalable fabrication of engineered tissues that can …

Is Artificial Intelligence Friend or Foe? It Depends

Is Artificial Intelligence Friend or Foe? It Depends

Published by Jenni Sidey

There seems to be growing concern as to how artificial intelligence (AI) will change our lives and possibly even who we are psychologically as well as biologically. Some suggest it will rob us of our humanity by fostering passive consumption of and over-dependence upon AI-generated information. Others suggest, similar to the Industrial Revolution, AI will relieve us of many of the burdens that plague us. They assert AI has the potential to bring out the best in us—to make us more human. So, is AI a friend or a foe? The answer appears to be, “It depends.” The Current State of AI Currently, AI does not originate thought or knowledge independently of retrieved data. Rather, it produces outputs through varying degrees of data recall and novel recombination of learned patterns or other forms of information. Even so-called novel outputs from AI are necessarily built upon previously acquired information, even when the specific output itself has never existed before. Think of that as what I have previously referred to as recombinant AI (Psychology Today, April 9, …

FIFA grass in NFL stadiums reignites debate over artificial turf

FIFA grass in NFL stadiums reignites debate over artificial turf

Published by Sam Flores

FIFA’s natural grass transformation of SoFi Stadium and six other NFL stadiums with artificial surfaces for this summer’s World Cup reignited the debate over grass versus synthetic turf. Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis long ago took a side in the fight. “I just always felt that football should be played on grass,” Davis told The Times. “That’s for safety purposes, No. 1. I want it to look like a game was played even if it’s an indoor field. You see grass stains and everything else. I wasn’t going to a stadium without it being grass once I knew that capability was there. Obviously, it added a lot of cost, but it’s worth it.” FIFA spent millions to lay new grass atop all 11 NFL stadiums and most of the other five stadiums that hosted World Cup games in Mexico and Canada — and some NFL players see this summer’s temporary changeover as the league’s touch-grass moment. “We’ve made it clear that we prefer grass fields,” San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle said in …

Pope Leo applies Catholic social teaching to artificial intelligence

Pope Leo applies Catholic social teaching to artificial intelligence

Published by Sam Flores

This is the third of a series of columns by the author on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas.” This piece focuses on Chapter 3. For earlier columns, see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.  (RNS) — After summarizing Catholic social teaching in Chapter 2 of his encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity), Pope Leo XIV applies this teaching to modern digital technology, especially artificial intelligence. In particular, Pope Leo argues that AI should respect human dignity, foster the common good and not simply empower and enrich those who are developing AI. Like Pope Francis before him, Leo denounces “the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in our globalized world: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions.” When this paradigm rules, Leo argues, technology is not just a tool, “it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven …