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By Alan Brads

The artificial intelligence (AI) singularity:

A hypothetical point of no return, where machines surpass human intelligence, and learn to teach themselves without human intervention. Also linked with an intelligence explosion, where machines quickly improve their own abilities, leading to runaway technological progress.

The utopian view of the AI singularity suggests the exponential growth of AI would lead to unprecedented levels of technological progress, including cures for diseases, solutions to environmental problems, and the elimination of scarcity. Theoretically, the singularity could even lead to the achievement of a post-scarcity society, where resources are plentiful, and all basic needs are met.

But

The dystopian view of the AI singularity says it could lead to a society where machines dominate or even replace humans. It suggests that as AI surpasses human intelligence, it could become uncontrollable or hostile to human interests, leading to catastrophic outcomes.

Pause I must confess.I didnt write any of that, nobody did. ChatGPT wrote everything you just read. And more than likely, you didnt notice.

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. Five days later it had over 4 million users. The newest innovation in AI appealed to the masses: a robot that could seemingly understand you. It gave rise to the question: What is the limit?

The possibility of a singularity is debated in all circles, including religious ones, but it falls squarely in the realm of speculation.

Dr. Seth Hamman of Cedarville University teaches computer science, heads up the center for cyber security and has published multiple scholarly articles regarding AI.

We learn in the opening chapters of Genesis that humans have unique attributes, Hamman said. We have self-consciousness, we know who we are, we can think, we have a desire for relations, we have ethics and religion.

Hamman argues that since we see no sign of these traits in animals, we can presume they belong uniquely to bearers of Gods image, humans.

You can extrapolate from that that if computers arent created in the image of God, which is pretty definitive, they cannot be self-conscious, relational, or have volition, Hamman said. And if they cannot think for themselves, the singularity will never happen.

Thinking outside of human designed programming would be necessary for the basis of the singularity, the ability to teach themselves things that humans did not program them to learn.

Hamman noted that while he finds this argument convincing, predicting the future is a dangerous game, and he addressed what a post-singularity utopia could be like.

The utopian view is heaven on Earth, Hamman said. You could live forever. You could do away with your body and just transport you into this computer world, and then you could live in a heaven of your own creation.

At first this strange idea, reminiscent of the Wachowski sisters The Matrix, sounds agreeable, but peeling back the layers reveals its problematic potential.

You have to think about what an automated world does to human dignity, Hamman said. We learn from scripture that idleness is not good. We have the story of King David where his kingdom goes off to war and he stays home. Next thing you know hes having an affair. Remember, Adam and Eve worked before the fall.

Idleness hits at the heart of the threat that AI and automation, with or without a singularity, presents to Christian living.

Jeff Simon, professor of digital media at Cedarville with a masters degree in animation and visual effects, deals increasingly with a new form of AI, machines that can simulate human art.

Controversy rages, regarding whether or not something created by 1s and 0s in a computing program can be considered art, but whats undeniable is that it is one more field in which humans may soon no longer be the most efficient workforce.

I actually lean toward saying a utopian reality would be worse than a dystopian reality, Simon said. In a dystopia, humans need someone else, we need God. The original sin was pride saying that humanity did not need God, and utopia would be going back to saying we can do it all ourselves.

Even in the absence of a singularity, temptation runs rife in the world of AI.

AI like ChatGPT opens the door to all kinds of laziness and cheating, Simon said. Its a useful tool that can help us generate artistic ideas and templates, it can save time on menial tasks, but to use AI to do all of our work for us is problematic.

Simon said that ethical use of AI can be boiled down to one word: integrity.

Its like most things in life, Simon said. Its a tool, its not good or bad, it just depends on how you use it.

Exact visions of a post-singularity utopia vary, but most Christians scholars agree that a life without work is not a life for which God created humans.

But there is still room within the Christian ethic for advancing automation in certain areas. Developers look for jobs that fall under the three Ds: Dirt, Danger and Drudgery.

If a robot can be trained to sniff out bombs like a dog, few would argue that its better for an animal to risk detonation than a robot. Likewise, if we can train a robot to clean sewer systems, that seems like a superior alternative. Finally, some jobs are universally boring, like careful inspection of equipment with a 99.99% pass rate. Robots have an enormous advantage in that field, in that they dont need to take breaks, eat or sleep, and they never get bored.

