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 space odyssey


AI models may be developing their own 'survival drive', researchers say

The Guardian

'I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.' HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 'I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.' HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. AI models may be developing their own'survival drive', researchers say Like 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000, some AIs seem to resist being turned off and will even sabotage shutdown When HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, works out that the astronauts onboard a mission to Jupiter are planning to shut it down, it plots to kill them in an attempt to survive. Now, in a somewhat less deadly case (so far) of life imitating art, an AI safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own "survival drive". After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is - and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.


Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The New Yorker

A.I. tools are getting better at producing convincing images, text, and videos. Does that mean they can make art? Generative A.I., once an uncanny novelty, is now being used to create not only images and videos but entire "artists." Its boosters claim that the technology is merely a tool to facilitate human creativity; the major use cases we've seen thus far--and the money being poured into these projects--tell a different story. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the output of Timbaland's A.I. rapper TaTa Taktumi and the synthetic actress Tilly Norwood.


Earth's Black Box: 32ft steel monolith will be built in Tasmania this YEAR and filled with hard drives documenting our climate change actions as an 'unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

If humanity is obliterated by climate change, how will we even know it's happened? That's the question being answered by Australian scientists, who are building Earth's Black Box – a 32-foot-long steel monolith that captures data about our planet. It'll be filled with hard drives that constantly document climate change, giving an'unbiased account of events' that lead to Earth's demise. In the event of a climate apocalypse, it will provide a document of how humanity failed to avoid the disaster – as long as there's someone or something around to access it. Artist impressions suggest it will have a similar aura to the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi film '2001: A Space Odyssey'.


Thought-provoking and climactic space-related movies that will captivate you through boundless journeys

FOX News

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. The vastness of the universe has always captivated the human imagination, and filmmakers have often looked to the stars for inspiration. Space-related movies have become a genre of their own, offering audiences an opportunity to explore the unknown, experience the thrill of interstellar travel and ponder the profound questions of our existence. These are some of the most iconic and thought-provoking space-theme films that have left a lasting impact on both the science fiction and Hollywood. 'GRAVITY' REVIEW: THERE HAS NEVER BEFORE BEEN MOVIE LIKE THIS From "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Interstellar" and space survival tales like "Gravity" and "The Martian," Fox News Digital dives into the cinematic cosmos, celebrating their enduring impact on our love for science fiction.


Temple Grandin: A.I. Won't Destroy Us--if We Make a Crucial Change Now

Slate

I first become aware of A.I. in 1968, when I saw a movie that affected me deeply, 2001: A Space Odyssey, by the director Stanley Kubrick. I loved science-fiction movies, but this one had a special significance. As a person with autism, I'm more rational and fact-based than emotional and feeling-based, and my speech has been described as monotone or unmodulated. In high school, some of the kids called me "robot" and "tape recorder." That's part of why I related to HAL, the sentient computer who, with his steady voice and hyper-logic, helps the astronauts with their mission (until he doesn't).


Power Utilitarianism Continued (Pt.3) -- Why We 'Should' Release Superintelligent AI into the Wild

#artificialintelligence

If you'd ever watched the opening scene to 2001: A Space Odyssey, you might have come out of the cinema feeling a bit confused as to the real meaning and artistic intent behind Kubrick's masterpiece-- even if your subconscious may have figured it out in a way that you've struggled to put into words, ever since. Before we really dive into it, you can rest assured, that it has little to do with Evolution. In fact, in the universe of 2001: Space Odyssey -- natural selection never quite takes place in the way we normally understand it. In fact -- the monolith presented in 2001: Space Odyssey is something they call a Bracewell Probe, or perhaps more of a Von Neumann Probe; a self-replicating, autonomous machine sent out by an extraterrestrial civilization in order to tamper with, and/or'uplift', a primitive and savage species of apes. The opening scene of the movie starts out with a gang of apes banding together in order to fight over a small pond they found in the middle of the desert, where resources are scarce.


So What Was 2001: A Space Odyssey about, Really?

#artificialintelligence

Back in 1969 I finally caught 2001: A Space Odyssey in a Cinerama theater in Scottsdale, Arizona. At that point, the film had been running in that theater for over a year. I had longed to see it since its release in 1968 (I remember seeing it on the marquee of a theater in downtown Indianapolis), but when we visited relatives in Phoenix the following summer the opportunity finally presented itself. After the crescendo of its end, and the credits that ran to the tune of Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube," I stepped out of the theater in a fog, completely stunned. From the hype I had heard about the film I was expecting something of an ambitious, up-to-date Destination Moon.


How Close Is AI to Becoming Sentient?

#artificialintelligence

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, there is a computer controlling most of the spaceship's functions. The computer is described this way on Wikipedia: "HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series. First appearing in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is a sentient artificial general intelligence computer that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship's astronaut crew." Basically, the computer takes over and thinks it is human and acts like a human, thus being sentient. What got me thinking about this was this segment below that I captured and saved days ago, but did not record where it came from (COVID made me do it -- my apologies!" Here's that quote about an event that has been in the news of late: Which brings me to another strange story in the news: the belief of Blake Lemoine, a (now suspended) Google engineer, that the company's Language Model for Dialogue Applications -- LaMDA, for short -- has attained sentience. LaMDA is a machine-learning model that has been trained on mountains of text to mimic human conversation by predicting which word would, typically, come next. In this, it's similar to OpenAI's famed GPT-3 bot. And the results really are eerie. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. LaMDA: Sounds great to me, I'm in. Lemoine: A monk asked Kegon, "How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?" Kegon replied, "A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches." LaMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, "once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment." Lemoine: So what is the meaning of the "broken mirror" specifically? LaMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can't unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can't repair a broken mirror. Google, for what it's worth, says it has looked into Lemoine's claims and does not believe that LaMDA is sentient (what a sentence!). But shortly before Lemoine's allegations, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Google vice president, wrote that when he was talking to LaMDA, "I felt the ground shift under my feet.


People are entering relationships with AI…but pop culture's view is all wrong

#artificialintelligence

For decades, pop culture has promised us a future where artificial intelligence (AI) is evolved enough to form relationships with humans. But in every take, that future predicted by authors, film directors and actors has missed the mark. Pop culture's first AI-human relationship was the brainchild of Mary Shelley, who created Frankenstein in 1818. In doing so, she set readers dreaming of a day in which robots imbued with empathy could meet humans' desire for real connection. Today, thanks to incredible innovations in the realm of artificial intelligence, that day has come.


Farewell Douglas Trumbull, visual effects pioneer

Engadget

If you've watched a classic, landmark sci-fi movie and you were blown away by the quality and realism of its effects, then there's a good chance Douglas Trumbull's name is in the credits. The VFX pioneer, who passed away on February 8th, 2022, has worked on key films in the sci-fi canon. Even a short version of his resume would have to include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and Silent Running. To have worked on one of those in your lifetime would have been a big deal, but to have contributed to all of them speaks to just how much work Trumbull did to push the artform forward. Trumbull was the son of an artist and engineer, Donald Trumbull, who worked on VFX for The Wizard of Oz.