Elon Musk  

Elon Musk discussed his new project digging tunnels under LA, the latest from Tesla and SpaceX, and his motivation for building a future on Mars in a recent conversation on the TED stage.

Recently, Elon Musk discussed his new project digging tunnels under LA, the latest from Tesla and SpaceX, to the development of a neural lace, and his motivation for building a future on Mars in conversation with TED's Head Curator, Chris Anderson. The scale of Musk's ambition and energy were impressively on display on stage. (See the full video below).

This is what an Elon Musk hobby looks like.

Musk and Anderson began the discussion with one of the newest of Musk's 'hobbies,' The Boring Company. The venture aims to build s network of tunnels under Los Angeles to help alleviate traffic congestion. As far a the 'hobby' title goes, Musk claims the project is only consuming "two or three percent" of his time.

"So a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So by having an elevator, sort of a car skate, that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then the car gets on a skate. There's no speed limit here, so we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour," states Musk.

Anderson gets Musk to confess that his Tesla Motors cars may actually increase traffic with their rapid adoption, and as self driving technology effects are expanded.

"There's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have," explains Musk. "You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point. So a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, that will simply alleviate congestion, it will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels."

Tunneling offers advantages compared to other technologies like flying cars according to Musk, "There is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy, the wind force generated will be very high. Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation."

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Musk and Anderson also chatted about combining another of Musk's engineering challenges, the Hyperloop with the tunnelling project.

There are benefits too. "In order to seal against the water table, you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six atmospheres. So to go to vacuum is only one atmosphere, or near-vacuum. So actually, it sort of turns out that automatically, if you build a tunnel that is good enough to resist the water table, it is automatically capable of holding vacuum."

The discussion then turned to Tesla's latest offerings, including technical advances in self driving cars. "Our focus is heavily on having a vision neural net that's very effective for road conditions." The path for the car maker seems to be based on computer vision alone according to the CEO. "You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras. Like, you can probably do it ten times better than humans would, just cameras."

Musk claims the vehicle will be able to drive across the country unaided by the end of the year: "We should be able to go all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey."

The technology will also be part of a new electric Semi truck that Tesla will be fully unveiling soon. The TED crowd just got a teaser image. The vehicle has high weight capability and a long range for heavy-duty trucking loads. According to Musk, the vehicle handles like a sports car.

Tesla's Power Wall and solar roof tiles were then mentioned. Modestly Musk thinks adoption of the roof tiles may take 40-50 years. The discussion necessitated mention of the Gigafactory, the huge complex under construction where the batteries powering Tesla's devices is being built.

Anderson questions, "What makes an exciting future is a future where we no longer feel guilty about energy. Help us picture this. How many Gigafactories, if you like, does it take to get us there?

Musk answers, "It's about a hundred, roughly. It's not 10, it's not a thousand. Most likely a hundred."

The far future concludes the talk, and Musk's voice pattern switches from confident and technical to earnest and emotional. When he talks about a city on Mars, you can tell that is his real goal.

I think it's important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if we're not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multiplanet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have.

Importantly, while some progress in technology is essentially inevitable, Musk does not see humanity becoming muliplanetary as assured.

Then there's becoming a multiplanet species and space-faring civilization. This is not inevitable. It's very important to appreciate this is not inevitable. The sustainable energy future I think is largely inevitable, but being a space-faring civilization is definitely not inevitable. If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 you were able to send somebody to the moon. 1969. Then we had the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle could only take people to low Earth orbit. Then the Space Shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit. So that's the trend. The trend is like down to nothing. People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it.

Having written this synopsis, it is hard to believe that all of these projects spring from the mind of one man. Even Anderson admits they never got to discuss OpenAI, and Neuralink. What's more, Musk may only be getting started.

SOURCE  TED

By  33rd Square	Embed

Brain-Machine Interfaces  

Tech investor Elon Musk has elaborated on plans for his recently launched Neuralink venture – a company he founded to link the human brain with machine interfaces – which, if successful, raises some fascinating questions about the way we understand  and use language.

