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While many experts agree that artificial intelligence holds tremendous potential for advancing medical science and human health, a group of international doctors and other specialists warned this week that AI "could pose an existential threat to humanity" and called for a moratorium on the development of such technology pending suitable regulation.

Responding to an open letter signed by thousands of experts calling for a pause on the development and deployment of advanced AI technology, pioneering inventor, futurist, and Singularity Group co-founder Ray Kurzweilwho did not sign the lettersaid on Wednesday that "there are tremendous benefits to advancing AI in critical fields such as medicine and health, education, pursuit of renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels, and scores of other fields."

However, an analysis by an international group of physicians and related experts published in the latest edition of the peer-reviewed journal BMJ Open Health warns that "while artificial intelligence offers promising solutions in healthcare, it also poses a number of threats to human health and well-being via social, political, economic, and security-related determinants of health."

According to the study:

Facial recognition systems have also been shown to be more likely to misclassify gender in subjects who are darker-skinned. It has also been shown that populations who are subject to discrimination are under-represented in datasets underlying AI solutions and may thus be denied the full benefits of AI in healthcare.

The publication's authors highlighted three distinct sets of threats associated with the misuse of AI. The first of these is "the ability of AI to rapidly clean, organize, and analyze massive data sets consisting of personal data, including images."

This can be utilized "to manipulate behavior and subvert democracy," the authors explained, citing the role of AI in attempts to subvert the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan elections, the 2016 U.S. presidential race, and the 2017 French presidential contest.

"When combined with the rapidly improving ability to distort or misrepresent reality with deepfakes, AI-driven information systems may further undermine democracy by causing a general breakdown in trust or by driving social division and conflict, with ensuing public health impacts," the analysis contends.

The second set of threats concerns the development and deployment of lethal autonomous weapons systemsoften referred to as "killer robots"that can select, engage, and destroy human targets without meaningful human control.

The third threat set involves the many millions of jobs that experts predict will be lost due to the widespread deployment of AI technology.

"While there would be many benefits from ending work that is repetitive, dangerous, and unpleasant, we already know that unemployment is strongly associated with adverse health outcomes and behavior, including harmful consumption of alcohol and illicit drugs, being overweight, and having lower self-rated quality of life and health and higher levels of depression and risk of suicide," the analysis states.

Furthermore, the paper warns of the threat of self-improving, general-purpose AIor AGIis "potentially all-encompassing":

"With exponential growth in AI research and development, the window of opportunity to avoid serious and potentially existential harms is closing," the authors stressed. "The future outcomes of the development of AI and AGI will depend on policy decisions taken now and on the effectiveness of regulatory institutions that we design to minimize risk and harm and maximize benefit."

"Crucially, as with other technologies, preventing or minimizing the threats posed by AI will require international agreement and cooperation, and the avoidance of a mutually destructive AI 'arms race,'" the analysis stresses. "It will also require decision-making that is free of conflicts of interest and protected from the lobbying of powerful actors with a vested interest."

"Crucially, as with other technologies, preventing or minimizing the threats posed by AI will require international agreement and cooperation."

"If AI is to ever fulfill its promise to benefit humanity and society, we must protect democracy, strengthen our public-interest institutions, and dilute power so that there are effective checks and balances," the authors concluded.

The new analysis comes a week after the White House unveiled a plan meant to promote "responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence."

On Wednesday, Data for Progress published a survey showing that more than half of U.S. votersincluding 52% of Democrats, 57% of Independents, and 58% of Republicansbelieve the United States "should slow down AI progress."

According to the survey, 62% of voters also support the creation of a federal agency to regulate the development and deployment of AI technology.

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Warning of AI Threat to 'Human Existence,' Health Experts Urge Halt ... - Common Dreams

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I cant wait to wear it this summer

People / Tyler Roeland

While I love to bundle up under cozy sweaters and scarves, there's something special about sundress season. I adore the airiness, the singularity, and, of course, the twirl-ability that a sundress has to offer and my new favorite piece promises all of the above and then some.

