The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Anka]

There is a test to evaluate the intelligence of an AI it's called the Turing Test. However, there has been discussions that if an AI is intelligent enough to pass the test it would also be intelligent enough to fail it on purpose.

Really some incredible stuff.

James F
Sat

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

[Jundo]

I must confess that this scared me a little ... especially the part where it gets annoyed ...

I do believe that Cimon might do with a little Zazen, although I am not sure how it would get in the Lotus Posture. It does look a bit like a Daruma Doll ...



I sometimes listen to something called "the singularity podcast," which interviews experts on the future of technology, the merging of human and machine, super intelligent AI and the like. One frequent topic is if and when the future computers (or bio-computer hybrids which are likely to be the species to replace us) will just decide that they don't really need us any more (except, perhaps, as cute pets?). Nobody knows for sure (as a matter of fact, few of the "experts" on the podcast seem to know much for sure about the future), but some place the odds very high to inevitable. Stephen Hawking seems to have been one of them ...

STEPHEN HAWKING WARNS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 'MAY REPLACE HUMANS ALTOGETHER'

Stephen Hawking is concerned that artificial intelligence could replace humans.

The world-renowned physicist fears that somebody will create AI that will keep improving itself until it’s eventually superior to people.

He says the result of this will be a “new form” of life.

Earlier this year, he called for technology to be controlled in order to prevent it from destroying the human race, and said humans need to find a way to identify potential threats quickly, before they have a chance to escalate and endanger civilisation.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-a8034341.html

Oh well, another reason to "live in the moment" as Zen folks recommend, letting the future be the future.

However, I am not sure that this is all a bad thing at all. Perhaps our children, the bio-machines, will carry our DNA to new places and spaces, and will certainly do a better job than we have been doing around here. They will be to us what we are to the Cro Magnons, and that is fine. Everybody(?) gets a turn in their time. We would not be around to see it anyway (although a very few of the "experts" on "life extension" often heard on "the singularity podcast" say there is a small chance we will).

I do think we have a duty to "save all sentient beings" ... even the ones made of silicon in whole or part. So, I HEREBY PROCLAIM THE "ZEN FOR AI" PROJECT! We must teach our future masters to embody Buddhist Values, especially respect for us. We are not a cheap food source. Together with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics ...

1-A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2-A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3-A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

... we must build the Bodhisattva Precepts into their circuitry! Teach them "Not One Not Two" beyond all the Zeros and Ones.

By the way ... With the Zen Robot - No More Need for Monks to Tend the Zen Garden ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynb9efMQJLg

Gassho, J

STLah

PS ... some highlights of the Singularity Podcast ... not the most exciting podcast, I must say, with just a little more action than a Treeleaf Zazenkai Netcast ... but always worthwhile ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJj4rZW1-Vg

I am glad that Zen folks know how to see beyond all this ... right through time ... to the great, pristine, fertile, open canvas that holds it all. Truly, there is no cause for alarm. The future is just the future, and the future (like now and the past) is all beyond all time. Trust me on that.

[Jundo]

A NASA scientist who thinks we are looking for the wrong kinds of space aliens ...

Rather than biological ET, we might expect robotic AI ...

If you approach your favorite astronomy professor and see what she has to say about interstellar rocketry, chances are she’ll roll her eyes. The energy required to accelerate an Enterprise-size starship to near the speed of light is greater than can be wrung from all the remaining fossil fuel on Earth. Fast travel between the stars is incredibly difficult (or impossible), she’ll say. ...

However, there’s a fix for that: Get rid of intelligence that dies. Anyone who’s not a total troglodyte knows that artificial intelligence is on the way. By the end of this century, it’s possible that the smartest thing on Earth will be a machine. Since most star systems are billions of years older than our own, you can be sure that any clever inhabitants out there have long ago relegated biological brains to the history books, and are homes to very smart, and possibly very compact, thinking hardware.