Elon Musk has in the past made little attempt to disguise his worries over super-intelligent AI , claiming it could either wipe out humanity or relegate humans to mere pets, and now, kicking against the threat of a Terminator- style future, he has detailed plans to make "micron-sized " human-machine interfaces as a step to "counter for Skynet".

With these interfaces, Musk aims to allow humans to communicate their thoughts directly with each other, a process he claims would essentially allow humans to “engage in consensual telepathy”. This may sound very sci-fi but brain interfaces already exist in the medical realm and in an in-depth interview with website Wait But Why Musk outlines some of the thinking behind setting up Neuralink.

"You wouldn't need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something … But the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that's difficult to conceive of right now," Musk said.

Whether this is possible technically is one question but the concept of this sort of direct brain-to-brain transmission raises some very interesting issues for our very understanding of language.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

J. G. Ballard

First words

The field of direct brain-to-brain transmission has developed rapidly in recent years following the first successful experiments between animals in 2013, as reported in the journal Scientific Report. That experiment, which involved sending signals between a rat’s brain in Brazil and a partner in the US, heralded a new age where the concept of sending brain data between individuals became a concrete reality.

Described at the time as an ‘international mind-meld’ the experiment itself is far from what Musk hopes to achieve but points to a future where technology can enable cooperation. In the experiment, the Brazilian rat – the encoder – was trained to press one of two levers to gain a reward, dependant on whether or not an LED in its enclosure was lit. A neural interface recorded the activity in the rat’s motor cortex and then transmitted this to the US rat – the decoder – which was also faced with two levers.

The neural input the US rat received helped it choose which lever to press and, every time it chose the same as the Brazilian rat, gain a reward. Provided they cooperated they could improve their rewards and overall they achieved a 64% parity, far better than even odds and what the researchers describe as “a new central nervous system made of two brains”.

The team conducting the research at Duke University in North Carolina was led by Dr Miguel Nicolelis who believes that this research paved the way to define “an organic computer capable of solving heuristic problems that would be deemed non-computable by a general Turing-machine”

Creating collaboration or multiplying fictions?

As impressive as the hyperbole surrounding mind interfaces is the interesting questions are not so much in the concept of a borg like superbrain but in the ways that humans could ultimately relate to this technology.

While rats are able to react to stimuli and adjust their behaviour in order to gain rewards they do not have a developed sense of self and hence their collaboration is fairly straight forward.

In many respects, there is little difference between a rat responding to an LED light or responding to an electrochemical signal. If instead of a neural interface the rat in the US simply watched a video transmission of the Brazilian rat’s LED we might expect it to do better than a 64% correspondence.

Humans on the other hand have developed a highly complex sense of self through centuries of using both spoken and written language. What is remarkable is the potential that neural transmission offers for both language and deception.

It is the ability to manipulate words that first allowed us to cooperate in the plains of Africa and allowed us to generate complicated senses of self and reward/gratification strategies.

Would an implant give us any more idea if someone were lying, for example? Would we not simply learn to game the output for our own purposes?

Our first reaction might be that a link such as this would create - as Elon Musk hopes - an almost telepathic connection, a connected mind that would lead to a utopia of collaborative thought but is this likely? Does the history of natural language evolution suggest this is all that will develop?

What forms of fiction might we see if neural interfaces could send intracortical data between us?

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A bridge to new language

The rats in the Duke experiment already exhibited some signs of emergent behaviour. Since both rats got a reward each time the decoder chose correctly, the encoder rat started to try and aid its partner in the US by adjusting its movements to create a clearer signal. Over the course of the experiment the Brazilian rat refined its movements making clearer, smoother presses on the lever. In this case, the system was set up to favour collaboration but what would the result be if only one rat could receive a reward each time? Would the Brazilian rat try to obfuscate its mental signal?