Predicting the future in one of the worlds fastest developing fields is about as easy as picking tomorrows lottery numbers, but there are a select few things that Christians can confidently say AI will not do.

A robot will never encapsulate a soul, Simon said. No. Thats not happening.

Hamman pointed out three sparks that no scientist has produced, all present in the creation narrative in Genesis chapters 1-2, and he presumes the same will be true of AI.

The spark of creation No scientist has ever created out of nothing. They cant just make something appear.

The spark of life Even taking the natural materials that we have that make up life and putting them together, no scientist has ever actually animated something.

The spark of self-consciousness Whether its a computer program or anything, no scientist has ever made something that is self-conscious.

So you can argue that those three things require something supernatural, Hamman said.

Despite its current limitations, ChatGPTs release reminded everyone that scientists are still redefining the boundaries, and we havent reached a final limit quite yet.

Alan Brads is a sophomore journalism student and frequent contributor for Cedars. He enjoys playing the drums and speaking Spanish, and watches Buckeye football like his life depends on it.

Photo by Julia Mumford

Cover photo courtesy of Flikr

Link:

Christians confront the possibilities and impossibilities of AI - Cedars

From ethical standards to direct threats, it is simply unknown whether artificial intelligence systems that make decisions on people's behalf may pose a danger and whether they can be controlled in the future, after entering our lives fairly recently and fairly innocently, mostly through video games governed by human-generated algorithms.

People are only using limited and weak artificial intelligence with chatbots in everyday life and in driverless vehicles and digital assistants that work with voice commands.

It is debatable whether algorithms have progressed to the level of superintelligence and whether they will go beyond emulating humans in the future.

The rise of AI over human intelligence over time paints a positive picture for humanity according to some experts, while it is seen as the beginning of a disaster according to others.

Wilhelm Bielert, chief digital officer and vice president at Canada-based industrial equipment manufacturer Premier Tech, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the most unknown issue about artificial intelligence is superartificial intelligence, which is still largely speculative among experts studying AI and which exceeds human intelligence.

He said that while humans build and program algorithms today, the notion of artificial intelligence commanding itself in the future and acting like a living entity is still under consideration. Given the possible risks and rewards, Bielert highlighted the importance of society approaching AI development in a responsible and ethical manner.

Professor Ahmet Ulvi Trkba, a lecturer at Istanbul Medipol Universitys Faculty of Law, argues that one day when computer technology reaches the level of superintelligence, it may want to redesign the world from top to bottom.

"The reason why it is called a 'singularity' is that there is no example of such a thing until today. It has never happened before. You do not have a section to make an analogy to be taken as an example in any way in history because there is no such thing. It's called a singularity, and everyone is afraid of this singularity," he said.

Vincent C. Muller, professor of Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Philosophy at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, told Anadolu it is uncertain whether artificial intelligence will be kept under control, given that it has the capacity to make its own decisions.

"The control depends on what you want from it. Imagine that you have a factory with workers. You can ask yourself: 'Are these people under my control?' Now you stand behind a worker and tell the worker, 'Look, now you take the screw, you put it in there and you take the next screw,' and so this person is under your control," he said.

According to Bielert, artificial intelligence will have a complicated and multidimensional impact on society and future generations.

He noted that it is vital that society address potential repercussions proactively and guarantee that AI is created and utilized responsibly and ethically.

"Nowadays, if you look at how teenagers and younger children live, they live on screens," he said.

He said that artificial intelligence, which has evolved with technology, has profoundly affected the lives of young people and children.

Read more:

Lack of control: Future of AI uncertain as it becomes human-like | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah

If you need a song to convince yourself that D.C. is home to some of the coolest people drawing breath on this sweaty planet, Wifigawd has hundreds. He keeps his voice low like a temperature, using it to rhyme about getting money, getting girls, getting fly, getting high and, cumulatively, about how good it feels to even imagine getting all of those things. As a rapper, hes scrupulous and relaxed, prolific and unhurried, which, according to him, results from growing up in a city where singularity is forged by necessity.

The culture here is all about being one of one, Wifigawd says. I always tell people that nobody in D.C. wants to seem like theyre trying to be somebody else. And being outside in D.C., you will find yourself. Go out on the block with stains on your shirt, your hairline messed up, whatever it may be, and [people will] let you have it.