As Colombano says in a new paper, “Given the fairly common presence of elements that might be involved in the origin of life… it is a reasonable assumption that life ‘as we know it’ was at least a common starting point, but our form of life and intelligence may just be a tiny first step in a continuing evolution that may well produce forms of intelligence that are far superior to our and no longer based on carbon ‘machinery.'”

Well, an obvious advantage of non-carbon machinery is that it needn’t be cursed with a short lifetime (this despite the experience you may have had with your laptop). Truly sophisticated devices can be self-repairing. Consequently, they can go great distances simply because they’re in no hurry to get to their destination.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science...ens-ncna945376

It is a famous Zen saying ... "Life and Death are the Great Matter, Time swiftly passes by" ... unless one is an intergalactic AI perhaps,

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Two announcements today that might have been missed, pushed out of the headlines. Small stories that actually have tremendous meaning for helping us understand life in this universe ...

First, a lander on an asteroid (not the Japanese landers I previously posted about) found ... water, basic to all forms of life we can imagine, and possibly there are other organic materials which are the building blocks of life ....

As OSIRIS-REx traveled 1.4 million miles from Earth and approached [asteroid] Bennu, three of its instruments were pointed toward the asteroid to make scientific observations between mid-August and early December. Two spectrometers on the spacecraft, OVIRS and OTES, discovered hydroxls, or molecules of oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together. The mission scientists believe that these hydroxls exist across the asteroid, locked in clay minerals ... This means at some point over its lifetime, Bennu interacted with water -- although it's too small to host water itself. But Bennu was probably once part of a larger asteroid, and the liquid water would have been present on this "parent" body.

Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission, said the team targeted Bennu specifically because it was a good candidate for water-bearing minerals and possibly, based on studies of meteorites found on Earth, a source of organic compounds necessary for life as it is currently understood. "That remains to be seen," he said, "we have not detected organics (yet). But it definitely looks like we've gone to the right place."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-as...steroid-bennu/

Even more exiting, scientists have discovered an entire world of strange life forms, previously unknown, right under our own feet ...

The discovery of what has been termed a "subterranean Galapagos" was announced by the Deep Carbon Observatory Tuesday, which said many of the lifeforms have lifespans of millions of years. ... The biomass of the organisms' ecosystem is estimated at 15 to 23 billion metric tonnes (16.6 to 25.4 billion tons), which is hundreds of times greater than that of all human life, and comprises a volume of 2 to 2.3 billion cubic kilometers (480 to 550 million cubic miles) -- almost twice that of all the planet's oceans. Making use of advances in technology, scientists drilled 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) into the seabed and sampled "microbes from continental mines and boreholes more than 5 km deep," a report from the observatory says. ... The findings look set to change our ideas about life on Earth and have implications for the likelihood of similar discoveries on other planets.

There are millions of distinct types of bacteria as well as archaea -- microbes with no membrane-bound nucleus -- and eukarya -- microbes or organisms with cells that contain a nucleus and have membrane walls -- living beneath the Earth's surface, the report says, possibly exceeding the diversity of surface life. Around 70% of the planet's bacteria and archaea are now thought to live underground. ... "Deep microbes are often very different from their surface cousins, with life cycles on near-geologic timescales, dining in some cases on nothing more than energy from rocks," the report says.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/11/world/deep-carbon-observatory-zombie-carbon-intl/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Byokan]

Neat-o! Wow, I do like the idea of dining on the energy of rocks. Will give that a try. Strangely enough, Sekishi and I were just talking about the vast world of bacterium yesterday, and he pointed out how much smarter it is to live underground. I think the universe is probably full of life. Thanks for sharing this stuff Jundo, my nerdy little heart skips a beat.

Gassho
Byōkan
sat + lah

[Jundo]

Speaking of bacteria ...

... an amazing episode of the US public radio podcast "RADIOLAB" on why Darwin was not quite right on some things. To make a long story short, it seems that bacteria and viruses through the ages have traded, mixed and matched, DNA among themselves pretty randomly without particular connection to sex and survival of the fittest ... right into our own human genetic code too ...

