List of All Articles with Tag 'tec'

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will deliver the keynote speech at the tech company’s annual Connect conference. Zuckerberg and guests are expected to unveil the new Meta Quest 3 VR headset and, the company says, reveal how Meta is bringing mixed reality to life. Zuckerburg will speak about how AI can help people connect and express themselves in new ways, according to the company. And he will showcase Meta’s latest products and updates that will help developers build the future of human connection. This year’s Connect is being billed as a two-day virtual event focused on AI and virtual, mixed and augmented realities, as it seeks to put its mark on these emerging technologies. The highlight of the two-day event event will likely be the keynote, where Meta is expected to announce its much-hyped Quest 3 mixed-reality headset. Zuckerberg is expected reveal the Quest 3’s features, pricing, and availability. Read More ‘Shocking’ rise in number of children falling victim to sextortion, charity says Elon Musk warns of ‘civilisational risk’ posed by AI at historic gathering ChatGPT boss says he’s achieved human-level AI, then says he’s ‘just memeing’

By Marc Jones LONDON Developing national digital currencies are at risk due to a lack of legal powers

Astronauts have never truly been alone. In 1988, on board the Russian space station Mir, the crew noticed something had blanketed one of their windows – from the outside. Whatever it was had even begun to infiltrate its way into the station, slowly destroying the window's titanium-quartz surface. The blanket was eventually revealed to be fungi that had managed to hitch a ride into space by clinging onto the astronauts themselves, Space.com reports. Amazingly, the fungi had managed to adapt to the space environment, surviving and thriving on windows, control panels, and air conditioners. The on board the space station even had their food and water contaminated. Although this was the first instance of a hijacker damaging the space station, it wasn't the last. Many space-borne fungi remain dormant during launch, until "activating" and reproducing to form thick, living mats on various regions in the space station. The fungi can threaten the health of those on board as well as damage electronics and plumbing. Since the 1988 incident, there have been numerous attempts to establish robust cleaning routines for scrubbing the fungi off walls and equipment, in an attempt to prevent the organisms from causing serious issues. Despite the concern surrounding the risks, scientists are trying to take advantage of the fungi's abilities. One team associated with the European Space Agency (ESA) recently conducted hypergravity experiments on fungi to better understand how these organisms survive effortlessly in the harsh environment of space. If these mechanisms are understood, fungi may be able to be used to build off-world settlements and be incorporated into off-world medications. In 2016, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California launched fungi into space for the first time on board the International Space Station. The team studied how the ISS environment caused the species to create certain molecules it doesn't produce on Earth. "We are never going to be able to get rid of fungi entirely as we venture into space, so we need to understand them," André Antunes, a researcher who is part of the recent ESA study, said in a statement published on Monday. In addition, they offer positive opportunities as well as risks. Down on Earth fungi are employed to make food - such as yeast for fermentation - as well as medicines, chemical enzymes for industry as well as metal nanoparticles used in numerous fields. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, has scrapped a feature that lets users self-report political misinformation on the platform, a research group says, marking the latest safety-focused guardrail that X has rolled back since billionaire Elon Musk took the helm.

Dubai is rolling out its first round of robotaxis next month, as a part of a plan to alleviate congestion and accidents.

Billionaire Ken Griffin's Citadel will take a tougher stance against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and is

Glencore Plc and Seriti Resources Holdings Ltd. are in talks to cut hundreds of jobs in South Africa