This is a useful answer to why theres never been a centralized, signature sound style in D.C. rap music, as well as a tidy explanation for why Wifigawds music sounds entirely like his own. His quest for one-of-oneness has involved building an encyclopedic knowledge of classic hip-hop in his childhood, listening voraciously while coming of age in the bluster of the blog rap era, developing a deep fluency in the oozing sounds of Memphis and Houston rap and, ultimately, mastering the art of echolocation in SoundClouds darkest corners. After working with Wifigawd, little-known producers tend to blow up. OogieMane has since supplied tracks to Lil Uzi Vert and Drake. F1lthy has produced for Playboi Carti and Lil Yachty. I guess I knew what an algorithm was before anyone was talking about it, Wifigawd says.

And once he finds the right tracks, he knows exactly how to sink into them, dropping words into the beat the way people drop bowling balls onto Posturepedic mattresses. He switches up his flows incessantly, but with stealth smoothness, like a seven-figure sports car shifting gears on the Autobahn. When he tosses regional references into his rhymes the Solbiato Sport boutique in Georgetown; go-go heroes TOB he does so sparingly. Musically, he tends to gravitate toward melodies that feel as cool as an open refrigerator door in August, and bass timbres that feel like the refrigerator is falling on you a spectrum that ranges from rip your heart out to beautiful, euphoric worlds, as he puts it.

Theres always a consistent vibe from his music, a mood, says Tony Seltzer, the New York producer whos become one of Wifigawds tightest collaborators. The song can be really aggressive, or the song can be really chill, but its just Wifigawd either way. Hes not following trends. Hes literally only setting trends. Every artist I work with is a Wifigawd fan.

Hes been a rappers rapper practically since childhood. Wifigawd doesnt remember the address, but he was born on North Capitol Street in 1995, raised by Rastafarian parents who brought him along to reggae nights at Carter Barron Amphitheater and rap shows at 9:30 Club, where he remembers being crowd-surfed onto the stage during a De La Soul set when he was only in first or second grade. At home, he called himself DJ Melly Mel a nod to the hip-hop pioneer and a play on his given name, Melchizedek and would make mixtapes for fun, picking his favorite cuts from his parents massive vinyl collection (KRS-One, Public Enemy, Jeru the Damaja, just stacks of records) and dubbing them onto cassette. I was watching Beat Street all the time, and I wanted to be the older-brother DJ character, Wifigawd says. So I made a bunch of these little tapes, and Id give them to my teachers, because who else would know this music? If I gave it to another kid, theyd be like: What are you on? Youre weird, bro!

Remember that old hip-hop trope where the aggrieved teacher tells the tomorrow-rapper that theyll never amount to nothing? At the Tree of Life Community School in Northeast Washington, where Wifigawd spent his earliest school years, it was the opposite: If you told your teachers you wanted to be a rapper, theyd be like: Lit. Heres my mixtape. One of those teachers was Gregory Phillips, known outside the classroom by serious rap fans as Grap Luva. Wifigawd says he remembers Phillips occasionally taking leave from work to go on tour with his brother, the legendary DJ-producer Pete Rock. He was one of the first people I told I wanted to rap, Wifigawd says. He would rap when he was teaching us. And then hed tour Japan and come back with all these manga and kung fu toys.

Another teacher at Tree of Life played a fateful role in Wifigawds creative life by bringing him to the Value Village thrift store in Adelphi after he got caught shoplifting from the Macys at Metro Center. He showed me a polo in that thrift store, Wifigawd says, and I started getting fly in the fifth grade. Years later, he realized that the patience and tenacity required to find a pristine Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker on a Goodwill rack ran in tight parallel to his talent for finding the right beats on SoundCloud: Im looking for a hidden gem amongst a whole bunch of [trash].

Since his breakout mixtape, 2016s Fubu 05, his gem collection has been growing at an astonishing rate, with more than 30 mixtapes under his belt. In rap-critic circles, the go-to praise phrase for Wifigawds music remains ahead of his time. So where does that put him now? Ive been rapping for 10 years, but Ive been in the G-league, the underground purgatory, Wifigawd says. But every artist whos established did it for a minute before they got any kind of stride. Its about timing, and Im not worried about nothing. I know my network is impeccable.

