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"Halfway through their three-hour conversation, Brown said something that caught me off-guard. In hindsight, it isn't all that surprising-as long as you're aware of the latest advances-but it may still shock you coming from a physics university professor: A lot of physics professors are using [large language models] just as personal tutors.1"

"Oh, I just listen to bird sounds a lot and then try to emulate the kinds of things they do. Synthesizers are quite good at that because some of the new software has what's called physical modeling. This enables you to construct a physical model of something and then stretch the parameters. You can create a piano with 32-foot strings, for instance, or a piano made of glass. It's a very interesting way to try to study the world, to try to model it. In the natural world there are discrete entities like clarinets, saxophones, drums. With physical modeling, you can make hybrids like a drummy piano or a saxophone-y violin. There's a continuum, most of which has never been explored."

"In terms of safety, a 2013 Navigant Research report noted "the potential for greatly reduced accident rates." Such potential rests on the basic logic of driving: Good driving relies on physics calculations; bad driving happens thanks to human physical limitations like intoxication and sleepiness."

"Cathy Hackl: I think it's important to state that there is really no agreed-upon definition right now. Every morning-it's become a bit of a ritual-I go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and type in the word metaverse. And every day it says this word is not in the dictionary. But if we needed to define it, I tend to have a pretty expansive view of what the metaverse is. I believe it's a convergence of our physical and digital lives. It's our digital lifestyles, which we've been living on phones or computers, slowly catching up to our physical lives in some way, so that full convergence. It is enabled by many different technologies, like AR [augmented reality] and VR [virtual reality], which are the ones that most people tend to think about. But they're not the only entry points. There's also blockchain, which is a big component, there's 5G, there's edge computing, and many, many other technologies. To me, the metaverse is also about our identity and digital ownership. It's about a new extension of human creativity in some ways. But it's not going to be like one day we're going to wake up and exclaim, "The metaverse is here!" It's going to be an evolution."

"A new type of threat, however, goes one step further: the physical destruction of your computer."

"IBM predicts that in five years, "What we say and write will be used as indicators of our mental health and physical wellbeing.""

"This algorithm uses a recurrent neural network to predict sound features from videos and then produces a waveform from these features with an example-based synthesis procedure. We show that the sounds predicted by our model are realistic enough to fool participants in a "real or fake" psychophysical experiment, and that they convey significant information about material properties and physical interactions."

"But the blockchain looks set to change that. Right now, there are a number of startups that are working on tools to record ownership of a property (intellectual or physical) onto the blockchain, like Tieron, Monegraph, Colu, and Ascribe."

"While Google has played down the notion of rolling out anything soon (it will take years until Glass builds up enough users to make it worthwhile), marketers can't stop buzzing about the possibility of paying for ads in the physical world based on user engagement and reactions. The patent even details how a device like Google Glass could infer a user's emotional response to an ad - whether they were happy, sad or indifferent - and adjust pricing accordingly."

"In some ways, losing access to your home and documents is worse than having your home and documents physically destroyed."

"But what about evolution through 'unnatural selection', as National Geographic puts it. It seems that our natural, biological evolution simply cannot keep pace with the dizzying array of human enhancing technologies that emerged, and have shaped how we think, and our physical capacities."

GREAT ARTICLE ON AI "There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence-the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we'd be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 204012-that's only 25 years from now, which doesn't sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it's likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like-this could happen: It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human."

"Proponents say that it's more than just a matter of probability. The laws of physics don't seem that different from code in a program, according to some, and it's likely that with enough time, a sufficiently advanced civilization could crunch the numbers and produce a simulation that mimics the existence and behavior of every particle in our universe."

""We've taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading," Zuckerberg wrote. But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in "pseudoscience." According to Facebook's ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people."

"But could robots ever reproduce? This, undoubtedly, forms a pillar of "life" as shared by all natural organisms. A team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands have recently demonstrated a fully automated technology to allow physical robots to repeatedly breed, evolving their artificial genetic code over time to better adapt to their environment. Arguably, this amounts to artificial evolution. Child robots are created by mixing the digital "DNA" from two parent robots on a computer."

"To Lawmakers and School Administrators: As parents and caregivers, there is nothing more important to us than our children's safety. That's why we're calling for an outright ban on the use of facial recognition in schools. We're concerned about this technology spreading to our schools, infringing on our kids' rights and putting them in danger. We don't even know the psychological impacts this constant surveillance can have on our children, but we do know that violating their basic rights will create an environment of mistrust and will make it hard for students to succeed and grow. The images collected by this technology will become a target for those wishing to harm our children, and could put them in physical danger or at risk of having their biometric information stolen or sold. The well-known bias built into this technology will put Black and brown children, girls, and gender noncomforming kids in specific danger. Facial recognition creates more harm than good and should not be used on the children we have been entrusted to protect. It should instead be immediately banned."

"Remote working changes not just our understanding of a working community and the company ethos, but also our very concept of physical reality. Suddenly, to misappropriate Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. But if there is no shared space, what's to stop employers following the example of many customer-care call centres, and employ much cheaper staff based in the developing world?"

"As the lava lamps bubble and swirl, a video camera on the ceiling monitors their unpredictable changes and connects the footage to a computer, which converts the randomness into a virtually unhackable code.  Why use lava lamps for encryption instead of computer-generated code? Since computer codes are created by machines with relatively predictable patterns, it is entirely possible for hackers to guess their algorithms, posing a security risk. Lava lamps, on the other hand, add to the equation the sheer randomness of the physical world, making it nearly impossible for hackers to break through."

"Creating an algorithm that discriminates or shows bias isn't as hard as it might seem, however. As a first-year graduate student, my advisor asked me to create a machine-learning algorithm to analyze a survey sent to United States physics instructors about teaching computer programming in their courses."

"The Singapore government says the wearable device it is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS, internet, or cellular connectivity, so data it collects can only be extracted when it is physically handed over to a health official. These details are being offered up as the government looks to ease concerns about data privacy and drive the adoption of digital tools that can help speed up contact tracing. "