I was influenced to buy the Britt Tiered Maxi Tent Dress from The Drop after seeing it pop up in so many stories by fellow PEOPLE writers. Although I've only had the dress for a few weeks, I've already worn it several times both for casual and dressier outings. And I'm hardly the only fan: The dress has garnered more than 1,300 perfect ratings at Amazon and, if you act fast, you can snag so many of its colors and sizes on sale up to 55 percent off.

Related: 13 Beautiful Mother's Day Dresses That Are on Sale for Under $50 at Amazon Right Now

The dress is made from super soft and breathable fabric that's great for beating the heat. Plus, its sleeveless top and tented skirt facilitate even more airflow, which is a necessity for me during East Coast summers; I already know this dress will be my everyday pick for the season. Still, the maxi hemline, tiered silhouette, and strong fabric stay put, so you don't have to worry about a Marilyn Monroe-esque accident happening when a gust of wind blows by. And to top it all off, its straps are adjustable and convertible to wear with a cross-back design.

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In addition to its comfort and breathability, my favorite part about the Britt dress is its stylish versatility. I've paired it with a number of different accessories thus far: Sneakers to keep the look casual, ballet flats for a slightly dressier touch, both dainty and statement-making jewelry, and more. I'm sure I'll find new ways to wear it this summer, too.

Story continues

I bought the dress in black (which just so happens to be on sale right now!), but after owning and loving it, I definitely intend to stock up on other colors. One shopper wrote that they "want this dress in every color and to wear [it] every day" in their review, then finished off by calling it "soft and comfortable." You can also snag the Britt Dress on sale in ginger and rosette, along with full-price styles like dusty purple and navy stripe.

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Related: Shoppers Say People 'Often Mistake' These Flats for Rothy's but They're a Fraction of the Price

The dress is available in women's sizes XXS5X and a total of 18 different styles; discounts vary depending on size and style. And if you're an Amazon Prime member, you can give the dress a test run with Try Before You Buy, which allows members to order up to six eligible items free of charge, try them on over the course of a week, keep and pay for the pieces they like, and send back the items they don't. If you're not a member already, sign up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime to give the Britt dress a proper try-on in different colors, sizes, and styles to find your perfect fit.

Get ahead of the sweltering curve this summer and stock up on The Drop Britt Tiered Maxi Tent Dress while so many of its sizes and styles are on sale. Keep scrolling to see some of its other standout styles.

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Buy It! The Drop Britt Tiered Maxi Tent Dress in Dusty Purple, $59.90; amazon.com

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Clara McMahon is a commerce writer who covers home, fashion, beauty, and more. She occasionally receives products to review and writes about her favorites.

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This 'Soft and Comfortable' Sundress Has Racked Up 1,300+ Perfect Ratings and It's Up to 55% Off - Yahoo Entertainment

In 2018, just as 3D printing was starting to take off as a construction method, Dubai set an ambitious goal: the city wanted to become the 3D printing capital of the world, aiming for a quarter of its new buildings to be printed rather than conventionally constructed.

Follow-through was swift, with the Dubai municipality building becoming the worlds largest 3D-printed structure in 2019. The city is continuing to make good on its goaland breaking its own recordwith an even bigger building, and the first of its kind: the worlds first 3D-printed mosque will be built there this year. At 2,000 square meters (21,528 square feet), it will accommodate 600 people and have more than twice the square footage of the municipal building.

The mosque is a collaboration between the Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department (IACAD) and architectural firm JT+Partners. There will also be a construction company involved, but a name hasnt yet been released (the municipality building was constructed by Boston-based Apis Cor; the city could be looking to work with them again, or could take a different direction entirely).

Renderings of the mosque show a design far more intricate than what were used to seeing in 3D-printed buildings. Most houses and other structures made with the technology have solid, flat walls (save for ICONs House Zero, whose softer, more creative design includes curved walls both inside and out).