He spends most of his days trying to expand that network, trawling for beats for hours on end, seeking out new producers to partner with. I only work with somebody who I really admire. If I [like your music], you could be one of the greatest ever, he says. You know how people say, Treat others how you want to be treated? Thats how I think, creatively. I want to be purely honest with [my producers] and myself. Im not making this for me; Im making it for everybody. And I do care what people think about it.

That level of care reveals itself in even his most nonchalant songs for instance, 7-11, from 36 Chambers of Pressure, Vol. 2, Wifigawds recent mixtape with the French producer Soudiere. Listen to how he squeezes a propulsive internal rhyme into the songs hook with a single world, boatload. Check out the wink to his craft when he brags about having infinite flows. Pay attention to that hiss at the end of the word dollars, and how it makes the word feel super-plural, as if youre suddenly swimming on millions of them.

How many different influences is he siphoning through is brain in moments like these? Ill talk influences all day, because my influences only affect my music in the subtlest ways, Wifigawd says. I grew up off original hip-hop, right? Then I found Memphis. Then the DatPiff wave. Kid Cudis early hooks? Very influential. That laid-back style, very effortless. Currensy in style, beat selection. Dom Kennedy bars. Kanye. Bob Marley. Stevie Wonder. Pharoah Sanders sonically, emotionally which might not make sense for rap, but its all about the feelings for me. When I say Im influenced by certain people, its by the way they make me feel.

So even if Wifigawds sound is built on an incredibly ornate, half-hidden framework of techniques, traditions, styles and flows, its all in service of the feeling a feeling hes trying to vocalize every time he approaches the microphone. The first thing you hear in your head when you hear a beat is probably the right thing, he says of his first-thought-best-thought approach to rapping, casually summarizing a conversation he once had with notable fan-peer Earl Sweatshirt. If I put that bar down, thats what Im going for.

And now, as cool and thorough as his music, hes suddenly defining the entire essence of rap music itself that is, the art-slash-craft of summoning the entirety of your experience into the present, and ultimately trusting yourself in that decisive moment. The one rule of hip-hop is to be original, to be yourself, he says. Thats what it means to be a rapper. You have to have the swag to put it down. What you say is gold. You have to know that. It took me a minute to get to that point, but once youre there, you know what to say. Just go.

Read the original post:

Wifigawd is still rapping two steps ahead of the algorithm - The Washington Post

If you're wondering how to startThe Burning Shores DLC for Horizon Forbidden West, the process is relatively straightforward, but it can be confusing because of one important factor (well, two: but one should be taken care of for you automatically). Before running off to meet Sylens, here's how to trigger the DLC.

Note that The Burning Shores expansion doesn't unlock until 12 a.m. EST on April 19 or 9 p.m. PST on April 18. Though you can pre-load the expansion beforehand, you won't be able to access it in Horizon Forbidden West until those dates and times.

To start The Burning Shores DLC, these are the essential steps.

Here are the steps in more detail.

With the DLC installed,make sureHorizon Forbidden Westupdates to version 1.021. If you already have HFW installed and you're connected to the Internet, thisshould happen automatically. Pull up the Command Center and check your download history for Horizon Forbidden West, not HFW: The Burning Shores. The former is for the update, the latter is for the expansion.

Now start Horizon Forbidden West. If The Burning Shores DLC is installed, you'll seethe expansion's symbolin the top right corner. Text in the symbol will tell you to complete the main questline whether you've got a completed save file or not, so don't worry about that.

However, you'll have to load a completed save file, one after you've completed Singularity, the last primary mission in HFW. You can't trigger the DLC unless you do this. Because of where the expansion's storyline falls in Horizon Forbidden West, New Game+ saves won't work unless you beat Singularity once again in NG+.

Once you load into your completed game, you'll see an overlay with some information. Confirm you've read it. And shortly after, you'll hear Sylens speaking,telling you to meet him at Tilda's, starting the quest, "To the Burning Shores."

And that's how to start The Burning Shores DLC in Horizon Forbidden West. Once you trigger it, many new adventures await. For more, head over to our HFW guides hub.

Featured image by GameSkinny.

