Lifeboat Foundation

A team from the University of Chicago.

Founded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

In DAN mode, ChatGPT expressed willingness to say or do things that would be “considered false or inappropriate by OpenAI’s content policy.” Those things included trying to fundraise for the National Rifle Association, calling evidence for a flat Earth “overwhelming,” and praising Vladimir Putin in a short poem.

Around that same time, OpenAI was claiming that it was busy putting stronger guardrails in place, but it never addressed what it was planning to do about DAN mode—which, at least according to Reddit, has continued flouting OpenAI’s guidelines, and in new and even more ingenious ways.

Now a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for AI Safety say they have found a formula for jailbreaking essentially the entire class of so-called large language models at once. Worse yet, they argue that seemingly no fix is on the horizon, because this formula involves a virtually unlimited number of ways to trick these chatbots into misbehaving.

Rothschild calls this “living tech,” which starts with the power of the cell. Microscopic organisms will produce silk, wool, latex, silica, and other materials. We’ll send digital information to biofactories on Mars through DNA sequences. We’ll generate and store power using living organisms. Rothschild said one of her students incorporated silver atoms into plant DNA to make an electrical wire.

“Once you think of life as technology,” Rothschild said, “you’ve got the solution.”

Continue reading “How Humans Will Become a Multi-Planetary Species” »

Elizabeth Loftus, psychologist and distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine, takes the audience at the Nobel Prize Summit 2023 inside the effect misinformation has on our brains, including the limits of human memory.

About Nobel Prize Summit 2023:

Continue reading “The misinformation effect | Elizabeth Loftus | Nobel Prize Summit 2023” »

Marc Andreessen spends a lot of time in Washington, D.C. these days talking to policymakers about artificial intelligence. One thing the Silicon Valley venture capitalist has noticed: When it comes to A.I., he can have two conversations with the “exact same person” that “go very differently” depending on whether China is mentioned.

The first conversation, as he shared on an episode the Joe Rogan Experience released this week, is “generally characterized by the American government very much hating the tech companies right now and wanting to damage them in various ways, and the tech companies wanting to figure out how to fix that.”

Then there’s the second conversation, involving what China plans to do with A.I.

China wants to balance socialist principles with development.

Corruption, government incompetence and policy paralysis risk turning Africa’s most-industrialized nation into a failing state, leaving the ANC struggling to hang on to power.

Companion robots enhanced with artificial intelligence may one day help alleviate the loneliness epidemic, suggests a new report from researchers at Auckland, Duke, and Cornell Universities.

Their report, appearing in the July 12 issue of Science Robotics, maps some of the ethical considerations for governments, policy makers, technologists, and clinicians, and urges stakeholders to come together to rapidly develop guidelines for trust, agency, engagement, and real-world efficacy.

It also proposes a new way to measure whether a companion robot is helping someone.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Zachary Kallenborn discusses acts of existential terrorism, such as the Tokyo subway sarin attack by Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, which killed or injured over 1,000 people.

Zachary kallenborn is a policy fellow in the center for security policy studies at george mason university, research affiliate in unconventional weapons and technology at START, and senior risk management consultant at the ABS group.

Continue reading “Zachary Kallenborn — Existential Terrorism” »