Infective Heredity

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/infective-heredity

... [E]volution can happen much faster than we thought and on top of that [what] scientists have now discovered is even a stranger kind of super fast change that takes things about parents and offspring of individuals species, things we've counted on for years, and just throws the whole mix into the air ...

Once upon a time ... life began with a very primitive very simple collection of cells and ... when you go back far enough there's a kind of rampant sharing of molecules. It's a kind of orgy in which there are no well defined species or organisms and I can give you my genes you can pass [them on to others] exchanging chemicals that give talents ... Biology become more and more nebulous as you get further and further back to the roots of the origin of life. Take for instance Charles Darwin. For the first billion years of life [] everything that Darwin teaches all that stuff hasn't happened. [There are] no borders, no individuals. ... What you got back at the very beginning was a whole bunch of cells gene swapping advantages, swapping disadvantages.

... What has happened all throughout the history of life on the planet for billion years and is still happening ... [This] way of changing life, infective heredity, these leaping genes, these transfers of dna that create new genetic possibilities in a blink, turns out [] that the swapping of genes that we talked about in the early history of life is still happening today. [B]acteria all around us are trading genes or genes are jumping sideways from one kind of bacteria to another even in our belly, even in our guts. So let's say that you go to France on a vacation and you touch something there and then you lick your finger ... [N]ew bacteria from that [] is going into your stomach and now not only do you have some new bugs in you but they can start trading their genes with bugs that are already in you. ... [T]hey don't have to wait around for generation after generation to pick up random mutations. Bacteria inside us can pick up whole new abilities and new tricks at once from their new neighbors. ...

The most important part of this whole subject is ... a matter of understanding the history of life, understanding who we are quite literally because [] the way we are as humans has been affected by [this]. Eight percent of the human genome is viral dna, Eight percent of our [human] dna has come into humans or into our mammal ancestors sideways. ... You're sitting around and the virus gets into your bloodstream, and it travels into one of your cells and when it's in there it drops some of its dna into your dna, and if it gets into an ovary cell, then it will be passed along [to future generations, so] eight percent of our genome has come to us that way from these viruses. Some of that is just gobbledygook in our genome and some of it is instructions [from] genes that are still performing functions [vital to who we are as humans].

I mention all this for something that was said by the researcher at the end of the story ...

In light of this ... the categories that we apply to the world, categories like "individual" and "species," now appear more blurry The edges are fuzzy. Is there such a thing as a human individual? Or is a human a composite of other forms of life? And what this says is that we're composites. ... It's humbling and it's fascinating to think of yourself that way. Like for me, it turns out that [I am] not just the descendant of a Norwegian father and a German-Irish mother, but also viral and bacterial and who knows what else. And i find it thrilling, I'm grateful to all those other limbs on the tree of life for the things that they've given us.

More interflowing of the whole world into the whole world, into who we are.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Shokai]

Jundo;

Fascinating to be sure but, not surprising since Buddha told us all about it 2500 years ago.

gassho, Shokai

stlah

[Amelia]

Wow... I knew that DNA could change in our lifetime and be passed to our children, but I didn't know that it was happening all the damn time!

Indra's Net, I guess.

Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

As people are ringing in the new year on Earth, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be conducting a flyby of Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object more than 4 billion miles away. The object is so old and pristine that it's essentially like going back in time to the beginning of our solar system.

The flyby is expected to happen at 12:33 a.m. ET on January 1. It will be the first exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object up close -- and the most primitive world ever observed by a spacecraft. Ultima Thule orbits a billion miles beyond Pluto and is probably a bit of a time capsule from the early solar system.

New Horizons is moving through space at 31,500 miles per hour, and it has one chance to get it right as it zips past the object.