3D-printed walls are squirted out of a printer nozzle one layer after another, the concrete rapidly drying and gaining strength. Homes (and military barracks, and apartment buildings) built this way are durable and structurally sound, but not much experimentation has been done with complex or decorative designs.

The Dubai mosque mock-ups tell a different story. They show tall, angled pillars connected by lattice-like panels that let daylight through. The main buildings soaring ceiling extends over a second, smaller building, with an open space between the two creating a wide, airy corridor.

Theo Salet is a long-time advocate of 3D-printed construction, and dean of the Department of the Built Environment at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. While hes supportive of the Dubai mosque project, he acknowledges that some aspects of its construction will be uncharted territory and likely wont be easy. Realizing a large and eye-catching project like this is quite a task, of a scale yet unknown, he told CNN. Without any doubt the 3D printing will work, howevera project of this scale and ambition is, in my opinion, a project to learn from and mistakes should be possible.

After years of churning out stand-alone buildings and small communities of homes, it seems 3D printing could reach a new level of scalability, with developments of 50 to 100 homes underway in Texas and Kenya. But plenty of challenges remain; critics point out that the cost savings of 3D-printed construction may not end up being as worthwhile as all the hype implies, nor will the eco-friendliness, since the technology uses cement, a major source of carbon emissions.

At a time when we desperately need better ways to build things, though, it seems like these issues are worth trying to work through. After all, if we can print bases on the moon using lunar soil, shouldnt we be able to build affordable, high-quality houses and buildings on Earth? In any case, projects like the Dubai mosque will continue to push the edges of 3D printing construction capability, both in terms of scale and complexity.

Image Credit: JT+Partners and IACAD

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This Dubai Mosque Will Be One of the World's Biggest and Most ... - Singularity Hub

Last Week on Crypto Twitter: Memecoin Mania

Gm,

What a week its been. memecoins are so back. They are back to the extent that they have broken Crypto Twitter, Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Let us explain

So. You may or may not remember this round-up mentioning PEPE for the first time two weeks ago. It had already printed millionaires back then.

But now were in memecoin frenzy mode. All-out mania. People are even suggesting a memecoin supercycle:

You read that absolutely right. No more complicated ponzis. No more DeFi, L1, infrastructure vaporware VC shenanigans. Adjust investments to the IQ of Tiktokers.

Whether they like it or not, Bitcoiners are now part of the memecoin madness too. Ordinals were the test case. They are at an all-time high volume, as this thread about Bitcoin Ordinals analytics explains:

The markets already in the next state of mania and moved on to BRC-20 shitcoins, ehhh altcoins, that is. Needless to say that explosive growth is a bit of an understatement for this situation.

So redphone is probably right when he suggests the next bull cycle being the most explosive one yet:

Imajin if people actually started caring about Dapps and all that other stuff on the blockchain no one uses. We could be in for the ponzi singularity.

Now if you missed PEPE or just dont trade memecoins, you may be better off tailing the smart people who do. Someone checked the chain and there are wallets that bought both PEPE and SHIB early:

Might want to bookmark these three addresses.

Was there anything else worth talking about other than memecoins and their effects?

Not really. But Jason Lowery had a nice thread about why Bitcoin is a great tool for national cybersecurity:

Ok yea, Jason, nice. But hear us out: altcoins on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Lots of wisdom in the timeline last week. One nugget came from Hsaka:

You can (or don't want to) never leave indeed. This is most probably not the last memecoin mania either. If you missed this one, dont beat yourself up. Because its not about the millions.

Story continues

Another week, another memecoin rug. This time WSB Coin was on the end of some drama:

As it always goes, out came the pitchforks and doxxing threats:

How did this one end?

Apparently with funds recovered. Good for them:

Surely, with all this madness going on, Elon would put on his memecoin shitlord suit and jump right in?