When it comes to human social interactions there are of course a far wider range of options than simply ‘left’ or ‘right’ lever. Some people will blurt out whatever is in their head while others show icy restraint, some people speak plainly while others always rely on irony, some people invariably tell the truth while others lie incessantly.

"It begs the question - what forms of language will this lead us to?"

Would intracortical microstimulation make these variations less pronounced or more? Would an additional sensory input lead to fewer lies or more?

Before the first written language, human cooperation was limited but so too was organised religion or nationwide warfare. Certainly written language has done little to reduce the amount of fiction in the world.

It begs the question - what forms of language will this lead us to? 

Greeks Bearing Gifts

These questions all come before we even consider the software and hardware architectures used to transmit any ‘thoughts’. The researchers in the Duke University experiment used software to try and ‘clean’ the signal.

With a choice of just two levers the desired result was fairly obvious so they were able to boost the signal-to-noise ratio but what implications are there for the interference of software in transmission when the moral or ethical outcome is less clear cut?

Will Elon Musk develop algorithms to ‘clean’ the transmission between two humans? Should he? What level of trust would we have with a sensory input from such a transmission if we felt that it had been manipulated or ‘cleaned’ by software?

Whatever Elon Musk’s intentions it is undoubtedly many years before anything approaching a neural bridge can be developed for humans but it seems certain that the language with which we, as a society, construct our thoughts in the present day is never more important – as this will be the language upon which these first prototypes will be built.

By  Lochlan Bloom	Embed
Lochlan Bloom is a British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He is the author of the novel the The Wave as well as the novella Trade and The Open Cage. He has written for BBC Radio, Litro Magazine, Porcelain Film, IronBox Films, EIU, H+ Magazine and Calliope, the official publication of the Writers’ Special Interest Group (SIG) of American Mensa, amongst others.

Elon Musk  

re Mind Uploading and Colonizing Mars

Dear Elon,


All my life (I am 65 now) I have wanted to explore the rest of the known Universe - to do this I knew I would need a greatly extended life span. I worked in BioMedical Research and then in IT and might still complete a PhD in computer simulations of Population Genetics of Threatened Species.

When I could no longer ignore increasing physical decrepitude, I investigated and became actively involved in Cryonics. Later, with signs of cognitive decline (my father died last year from Alzheimer's at age 89), I decided that information preservation was more important than cell viability, so I set up the Neural Archives Foundation. NAF has been in existence for nearly nine years and has frozen more than one brain per year - including those of both my parents last year.

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Now, in addition to my own health issues, the planet also has rapidly increasing environmental health problems - with the potential for Abrupt Climate Change and concomitant, large-scale ecological collapses. For these reasons I am convinced that I need to become a virtual person (via mind uploading) sooner rather than later - and lots of other people should too - "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."!

Since your PayPal days I have been following your ventures with great interest (I have even paid the deposit on the purchase of the Model 3 Tesla) and I also think that the world would not be in the parlous state that it is now if we had had more corporate leaders like you.

I have a proposition for you, and, with a lot of luck and a very large amount of commitment and investment of resources, we might be able to help each other. A successful result would be that I would get to explore the Universe for as long as I found life interesting and exciting and, with the help of my virtual self, you would have a much better chance of successfully colonizing Mars. Your current SpaceX and Tesla projects are part of the bigger picture and your new 'Neural Lace' development is a very big part of it.

Sending virtual people to Mars solves lots of your "hairless apes in tin cans with air, food and water" problems - the more virtual people with synthetic bodies you have on the trips, the more successful colonisation is likely to be - particularly in the initial stages.

Let me know if you want to chat.