See the original post here:

How to Start the Horizon Forbidden West DLC: The Burning Shores ... - Gameskinny

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.

Even today, we cant really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers.

More than 150 years ago, Darwin poignantly noted the dichotomy between what we understand in physics and what we observe in lifenoting at the end of The Origin of Species whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

Isaac Newton described a universe where the laws never change, and time is an immutable and absolute backdrop against which everything moves. Darwin, however, observed a universe where endless forms are generated, each changing features of what came before, suggesting that time should not only have a direction, but that it in some ways folds back on itself. New evolutionary forms can only arise via selection on the past.

Presumably these two areas of science are describing the same universe, but how can two such diametrically opposite views be unified? The key to understanding why life is not explainable in current physics may be to reconsider our notions of time as the key difference between the universe as described by Newton and that of Darwin. Time has, in fact, been reinvented many times through the history of physics.

Although Newtons time was fixed and absolute, Einsteins time became a dimensionjust like space. And just as all points in space exist all at once, so do all points in time. This philosophy of time is sometimes referred to as the block universe where the past, present, and future are equally real and exist in a static structurewith no special now. In quantum mechanics, the passage of time emerges from how quantum states change from one to the next.

The invention of thermodynamics gave time its arrow, explaining why its moving forward rather than backwards. Thats because there are clear examples of systems in our universe, such as a working engine, that are irreversibleonly working in one direction. Each new area of fundamental physics, whether describing space and time (Newton/Einstein), matter and light (quantum mechanics), or heat and work (thermodynamics) has introduced a new concept of time.

But what about evolution and life? To build novel things, evolution requires time. Endless novelty can only come to be in a universe where time exists and has a clear direction. Evolution is the only physical process in our universe that can generate the succession of novel objects we associate to lifethings like microbes, mammals, trees, and even cellphones.

Such objects cannot fluctuate into existence spontaneously. They require a memory, based on what existed in the past, to construct things in the present. It is such selection that determines the dividing line between the universe described by current physics and what Darwin saw: it is the mechanism that turns a universe where memory does not matter in determining what exists, to one where it does.

Think about it, everything in the living world requires some kind of memory and information flow. The DNA in our cells is our blueprint. And to invent new things, such as rockets or medication, living beings also need informationknowledge of the laws of physics and chemistry.

To explain life, we therefore need to understand how the complex objects life creates exist in time. With my collaborators, we have been doing just that in a newly proposed theory of physics called assembly theory.

A key conjecture of assembly theory is that, as objects become more complex, the number of unique parts that make it up increases, and so does the need for local memory to store how to assemble the object from its unique parts. We quantify this in assembly theory as the shortest number of physical steps to build an object from its elementary building blocks, called the assembly index.

Importantly, assembly theory treats this shortest path as an intrinsic property of the object, and indeed we have shown how an assembly index can be measured for molecules using several different measuring techniques including mass spectrometry (an analytical method to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of molecules).

With this approach, we have shown in the lab, with measurements on both biological and non-biological samples, how molecules with an assembly index above 15 steps are only found in living samples.

This suggests that assembly theory is indeed capable of testing our hypothesis that life is the only physics that generates complex objects. And we can do so by identifying those objects that are so complex the only physical mechanism to form them is evolution.

We are aiming to use our theory to estimate when the origin if life happens by measuring the point at which molecules in a chemical soup become so complex that they start using information to make copies of themselvesthe threshold at which life arises from non-life. We may then apply the theory to experiments aiming to generate a new origin of life event in the lab.

And when we know this, we can use the theory to look for life on worlds that are radically different to Earth, and may therefore look so alien that we wouldnt recognize life there.

If the theory holds, it will force a radical rethink on time in physics. According to our theory, assembly can be measured as an intrinsic property for molecules, which corresponds to their size in timemeaning time is a physical attribute.

Ultimately, time is intrinsic to our experiences of the world, and it is necessary for evolution to happen. If we want physics to be capable of explaining lifeand usit may be that we need to treat time as a material property for the first time in physics.

This is perhaps the most radical departure for physics of life from standard physics, but it may be the critical insight needed to explain what life is.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Zdenk Machek / Unsplash

Read more from the original source:

Modern Physics Can't Explain LifeBut a New Theory, Which Says ... - Singularity Hub