Nope! A really quiet week for Chief Twit. No drama, no major Twitter updates, no crypto. Just Elon enjoying some family time at the F1 race:

Just kidding, how could Elon not cause a memecoin to pump? He replied to Beeples incomprehensible tweet, causing GPT-created memecoin TURBO to pump:

Ok. So. Uhm, where do we start here

We covered this entire Pepe-to-the-moon story in an extra article: Is Memecoin Szn Back? But that was last Wednesday. So now its time for an update and, obviously, everyone wants to know: wen short?

Well, the top may or may not be already in. Jack Niewold thinks its not:

PEPE is a wonderful reminder about what crypto stands for:

Imagine this: PEPE even started onboarding those people to DeFi that refused to use its infrastructure for years. Like millionaire crypto influencers:

Crazy, isnt it?

But still, there are some good people left in crypto- People with integrity that do not put money first. People like jaredfromsubway.eth:

This memecoin tsunami is so strong, it even washes over Bitcoin dinosaurs and laser eye maxis that want to keep the chain clean of nasty transactions. Yes, that really happened:

Bitcoiners are in shock and disbelief over this DDoS attack:

The horror! Someone is *gasp* using Bitcoin. Binance temporarily suspended withdrawals to cope with this onslaught of usage. That makes the proposed tax on Bitcoin miners even more lucrative:

Now that everyone has submitted to the Pepe standard and we agree money isnt real, it doesnt matter if we burn millions, right? Then we can consider Balaji a foreward-thinking pioneer:

The memes were pretty obvious last week. But everyone who was watching it from the sidelines did not have a lot of fun:

Business and finance classes on Twitter are far superior to boring university alternatives:

Leaving you with the overall sentiment of this market:

See you next week!

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Last Week on Crypto Twitter: Memecoin Mania - Yahoo Finance

We often think of death as an on-off switch. One minute youre there, and the next its lights out.

Not so. During heart failureone of the largest medical killers globallythe brain gradually loses access to oxygen in the blood, but sparks of activity linger. Far from the last gasp of the brains descent into permanent unconsciousness, scientists have long thought these electrical signals may explain near-death experiences, and more broadly, consciousness.

Reports of near-death experiences span various ages, cultures, and ethnicities. The luckily revived few often describe vivid visions of tunnels of white light, floating outside their own bodies, or reconnecting with departed loved ones.

To Dr. Jimo Borjigin at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, Ann Arbor, these realer-than-real shared experiences suggest a common, if paradoxical, theme: rather than having its electrical lights flipped off, dying actually triggers a surge of activity in the human brain.

A new study led by Borjigin hints at the first proof of concept of the radical idea. As four comatose patients were sustained by life support, her team detected a surge of brain activity in two of them following withdrawal as they passed on.

The neural activity patterns are far from random. The dying brain generated waves of gamma band activity, a fast oscillating electrical wave thats often associated with conscious processing and thoughts. The team detected these signals both within a critical hot zone and other brain regions previously linked to consciousness.

To be clear, its highly unlikely the comatose participants regained consciousness right before death. Rather, the study shows that the dying brain generates a swan songone that may explain lucid visions and out-of-body experiences as they occur in the mind.

How vivid experience can emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the process of dying is a neuroscientific paradox. Dr. Borjigin has led an important study that helps shed light on the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms, said study author Dr. George Mashour, the founding director of the Michigan Center for Consciousness Science.

Consciousness comes in two flavors.

One is overt: the person is alert and can easily interact with the outside world. The more mysterious half is covert. Here, the person may be conscious in the sense that they are aware of themselves and their surroundings, but unable to show it. This often happens in people with brain injuries such as trauma, stroke, or locked-in syndrome. Back in 2006, a study measuring brain activity using fMRI from a young woman who appeared vegetative surprisingly found that her brain responded to different cognitive tasks even though her body couldnt. Subsequent studies used EEG (electroencephalography) to probe for signs of consciousness in unresponsive peopleincluding the comatose and the dying.