Sincerely,

Philip Rhoades

By  Philip Rhoades	Embed
Philip Rhoades is an Executive Officer at the  Cryonics Association of Australasia (http://cryonics.org.au), Executive Director, Neural Archives Foundation (http://neuralarchivesfoundation.org) as well as a member of the LifeBoat Foundation (http://lifeboat.com)

Neural Lace  

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has a firm goal to implant tiny electrodes in human brains, and now has launched a start-up to tackle the problem. Neuralink, it will work on what Musk calls the 'neural lace' technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Tesla, OpenAI and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is behind a new startup called Neuralink. While the details so far are scarce, the Internet is abuzz with excitement over Musk's latest venture into Singularity technology.

It has been reported that Neuralink is a biotech company registered in California, and it’s working to develop neural lace technology into something that could actually hit the market for consumers. The reports are that the technology has already been tested in mice.

Neuralink has already hired a number of top experts in the fields of flexible electrodes and brain physiology, though at this early stage the company is still taking its funding entirely from Musk himself.

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Neural lace is a concept first coined in Iain M. Banks Culture Series, where humans living on another planet install genetically engineered glands in their brains that can secrete stimulants, psychedelics and sedatives any time they like.

An approach to a neural lace system was published two years ago. The “syringe-injectable electronics” concept was invented by researchers in Charles Lieber’s lab at Harvard University and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing. It would involve injecting a biocompatible polymer scaffold mesh with attached microelectronic devices into the brain via syringe.

Lieber’s team of researchers has shown this in live mice and verified continuous monitoring and recordings of brain signals. “We have shown that mesh electronics with widths more than 30 times the needle ID can be injected and maintain a high yield of active electronic devices … little chronic immunoreactivity,” the researchers reported in their paper in Nature Nanotechnology. 

“In the future, our new approach and results could be extended in several directions, including the incorporation of multifunctional electronic devices and/or wireless interfaces to further increase the complexity of the injected electronics,” they wrote.

"We're trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits."

According to Lieber, "We're trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits."

Musk’s eventual aims for this technology are clear: The control of AI and robots with mental commands, for increases in both the speed and usefulness of interactions with artificial intelligence.

Musk first described neural lace as a brain-computer system that would link human brains with a computer interface. It would allow humans to achieve "symbiosis with machines" so they could communicate directly with computers without going through a physical interface.

Musk has said a neural lace will help prevent people from becoming "house cats" to artificial intelligence. If successful, neural lace may not only help cast the technology in a positive light, but present ethics boards with a real early reason to push past the risks of initial human testing. 

Once we’ve had human beings walking around for years with neural lace implants, regardless of why they got those implants in the first place, it will be much easier to pitch expansion of the procedure for other purposes.  This could be the beginning of the first true human internet, or Global Brain, where brain-to-brain interfaces are possible via injectable electronics that pass your mental traffic through the cloud.

Musk has promised more details soon through the site Wait But Why on Twitter:

Long Neuralink piece coming out on @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2017

SOURCE  Wall Street Journal (paywall), Top Image Lieber Research Group, Harvard University

By  33rd Square	Embed

Artificial Intelligence  

Global governments should keep a close watch on the progress of artificial intelligence and how it is adopted across nations, warned Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.

Global governments should keep a close watch on the progress of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is adopted across nations, warned Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.

Speaking during Day Two of the World Government Summit 2017 in Dubai, Musk warned leaders from 139 nations that if AI developments are not closely monitored, what emerges could be a danger to the public.

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“We need to be very careful about how we adopt AI, and make sure researchers don’t get carried away, because sometimes they get so engrossed in their work that they don’t realise the ramifications of what they’re doing,” said Musk. “I think it’s important for public safety that governments keep a close eye on AI and make sure it doesn’t represent a danger to the public.”

Musk also advised governments to think about the future of transport and a movement towards electric vehicles and sustainable transport, along with considerations on how to tackle increased demands for electricity in the future.

Another concern he highlighted during his session – which was hosted by Mohammad Al Gergawi, Minister of the UAE Cabinet Affairs & The Future – was how to address mass unemployment as robotic automation becomes a global norm.

“This is going to be a massive social challenge and ultimately we are going to have to have a universal basic income, and I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” he said. “If my assessment is correct, I think we need to think about what we’re going to do about it.”

