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Submission + - Google's DeepMind Is Developing An AI Kill Switch (hothardware.com) 2

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: With big companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM all racing to develop AI software and hardware to address real-world needs, it's now commonly thought that one day soon AI could be much more intelligent and powerful than humans. As Elon Musk recently expressed concern--in the wrong hands or gone rouge--an AI agent could be a very real threat. The threat of a real life skynet apocalypse will not be the stuff of science fiction one day. Fortunately, some smart folks are actually also working on methods to maintain control of super-intelligent AI agents. In fact, a team of researchers at Google-owned DeepMind, along with University of Oxford scientists, are developing a proverbial kill switch for AI. The team has released a white paper on the topic called "Safely Interruptible Agents." The paper details the following in abstract: "Learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are unlikely to behave optimally all the time. If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions..." The papers goes on to explain that these AI agents might also learn to disable the kill switch and further explores ways in which to develop AI's that would not seek such an activity.

Comment Techno mythology (Score 1) 684

by twohorse (#50574695) Attached to: Let's Not Go To Mars
Mars, much further away than the Moon, much greater gravity well, no magnetic shield that could protect a terraformed atmosphere (its core is dead). So why are we hearing about its potential colonisation so much? Because the dream is a product. It can stay indefinitely in "development" while earning its promoters real world goodie tokens. They get publicity pandering to myths we all grew up with as kids while being able to postpone the dream delivery a couple of decades so as not to be called on it. Maybe humans will one day create sustainable habitats within the solar system and beyond. I certainly hope so. But not before we deal with a severe resource, energy, pollution and over-population problem here on what is by far the most interesting "rock" in the universe that we know of.
Earth

Early Plants May Have Caused Massive Glaciation 174

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the plot-to-destroy-animals-failed dept.
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science: "The first plants to colonize land didn't merely supply a dash of green to a drab landscape. They dramatically accelerated the natural breakdown of exposed rocks, according to a new study, drawing so much planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere that they sent Earth's climate spiraling into a major ice age."
Iphone

Real Reason Why the White iPhone 4 Is Delayed 182

Posted by samzenpus from the no-phone-for-you dept.
tekgoblin writes "There have been numerous reasons why the White iPhone 4 may be delayed with one reason being the color mismatch between the home button and the body. Well this time there is another reason. A source has told CultofMac that the reason for the delay is a light leakage issue caused by the case being clear. Light from the case leaks into pictures taken by the back and front camera on the white iPhone 4, causing distorted pictures. This problem is non-existent on the black iPhone 4, because of its already black case, so Apple has been looking for a solution to this problem, thus the delay of the White iPhone 4 till spring of next year."
Space

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the teach-them-to-foxtrot dept.
Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."

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