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Geoff Hinton — Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence? | Vector’s Remarkable 2024

Vector Institute’s Remarkable 2024 | Geoffrey Hinton — Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?

In this profound keynote, Vector co-founder Geoffrey Hinton explores the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence and its potential to surpass human intelligence. Drawing from decades of expertise, Hinton shares his growing concerns about AI’s existential risks while examining fundamental questions about consciousness, understanding, and the nature of intelligence itself.

Geoffrey Hinton is one of the founding fathers of deep learning and artificial neural networks. He was a Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google until 2023 and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. In 2024 Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Key Topics Covered:
• The distinction between digital and analog computation in AI
• Understanding consciousness and subjective experience in AI systems.
• Evolution of language models and their capabilities.
• Existential risks and challenges of AI development.

Timeline:
00:00 — Introduction.
03:35 — Digital vs. Analog Computation.
14:55 — Large Language Models and Understanding.
27:15 — Super Intelligence and Control.
34:15 — Consciousness and Subjective Experience.
41:35 — Q\&A Session.

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Scientists Calculated The Ultimate Lifespan of Earth’s Biosphere

If Earth’s life survives the Anthropocene, it will eventually face another existential threat from space.

As the Sun brightens with age, it will inevitably interfere with our planet’s finicky carbon cycle, triggering a depletion of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the point where plants will starve.

Luckily, this won’t happen until at least 1.6 billion years from now, suggests new research from University of Chicago geophysicist RJ Graham and colleagues. That potentially doubles the projected lifespan of Earth’s plants and animals.

Unraveling a 500-Million-Year Mystery: Scientists Reveal Ancient Origins of the Ventral Nerve Cord

An international team of scientists has uncovered a fascinating piece of the evolutionary puzzle: the origin of the ventral nerve cord, a vital part of the central nervous system, in ecdysozoan animals—a group that includes insects, nematodes, and priapulid worms. Their study, published in Science Advances

<em> Science Advances </em> is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It serves as an open-access platform featuring high-quality research across the entire spectrum of science and science-related disciplines. Launched in 2015, the journal aims to publish significant, innovative research that advances the frontiers of science and extends the reach of high-impact science to a global audience. “Science Advances” covers a broad range of topics including, but not limited to, biology, physics, chemistry, environmental science, and social sciences, making it a multidisciplinary publication.

Surprising Bacterial Communication We’ve Never Seen Before

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about new discoveries about bacterial communication.
Links:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj1539
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2025/january/cyanob…formation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prochlorococcus.

The Ocean Teems With Networks of Interconnected Bacteria


Previous video:

#biology #bacteria #biofilm.

0:00 Bacterial communication.
0:35 Cyanobacteria complexity.
3:00 Most prominent bacterium in the ocean.
4:10 Bizarre discoveries of nanotubes.
5:25 Possible explanations and studies trying to figure it out.
6:15 Recent study finds interspecies communication.
8:10 Entirely new way to communicate or a trade network?
9:30 Questions and future studies.
10:50 Conclusions.

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Digital Resurrection: Advanced Simulations Reveal Secrets of Human Evolution

Lucy, an early human ancestor, could run upright but much slower than modern humans. New simulations show that muscle and tendon evolution, not just skeletal changes, were key to improving human running speed.

The University of Liverpool has led an international team of scientists in a new investigation into the running abilities of Australopithecus afarensis, the early human ancestor best known through the famous fossil “Lucy.”

Professor Karl Bates, an expert in Musculoskeletal Biology, brought together specialists from institutions in the UK and the Netherlands. Using advanced computer simulations and a digital reconstruction of Lucy’s skeleton, the team explored how this ancient species.

Gene mutation in roots that enhances microbe partnerships could cut fertilizer use

Researchers have discovered a biological mechanism that makes plant roots more welcoming to beneficial soil microbes. This discovery by John Innes Centre researchers paves the way for more environmentally friendly farming practices, potentially allowing farmers to use less fertilizer.

Production of most major crops relies on nitrate and phosphate fertilizers, but excessive fertilizer use harms the environment. If we could use mutually beneficial relationships between and soil microbes to enhance , then we could potentially reduce the use of inorganic fertilizers.

Researchers in the group of Dr. Myriam Charpentier discovered a mutation in a gene in the legume Medicago truncatula that reprograms the signaling capacity of the plant so that it enhances partnerships with nitrogen fixing bacteria called rhizobia and arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi (AMF) which supply roots with phosphorus.

How Protein Shapes Are Rewriting the Story of Life on Earth

Researchers have innovatively merged protein structural data with genetic sequences to construct evolutionary trees, revealing deep-rooted relationships among species.

A species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms.

Scientists say the Universe can bend the laws of physics all by itself

In a bold new theory, researchers from Microsoft, Brown University, and other institutions suggest that the universe might be capable of teaching itself how to evolve. Their study, published on the preprint server arXiv, proposes that the physical laws we observe today may have emerged through a gradual learning process, akin to Darwinian natural selection or self-learning algorithms in artificial intelligence.

This radical idea challenges traditional cosmology by imagining a primitive early universe where physical laws like gravity were far simpler or even static. Over time, these laws “learned” to adapt into more complex forms, enabling the structured universe we observe today. For instance, gravity might have initially lacked distinctions between celestial bodies like Earth and the Moon. This progression mirrors how adaptable traits in biology survive through natural selection.

Spike Mechanism of Biological Neurons May Boost Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have brought about many stunning tools in the past decade, including the Nobel-Prize-winning AlphaFold model for protein-structure prediction [1]. However, this success comes with an ever-increasing economic and environmental cost: Processing the vast amounts of data for training such models on machine-learning tasks requires staggering amounts of energy [2]. As their name suggests, ANNs are computational algorithms that take inspiration from their biological counterparts. Despite some similarity between real and artificial neural networks, biological ones operate with an energy budget many orders of magnitude lower than ANNs. Their secret? Information is relayed among neurons via short electrical pulses, so-called spikes. The fact that information processing occurs through sparse patterns of electrical pulses leads to remarkable energy efficiency.

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