"It’s important for public safety that governments keep a close eye on AI and make sure it doesn’t represent a danger to the public."

Stating that with automation will come abundance of cheap goods and services, Musk stressed the need to address the challenge of human purpose.

“The much harder challenge to deal with is how do people then have 'meaning', since a lot of people derive meaning from their employment,” he said. “So, if there is not a need for your labour, what’s the meaning?”

Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2016

Offering a partial glimpse into his view of the future, Musk also added that one potential path forward would be a closer merger of biological and digital intelligence. Referring to his neural lace project, Musk

“It’s mostly about bandwidth and the speed of connection between your brain and the digital extension of yourself,” he said. With such technology we could “achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence, and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.”

SOURCE  World Government Summit

By  33rd Square

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Artificial Intelligence  

At the Beneficial AI Conference recently, Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Sam Harris, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Bart Selman, and Jaan Tallinn chatted with moderator Max Tegmark what likely outcomes might be if we succeed in building human-level AGI, and also what we would like to happen.

Last month a panel of experts gathered at the Beneficial AI Conference, in Asilomar, California organized by the Future of Life Institute to discuss the most important issue of this century. The amazing group of AI researchers from academia and industry, and thought leaders in economics, law, ethics, and philosophy for five days dedicated to beneficial AI.

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Below, Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Sam Harris, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Bart Selman, and Jaan Tallinn discuss with moderator Max Tegmark what likely outcomes might be if we succeed in building human-level AGI, and also what we would like to happen.

When Tegmark polls the panel about when this may happen, the consensus (apart from Musk who plays to the crowd) is that this will happen in the time frame of years. Tegmark comments that the timescale makes a huge difference—hard takeoff versus soft takeoff.

"We're talking about human AI. Human AI is by definition at human levels, therefore is human."

Kurzweil talked about how the growth of AGI might be better in a slow takeoff scenario. "As technologists we should do everything we can to keep the technology safe and beneficial. As we do each specific application, like self driving cars, there's a whole host of ethical issues to address, but I don't think we can solve the problem just technologically." Kurzweil projects that even if the most perfect and safe AI is created, it might be at the expense of the political system or other factors, it won't be an ideal outcome.

"We're talking about human AI. Human AI is by definition at human levels, therefore is human," he states. According to the futurist, the issue of how we make humans ethical is the same issue as how we make AIs human-level ethical.

In conjunction with the AI conference in Asilomar a large group of the leaders in AI and related fields teamed up and extended the open letter into a set of 23 principles for AI research, design and use, intended to ensure that AI lives up to its great potential to help and empower people in the decades and centuries ahead.

Artificial intelligence has already provided beneficial tools that we use every day by people around the world. According to the conference participants, continued development, guided by the following principles, will offer amazing opportunities to help and empower people in the decades and centuries ahead.

The Asilomar Principles 

1) Research Goal: The goal of AI research should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence. 

2) Research Funding: Investments in AI should be accompanied by funding for research on ensuring its beneficial use, including thorny questions in computer science, economics, law, ethics, and social studies, such as: 

• How can we make future AI systems highly robust, so that they do what we want without malfunctioning or getting hacked?
• How can we grow our prosperity through automation while maintaining people’s resources and purpose?
• How can we update our legal systems to be more fair and efficient, to keep pace with AI, and to manage the risks associated with AI?
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?

3) Science-Policy Link: There should be constructive and healthy exchange between AI researchers and policy-makers. 

4) Research Culture: A culture of cooperation, trust, and transparency should be fostered among researchers and developers of AI. 

5) Race Avoidance: Teams developing AI systems should actively cooperate to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards. 

Ethics and Values

6) Safety: AI systems should be safe and secure throughout their operational lifetime, and verifiably so where applicable and feasible. 

7) Failure Transparency: If an AI system causes harm, it should be possible to ascertain why. 