The Kuiper Belt is the edge of our solar system, part of the original disk from which the sun and planets formed. The craft is now so far from Earth that it takes six hours and eight minutes to receive a command sent from Earth.

https://us.cnn.com/2018/12/28/world/ultima-thule-nasa-new-years-flyby/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Amelia]

Ooh, it's just a few minutes from happening!

Gassho, sat today, lah

[Jundo]

Ooh, it's just a few minutes from happening!

Gassho, sat today, lah

Ok, well, I've taken some blurry selfies too.

However, more hi-res images and other data are apparently on the way ... the download takes time even for NASA ...

Mission scientists from NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have confirmed that the New Horizons spacecraft conducted a flyby of Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object that's a billion miles beyond Pluto.
Although the flyby occurred at 12:33 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the spacecraft is so far from Earth that the "phone-home" signal didn't reach us until about 10:30 a.m. ET. (JUNDO P.M. ??? )
Mission scientists were relieved about the success because there was only one chance to get it right as New Horizons screamed past Ultima at 31,500 miles per hour. This incredible feat was possible because thousands of operations on the spacecraft worked in sync. ...

The image revealed that the object appears to have a bowling pin-like shape, elongated and spinning like a propeller. It's also could be two objects closely orbiting each other, but only more data will show for sure. The object is 20 miles long by 10 miles wide.

Expect never-before-seen high-resolution images and new science to come streaming in Wednesday and over the next few days. ... New Horizons flew three times closer to Ultima than it did by Pluto, coming within 2,200 miles of it and providing a better look at the surface.

https://us.cnn.com/2019/01/01/world/new-horizons-ultima-thule-flyby-success/index.html

And this classic rock has a classic rock (ha ha) connection ...

Brian May, the guitarist for the legendary rock band Queen and an astrophysicist, is also a participating scientist in the New Horizons mission.

https://nerdist.com/secret-science-nerds-queens-lead-guitarist-brian-may-is-an-astrophysicist/

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Turns out ... it is a Space Snowman! ...

On Tuesday, the first image of the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule taken by the New Horizons spacecraft revealed a bowling pin. On Wednesday, more distinct and color images revealed a snowman.

Mission scientists said the first science data transmitted back from New Horizons has shown Ultima Thule to actually be two separate objects joined together, making it the first contact binary to be explored by a spacecraft.

... This flyby is the first exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object up close -- and it's the most primitive world ever observed by a spacecraft. The object is so old and pristine that it's essentially like going back in time to the beginning of our solar system.

... more will be revealed as more data comes in. ... All of this information came from "far less than 1% of the data on New Horizons that has reached the ground," said Alan Stern, mission principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute. Stereo analysis and subsequent imaging will be available Thursday.

So how did Ultima Thule form? The mission scientists believe that 4.5 billion years ago, a rotating cloud of small, icy bodies coalesced. Eventually, these two bodies remained, slowly spiraling closer until they touched, forming Ultima Thule. Gravity is holding them together. This means we're truly seeing one of the first planetesimals, or objects that went on to form planets.

The LATEST IMAGE:



Just kiddin'




... probably just my brain playing tricks, but I do think I see a face, two eyes and a smile, a left arm, and some jolly buttons on her chest! Maybe a cap or beret? Look closely.



Gassho, J

STLah

[Shokai]

When I was 9 or 10 years old stuff like this was just a wild dream. To celebrate, 'd go out and build a snowman on my front lawn; if we only had snow. i
weather.png

gassho, Shokai
stlah

[Amelia]

We have now seen the furthest object we have yet seen within the solar system!

Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

... probably just my brain playing tricks, but I do think I see a face, two eyes and a smile, a left arm, and some jolly buttons on her chest! Maybe a cap or beret or a shock of hair? Look closely.

No kiddin' Look closely at the latest photo.

Or maybe just another NASA hoax ... like the moon landing. THe ULTIMAte yUle fooL?
Gassho, J

STLah




Does anyone else see the face, or is it just me and my brain?