OpenAI founder Sam Altman, whose company created the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, announced on Tuesday that his firm had achieved human-level artificial intelligence, before claiming that he was “just memeing”. In a post to the Reddit forum r/singularity, Mr Altman wrote “AGI has been achieved internally”, referring to artificial general intelligence – AI systems that match or exceed human intelligence. His comment came just hours after OpenAI unveiled a major update for ChatGPT that will allow it to “see, hear and speak” to users by processing audio and visual information. Mr Altman then edited his original post to add: “Obviously this is just memeing, y’all have no chill, when AGI is achieved it will not be announced with a Reddit comment.” The r/singularity Reddit forum is dedicated to speculation surrounding the technological singularity, whereby computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence and AI development becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote about the hypothetical scenario in his seminal book Superintelligence, in which he outlined the existential risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence. One of Professor Bostrom’s thought experiments involves an out-of-control AGI that destroys humanity despite being designed to pursue seemingly harmless goals. Known as the Paperclip Maximiser, the experiment describes an AI whose only goal is to make as many paperclips as possible. “The AI will realise quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off,” Professor Bostrom wrote. “Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.” Following Mr Altman’s Reddit post, OpenAI researcher Will Depue posted an AI-generated image to X/Twitter with the caption, “Breaking news: OpenAI offices seen overflowing with paperclips!”. OpenAI is one of several firms pursuing AGI, which if deployed in a way that aligns with human interests has the potential to fundamentally change the world in ways that are difficult to predict. In a blog post earlier this year, Mr Altman outlined his vision for an AGI that “benefits all of humanity”, while also warning that mitigating risks poses a major challenge. “If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility,” he wrote. On the other hand, AGI would also come with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption. Because the upside of AGI is so great, we do not believe it is possible or desirable for society to stop its development forever; instead, society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right.” Read More ChatGPT AI is about to be eclipsed by ‘interactive AI’, DeepMind founder says Iranian officials mulling over use of AI to issue fatwas Spotify clarifies position on whether it will ban AI-powered music ChatGPT now has power to ‘see, hear, and speak’

Ancient clay tablets unearthed from ancient ruins in Turkey by archaeologists have revealed a language lost to the passages of time. The new language was discovered in the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire at Hattusa (known as Boğazköy-Hattusha). The well-preserved tablets are among many incredible artworks found at the site - a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Over the past four decades, researchers have dusted off nearly 30,000 unique tablets - with most written in Hittite. New research, however, shows that some of the tablet haul shows that they are written in a language previously unknown to modern man. Of course, the meaning and words of this language have not been deciphered, but it appears from early inspection to branch off from languages used within the Hittite Empire - and is being referred to as Kalašma. archaeologist Interestingly though, researchers from the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute have noted that the new language is found within a recitation in a 'cultic ritual text'. While that's usually the basis of a middling horror movie, we're certain that there's nothing to worry about - it stems from an ancient Hittite practice. Professor Daniel Schwemer explains that the discovery wasn't unexpected. "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages," he said. These ritual texts provide insight into little-known languages, and thanks to this discovery, one more has been added to the list. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A recent finding in South Africa has rediscovered a human population that was thought to have been lost. When some languages from the Namibia Desert died out, anthropologists feared that the populations that spoke them had gone with it. However, researchers have discovered that the genetic identity of these once-thought lost populations may have been maintained, even without their native tongue. Southern Africa holds some of the greatest human genetic diversity on Earth, and it is a common pattern that this diversity suggests it is where a species or family originated. Even without fossil records, anthropologists would know humans evolved in Africa, simply by looking at how much greater the biological diversity is there. It is among the inhabitants of the Kalahari and Namibia Deserts of south-eastern Africa where this diversity can be seen most dramatically. "We were able to locate groups which were once thought to have disappeared more than 50 years ago," Dr Jorge Rocha of the University of Porto said in a statement. One of these groups is the Kwepe, who used to speak Kwadi. The disappearance of the language was thought to mark the end of their serration from neighbouring populations. Dr Ann-Maria Fehn of the Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos said: "Kwadi was a click language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across Southern Africa." The team managed to find the descendants of those who spoke Kwadi, and discovered that they had retained their genetic distinctiveness that traces back to a time before Bantu-speaking farmers moved into the area. “A lot of our efforts were placed in understanding how much of this local variation and global eccentricity was caused by genetic drift – a random process that disproportionately affects small populations and by admixtures from vanished populations,” said Dr Sandra Oliverira of the University of Bern. "Previous studies revealed that foragers from the Kalahari desert descend from an ancestral population who was the first to split from all other extant humans,” added Professor Mark Stoneking of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Our results consistently place the newly identified ancestry within the same ancestral lineage but suggest that the Namib-related ancestry diverged from all other southern African ancestries, followed by a split of northern and southern Kalahari ancestries." The research allowed the team to reconstruct the migrations of the region's populations. With the Khoe-Kwadi speakers dispersed across the area around 2,000 years ago, possibly from what is now Tanzania. The populations that once spoke Kwadi, before adopting Bantu languages in recent decades, are the missing piece in the history of humanity as anthropologists identified in this study. The study can be read in Science Advances. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Mike Scarcella The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit accusing Amazon.com of abusing its retail market power to

LONDON E-commerce giant Shopify is investing in wholesale platform Faire, the companies said on Wednesday, in a global