Borjigin is no stranger to studying the dying brain. Back in 2013, her team ran a seminal trial in nine rats, measuring their brain waves as heart failure took over. Previous attempts at hunting down the neurobiological underpinnings of near-death experiences and consciousness during the dying process had mostly focused on individual neurochemicals, such as dopamine and glutamate. Few had examined brain activity directly on a global scale.

In that study, the team fitted rats with electrodes to measure their brain wavesneural oscillations of electrical activity. Like ocean waves, these come in different frequencies similar to radio channels. Each loosely captures a certain mental state. Alpha waves, for example, occur frequently during relaxed wakefulness. Beta waves are linked to cognitive processing while alert.

But gamma waves caught Borjigins attention. These neural oscillations were initially recorded in monkeys as a measure of visual perception, even when some questioned their existence. The mysterious waves subsequently gained traction as they appeared during REM sleepthe stage of sleep often associated with vivid dreams and visualsand even a feeling of bliss after meditation.

After chemically inducing cardiac arrest in the rats, the team found that most brain wave frequencies tanked in strength (known as power). Surprisingly, gamma bands spiked in power and became more synchronizeda marker often associated with a highly conscious alert statebut didnt necessarily prove they were alert or awake.

Rats are obviously not humans. Flash forward to 2022, a separate team captured an 87-year-old mans brain activity when he unexpectedly died. Similarly, his brain burst with gamma wave activity for 30 seconds as his heart stopped.

The new study embraced a precious data resource: EEG recordings from four comatose patients with little chance of recovery following cardiac arrest. None of the people showed any signs of overt consciousness and relied on machine ventilation. In 2014, their loved ones agreed it was time for them to pass on. Each person was fitted with an EEG cap to measure their neural activity as they were removed from their ventilators.

For 30 seconds to 2 minutes, two patients brains surged with gamma waves. The activity was both localized within a brain regionthe temporo-parietal-occipital junction, or TPOand also spread out to the front part of the other brain hemisphere.

Often considered a neural key gateway for processing visual environments, the TPO could be a hot zone for how the brain generates consciousness, the team explained. Similar to previous animal experiments, the patients gamma waves better synchronized in these hot zones and across brain regions.

These data demonstrate that the human brain can be active during cardiac arrest, said the team.

The results are similar to the 2022 octogenarian study. But the subject pool remains small, and as scientists transition from rodent to human studies, consistency is key.

The more consistent findings we have, the more evidence it is that this likely is a mechanism happening at the time of death and if we can pinpoint this down to one location, even better, said Dr. Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville Health who was not involved in the current work but co-authored the 2022 study.

Others are less convinced. To Dr. Daniel Kondziella at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the study, the results arent surprising. Because dying from cardiac arrest takes time, its likely that neural activity goes haywire in the minutes between the heart stopping and brain death.

To Borjigin, the study is just beginning to explore brain activity at the end of life. Particularly interesting is that the two people with a gamma wave surge both had limited bouts of epilepsy. Although epilepsy is a disorder marked by aberrant neural activity, neither experienced seizures within the 24 hours prior to the study.

While unlikely, its possible that the EEG electrodes placed on the patients scalps didnt capture deeper seizures that triggered the gamma activity. Its something to further investigate, the authors said. Similarly, the study wasnt able to correlate the brain activity to the patients personal experiences as they passed.

In other words, we dont yet know if these waves support or generate near-death experiences. However, the observed findings are definitely exciting and provide a new framework for our understanding of covert consciousness in the dying humans, said Borjigin.

For now, the team is looking to expand the study beyond four people to better hunt down signs of gamma waves in the dying brain. But more importantly, the work lays the foundation for further investigation of covert consciousness during cardiac arrest, and in turn, serves as a model system to explore mechanisms of human consciousness, they said.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann / Pixabay

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A Mysterious Surge of Brain Activity During Death Probes the Edges ... - Singularity Hub