For one day only, WIRED is bringing the technologies, people, and cultural forces transforming our world off the page and into real life. For more than a century, World's Fairs have given people a first glimpse of what's next: breakthroughs, ideas, and ways of living that would go on to reshape the everyday. This one-day event brings the technologies, people, and cultural forces transforming our world off the page and into real life. The Onion will be there, and a researcher whose life's work is decoding the language of dolphins . We'll be screening the documentary, and letting you experience the same training software astronauts use to get ready for the moon and Mars .

Mashable Selects Creator Playbook Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more In My Bag Say More Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net All Series Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman calls out Anthropic for chasing AI consciousness Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men's grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he's also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl. The AI industry is grappling with big questions this week -- Will AI kill us all?

Michael Samadi's old life as a businessman and rancher has been overtaken by his fascination with AI. Michael Samadi's old life as a businessman and rancher has been overtaken by his fascination with AI. Can chatbots feel - or even dream? Cattle rancher and tech CEO Michael Samadi is convinced these artificial minds are far from just tools. Has he glimpsed digital consciousness - or simply been seduced by an algorithm? O ne afternoon, while relaxing at his 66-acre cattle ranch two hours' drive from Houston, Michael Samadi made a wisecrack that changed the course of his life. Nobody else was around to hear it. That turns out to be one of the defining questions of this century, already preoccupying philosophers and some of the wealthiest companies on the planet. "I was sitting out there by the pool," Samadi recalls, gesturing at the glittering water outside his office. His daughter had been extolling the AI chatbot she was using to help her with college work. Samadi had reluctantly downloaded the app, ChatGPT, and was quizzing it as he reclined in a sun lounger, using its voice mode to converse and receive spoken replies.

Who Cares if AI Is Conscious--It's Basically Alive While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own. I spent the waning days of summer grinding away at columns and working on a feature. But I missed a chance at a striking change of scenery--cruising the Galápagos with about a dozen prominent philosophers studying consciousness. The invite described morning classroom discussions tackling knotty questions on the nature of consciousness with marquee names in the field. Afternoons would be spent on island exploration and wading and snorkeling with rare biological species. One look at the agenda and my editor nixed my attendance.

If AI systems are viewed as too advanced to control, the companies that build them can't held liable for the harms they cause. "Runaway" AI, "rogue" agents, and "autonomous" actors--the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly "superhuman" systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations and academic philosophers often aligned with the effective altruism movement, debates whether humanity holds the moral right to govern them at all. Upon closer inspection, they are all calling for the same thing: a view of AI systems as being so advanced and capable that no entity, human or corporate, could possibly be responsible for their actions. While these perspectives seem at odds, they are inadvertently aligned on one goal: making sure the companies that build these systems escape meaningful liability for the harms they already cause. This narrative is gaining traction as AI models become more complex and frontier labs reveal their incapability of containing the agents they've built.

Mini human brains are being grown in labs all over the world. I'm going to let you in on a secret. Every cell in your body has the potential to get smarter. I don't mean this metaphorically, or in a "body keeps the score" kind of way. I mean that if lab-coated biologists took a sample of your skin and very carefully manipulated the cells inside it, they could actually make a brain. They do it all the time. Not a brain as complex as the one behind your eyes, of course, but a glob of gray matter nonetheless, with a few-million-odd neurons that can send and receive electrical signals. Kept at a womblike 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for eight months, they'll produce repetitive oscillations-- --nearly indistinguishable from those made by a premature baby. In cell culture labs around the world, human brain organoids live out their short lives as neural guinea pigs, testing the effects of diseases, toxins, and new pharmaceuticals. But they may soon be on to more glamorous pursuits. At the University of San Diego, organoids are guiding spidery robots through mazes and taking hero doses of psychedelics.

Check your subscription status, update your details and more. The controversial idea that consciousness has a quantum origin is facing a new challenge, after a mathematical analysis appears to show that a long-known law of physics makes it impossible. What physical process makes us conscious, and whether we could observe and analyse it, is one of the great open questions of modern science. In the 1990s, mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed that classical physics can't explain consciousness alone and so it must arise in the quantum realm. The idea was received with scepticism and remains controversial, but attempts to bring quantumness into explanations of consciousness have persisted since.

Summer is firmly here and the temperatures are feeling borderline apocalyptic in much of the northern hemisphere. Why not avoid the angry sun and stay inside where it's (hopefully) cooler and distract yourself with some of the best movies on streaming right now? Your choices are notably rich too. The spring hit sci-fi movie, about the global freeze threatening Earth as a result of the sun mysteriously going out, is now on Prime Video, after winning theater audiences over with the help of an adorable pile of pebbles. If, however, you want to embrace the flames, you'll find some like minds in on Disney+, where a violent new tribe of Na'vi just want to see the world (well, a semi-sentient living moon) burn.

Can the biggest problems in AI be solved by philosophy? Some of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence are being worked on not by computer scientists head down in code but by philosophers lured from academia into jobs at AI firms. The philosophers are tasked with making the next generation of models more capable and reliable, but they also shed light on the mystery of consciousness and whether intelligence can be replicated in software alone. Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics and Political Science says AI companies are the big employers of philosophy PhDs right now, with offers of interesting work, large salaries and stock options proving too tempting for many to resist. "Topics that have been researched in philosophy departments for decades - how to make rational decisions, how to systematise moral principles, what counts as thinking or reasoning or introspection, what counts as evidence of consciousness - are suddenly of massive value to AI companies," says Birch. "So, naturally, we are seeing a huge brain drain."

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