8) Judicial Transparency: Any involvement by an autonomous system in judicial decision-making should provide a satisfactory explanation auditable by a competent human authority. 

9) Responsibility: Designers and builders of advanced AI systems are stakeholders in the moral implications of their use, misuse, and actions, with a responsibility and opportunity to shape those implications. 

10) Value Alignment: Highly autonomous AI systems should be designed so that their goals and behaviors can be assured to align with human values throughout their operation. 

11) Human Values: AI systems should be designed and operated so as to be compatible with ideals of human dignity, rights, freedoms, and cultural diversity. 

12) Personal Privacy: People should have the right to access, manage and control the data they generate, given AI systems’ power to analyze and utilize that data. 

13) Liberty and Privacy: The application of AI to personal data must not unreasonably curtail people’s real or perceived liberty. 

14) Shared Benefit: AI technologies should benefit and empower as many people as possible. 

15) Shared Prosperity: The economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly, to benefit all of humanity. 

16) Human Control: Humans should choose how and whether to delegate decisions to AI systems, to accomplish human-chosen objectives. 

17) Non-subversion: The power conferred by control of highly advanced AI systems should respect and improve, rather than subvert, the social and civic processes on which the health of society depends. 

18) AI Arms Race: An arms race in lethal autonomous weapons should be avoided.
Longer-term Issues 

19) Capability Caution: There being no consensus, we should avoid strong assumptions regarding upper limits on future AI capabilities. 

20) Importance: Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. 

21) Risks: Risks posed by AI systems, especially catastrophic or existential risks, must be subject to planning and mitigation efforts commensurate with their expected impact. 

22) Recursive Self-Improvement: AI systems designed to recursively self-improve or self-replicate in a manner that could lead to rapidly increasing quality or quantity must be subject to strict safety and control measures. 

23) Common Good: Superintelligence should only be developed in the service of widely shared ethical ideals, and for the benefit of all humanity rather than one state or organization.

If you'd like to join Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig, Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Dean, Tom Gruber, Francesca Rossi, Bart Selman, Leslie Kaelbling, Guru Banavar and others as a signatory, you'll find the principles and a signature form here.

Learn more about the Asilomar AI Principles that resulted from the conference and the process involved in developing them.

SOURCE  Future of Life Institute

By  33rd Square

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Artificial Intelligence  

In a recent interview, Silicon Valley pioneer, Elon Musk stated that artificial intelligence is the single biggest thing that is likely to impact humanity's future.

"AI is probably the single biggest item in the near-term that's likely to affect humanity."

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Y Combinator recently released a series called, "How to Build the Future," with interviews with prominent Silicon Valley personalities including the cofounder of Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk.

At the start of the interview, Musk is asked if he would change any of the five big problems he started working on when he was younger. Above all he thinks that, "AI is probably the single biggest item in the near-term that's likely to affect humanity."

Musk states, "It's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way. It's something that, if you could look into the crystal ball and to the future, you would like that outcome because it is something that could go wrong, as we've talked about many times. And so, we really need to make sure it goes right."

See the full interview below.

SOURCE  Y Combinator

By  33rd Square

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Artificial Intelligence  

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talked recently with Recode's Kara Swisher and The Verge's Walt Mossberg about his plans to send a one-way rocket to Mars in 2018 and his analysis that we are all probably living in a computer simulation if you consider the math. 

Onstage recently at the Code Conference, SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk explained to the crowd why it's entirely possible, if not likely, that our existence is really a simulation being run by a highly advanced civilization.

"Given that we’re clearly on a trajectory that we’re going to have games that are indistinguishable from reality."

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Musk has already shown himself to be a follower of the ideas of Nick Bostrom with regards to artificial intelligence. Bostrom clearly influenced Musk to co-found and fund the non-profit artificial intelligence research company, OpenAI, with the aims of promoting and developing open-source friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole

Bostrom also has presented one of the best laid out argument of why there is a high likelihood that we are living in a computer simulation.

