Mark Rylance & Trudie Styler on AI, Singularity, Othering, Empathy, and Evolution.
Actor Mark Rylance and director/activist Trudie Styler sit down with Kyle Meredith to talk about Spark Hunter, a new audio drama about the world’s most advanced AI having dinner with her maker over a philosophical discussion to determine if she represents a new hope for the world, or its destruction. The two discuss how the Dalai Lama brought them together, what it means to have standing inside the laws of nature, and the points of othering, racism, empathy, and evolution that the spy-drama digs into. Rylance, who also starred in Ready Player One and Don’t Look Up, and Styler also consider if we’ll ever see singularity or if robots should even aspire to be more human, especially considering folks like Elon Musk and his actions.
Intelligence has evolved on an accelerating, exponential trendline to create a Sentience Singularity in the past, just like the progress of technology that followed it. The two are closely related, and form the first principles of futurism, and any attempt to make long-term predictions.
In 1961 astronomers discovered a powerful x-ray source coming from the constellation Cygnus. Not knowing what it was, they named the source Cygnus X-1. It’s one of the strongest x-ray sources in the sky, and we now know it is powered by a stellar-mass black hole. Since it is only about 7,000 light-years away, it also gives astronomers an excellent view of how stellar-mass black holes behave. Even after six decades of study, it continues to teach us a few things, as a recent study in Science shows.
Cygnus X-1 is actually a binary system. The black hole itself is a 21 solar-mass stellar remnant, and it orbits a 41 solar-mass companion star. It’s a powerful x-ray source because material from the star is captured into an accretion disk of the black hole, which superheats the material and generates jets of plasma that flow away from the black hole. This is a common situation for black holes, but astronomers still don’t understand all the details of how this type of structure evolves.
For this study, the team used data from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), which can capture not just x-rays but also their polarization. When they combined this data with other observations of Cygnus X-1, they found the x-rays are emitted not from the regions along the jets, but from a 2,000 km region perpendicular to the jets. In other words, the accretion disk itself is the primary x-ray source. This supports the model where the innermost region of the accretion disk is what powers a black hole’s jets.
When in 2015, Eileen Brown looked at the ETER9 Project (crazy for many, visionary for few) and wrote an interesting article for ZDNET with the title “New social network ETER9 brings AI to your interactions”, it ensured a worldwide projection of something the world was not expecting.
Someone, in a lost world (outside the United States), was risking, with everything he had in his possession (very little or less than nothing), a vision worthy of the American dream. At that time, Facebook was already beginning to annoy the cleaner minds that were looking for a difference and a more innovative world.
Today, after that test bench, we see that Facebook (Meta or whatever) is nothing but an illusion, or, I dare say, a big disappointment. No, no, no! I am not now bad-mouthing Facebook just because I have a project in hand that is seen as a potential competitor.
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Trent Fowler is a machine learning engineer, author, and co-host of the Futurati Podcast. He recently appeared on the Cutting Edge Podcast with Lee Pierson to discuss artificial intelligence, consciousness, free will, epistemology, and AI risk. For more of their content, check out their excellent show at the Ayn Rand Center UK: https://www.youtube.com/c/AynRandCentreUK
Ben Goertzel, PhD, is author of many books on artificial intelligence including Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really Really Try; Engineering General Intelligence, Vols. 1 and 2; The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind; and The Path to Posthumanity. He is also editor (with Damien Broderick) of an anthology about parapsychology titled, Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports. He is chief scientific officer for Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong.
Here he notes that, while the question of reincarnation in robots seems outlandish, most of our present technology would have seemed nonsensical and incomprehensible to earlier generations of humans. He quotes the 14th Dalai Lama who suggested (half-jokingly) that artificial intelligence programmers of the future might incarnate into robots. He cites Stephen Braude’s book, Immortal Remains, as demonstrating that we must consider some version of consciousness operating outside of the body. He outlines the sort of scientific and metaphysical models that might lead to such a development.
New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.
Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist focused on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and learning.
Currently the Principal AI Engineer, Cognitive Computing at Intel Labs, having authored the book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence”, his focus is how to build machines that can perceive, think and learn.
In this video you can watch his keynote presentation at the AGI-22 Conference, on the topic of “It from no Bit: Basic Cosmology from an AI Perspective”.
Because our universe is so vast, it seems impossible that anything else could exist. According to experts, we may be in a 4-dimensional black hole.
The singularity, an endlessly hot and dense point in space, was the birthplace of our universe. According to scientists like James Beecham at CERN, black holes in our cosmos might be described in the same way that they are in the scientific community.
When enormous stars die and collapse into an impossibly dense mass, they form black holes from which even the smallest amount of light cannot escape. According to NASA, the event horizon is the border in space beyond which no light can leave or any object can return.