According to Musk, "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D with millions playing simultaneously."

He continues,  "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by 1000 from what it is now. It's a given that we’re clearly on a trajectory that we’re going to have games that are indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is 1 in millions."

See the must-watch full interview below.

SOURCE  Recode

By 33rd Square

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Hyperloop  

A new video has been released by start-up, Hyperloop Technologies. The firm started by a former SpaceX engineer has just appointed a new CEO, and certainly looks like they are about to make Elon Musk's transportation idea a reality.

Hyperloop Technologies is aiming to build a two-mile test track at its LA campus by the end of 2016, or early 2017. The company just hired a new CEO, Rob Lloyd who was the former Cisco president of sales and development. Lloyd will take over for Brogan BamBrogan, who will now serve as the company's CTO.

Lloyd called the Hyperloop vision “compelling and disruptive” as well as “the most transformative new mode of transportation that the world has seen in decades.” He also announced that his team consists of more than 50 full-time employees across engineering, design, manufacturing, legal, and human resources.

"We have custom built a wind tunnel that allows us to do both single blade and cascade tests over a wide variety of speeds & pressures."

According to the press release about Lloyd's hiring, there are many different use cases for Hyperloop, and the company is already in talks with a variety of customers and partners on every continent about how to work together.

Some of the unique innovations that the team at Hyperloop Tech is working on include the following:

Compressor 

Each HyperPod has a compressor on its forward facing surface that takes in the air in front of it instead of displacing it. This significantly reduces the drag on the Pod as it travel through the tube. Hyerloop is developing this unique compressor technology to operate at the very high-speeds and low-pressures experienced during operation. "We have custom built a wind tunnel that allows us to do both single blade and cascade tests over a wide variety of speeds & pressures. This will also allow us to test scale models of the innovative HyperPod concepts," they claim.

Related articles Hyperloop Development Proceeding Through New Startup  Elon Musk To Show Video of Iron Man-Like Design System  Elon Musk To Reveal Hyperloop Plans

Levitation

To support the HyperPod and payload during operation, Hyperloop is baselining the use of air bearings. "We have built a Levitation Test Rig to evaluate a variety of air bearing configurations at surface speeds up to 740mph. We’re also looking at some intriguing alternatives to air bearings such as a passive magnetic levitation (maglev) design."

Propulsion

All electric linear motors are used to propel the HyperPods through the tube. The same motors are used to brake the pods during normal operation, allowing us to recapture much of the energy. "We are optimizing and innovating on the full system of elements required for our high speed propulsion system. These systems include: advanced energy storage, high-power drives & power electronics, high-speed controls, and our custom electromagnetic motor," states the press release.

Tube Manufacturing

"We are innovating heavily on the tube architecture, construction, and manufacturing process in an effort to build an extremely strong and cost effective tube structure which can be built and deployed hundreds of kilometers at a time."

Hyperloop could potentially make the trip from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes at promised speeds of close to 800 miles per hour.

SOURCE  The Verge

By 33rd Square

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 Elon Musk  

Elon Musk has big plans for the Tesla brand, and the battery Gigafactory under construction in Nevada. The company has announced its foray into zero emission energy generation for homes and businesses.

Elon Musk recently announced "Tesla Energy," described by the founder of Tesla Motors as "a suite of batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities fostering a clean energy ecosystem and helping wean the world off fossil fuels."

Musk made the official announcement onstage at the company's design studio in Hawthorne, California (see video above).

"We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky, called the Sun," he said, stressing that solar power is the best way to end the world's addiction to fossil fuels and head off a disastrous future in which we are overwhelmed by CO2 in the atmosphere.

Powerwall is a home battery that charges using electricity generated from solar panels, or when utility rates are low, and powers your home in the evening. It also fortifies your home against power outages by providing a backup electricity supply. Automated, compact and simple to install, according to Tesla, Powerwall offers independence from the utility grid and the security of an emergency backup.

"We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky, called the Sun."

It looks "like a beautiful piece of sculpture," Musk said. You can order it now, it's wall-mounted, and it comes in different colors.

"The Tesla Powerwall is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery designed to store energy at a residential level for load shifting, backup power and self-consumption of solar power generation," Tesla said.

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"The Powerwall consists of Tesla’s lithium-ion battery pack, liquid thermal control system and software that receives dispatch commands from a solar inverter. The unit mounts seamlessly on a wall and is integrated with the local grid to harness excess power and give customers the flexibility to draw energy from their own reserve."

The Powerwall is available in 10kWh, optimized for backup applications or 7kWh optimized for daily use applications. Both can be connected with solar or grid and both can provide backup power. The 10kWh Powerwall is optimized to provide backup when the grid goes down, providing power for your home when you need it most. When paired with solar power, the 7kWh Powerwall can be used in daily cycling to extend the environmental and cost benefits of solar into the night when sunlight is unavailable.

Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3500 for 10kWh and $3000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late summer.

There will also be a battery application for businesses and one for utilities. Both will operate on a larger scale than the "Powerwall" home battery. They will be called "Powerpacks."

Partnering with Tesla on this technology are Amazon, Target, and Southern California Edison, among others. Musk said that with 160 million Powerpacks, the entire United States could be transitioned to renewable energy.

To demonstrate his point, he revealed that Tesla's entire event was being powered by solar energy stored in Tesla batteries.

Musk said that initially the Powerwall and Powerpack will be made in Tesla's Fremont factory, but as the product line scales, it will be made in the massive $5-billion Gigafactory that the company is building in Nevada.

Like all of Tesla's technology, the patents for the Powerwall, have also been open-sourced.

By 33rd Square

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 Artificial Intelligence  

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the villain starts out as an artificial intelligence experiment gone wrong. So is AI really the biggest threat to humanity?

Artificial intelligence development is proceeding at an accelerating rate, but will it reach human-level (strong AI), and is this a threat to humanity itself?  A growing number of researchers, scientists and concerned people are raising the alarm about the existential threat of AI.

Much of the recent dialog about the threat of artificial intelligence is coming from discussion following the release of Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. The book explores intellectual models of the sometimes dire possibilities when machines exceed human intelligence. For Bostrom, superintelligence is not the point when AI conquors the  Turing Test—it's what comes after that. Once we build a system as smart as a human, that machine will try to improve itself, which enables it to further improve itself—recursively and exponentially.

Speaking at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium in October, SpaceX and Tesla head Elon Musk referred to artificial intelligence as "summoning the demon."

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out.

Physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC in December he believes future developments in artificial intelligence have the potential to eradicate mankind. The Cambridge professor, who relies on a form of artificial intelligence to communicate, said if technology could match human capabilities “it would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.”

Related articles The Clever World of Artificial Intelligence  The Rise of Artificial Intelligence  How AI is Changing the Way We View Intelligence, the World, and Ourselves

He also said that due to biological limitations, there would be no way humans could match the speed of development of technology.

"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

“Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded,” he said. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

In an open letter, drafted by the Future of Life Institute and signed by hundreds of academics and technologists, calls on the artificial intelligence science community to not only invest in research into making good decisions and plans for the future, but to also thoroughly check how those advances might affect society.

The letter’s authors recognize the remarkable successes in “speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged location and question-answering systems,” and argue that it is not unfathomable that the research may lead to the eradication of disease and poverty. But they insisted that “our AI systems must do what we want them to do” and laid out research objectives that will “help maximize the societal benefit of AI.”

As capabilities in these areas and others cross the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies, a virtuous cycle takes hold whereby even small improvements in performance are worth large sums of money, prompting greater investments in research. There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.

"I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," Bill Gates recently wrote in a Reddit AMA. "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."

What do you think?  Are you concerned about the threat of artificial intelligence?

SOURCE  FW: Thinking

By 33rd Square

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