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"The new AI Index report notes that in 2023, AI still struggled with complex cognitive tasks like advanced math problem-solving and visual commonsense reasoning. However, 'struggled' here might be misleading; it certainly doesn't mean AI did badly. Performance on MATH, a dataset of 12,500 challenging competition-level math problems, improved dramatically in the two years since its introduction. In 2021, AI systems could solve only 6.9% of problems. By contrast, in 2023, a GPT-4-based model solved 84.3%. The human baseline is 90%. "

"The world's spookiest philosopher is Nick Bostrom, a thin, soft-spoken Swede. Of all the people worried about runaway artificial intelligence, and Killer Robots, and the possibility of a technological doomsday, Bostrom conjures the most extreme scenarios. In his mind, human extinction could be just the beginning."

" Kurzweil believes that "medical robots will go inside our brain and connect our neo-cortex to the smart cloud," and that's all slated to happen by 2029."

"What if technology provided the ultimate resolution of this existential crisis by allowing you to plug your brain into a boundless, cognitive melting pot with other humans?"

"The ability to understand an individual's unique anatomic configuration from skin to bone can be a significant benefit to a surgeon, especially prior to a complex operation. Immersive VR will enable surgeons to explore their patient's virtual body-reconstructed from their CT or MRI data-and plan or even practice difficult surgeries prior to the actual procedure. "

"Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15-20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible - just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. "

""We have absolutely nothing against bricklayers," Pivac says. "The problem is the average age of bricklayers is going up and it's difficult to attract new young people to the trade." There's a debate on about the future of automation-what it means that machines may be able to match humans at virtually any task. For now, robots are nowhere near that advanced."

"One of the most mind-bending far future predictions you'll hear from some futurists is this: Eventually, the technology will exist to copy your brain (every bit of data that makes you, you) onto a computer. Technical details and exact predictions aside (the concept is still firmly science fiction) mind uploading makes for a fascinating and disturbing thought experiment. If you had the power to upload yourself, would you?"

"There's a Cambrian explosion in robotics, with species of all sizes, shapes and modes of mobility crawling out of the muck of the lab and onto the terra firma of the marketplace, about to enter your home and your shopping experience."

"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."

"If you're a student and looking to establish yourself in a field of study that has a bright future in the world of high technology, then you'll need the mindset of a futurist. Understanding the direction of technology will help you decide how you want to position yourself to succeed, and figure out exactly what you need to study to get there."

"When it comes to the speed of these improvements, Yudkowsky says its important to not confuse the current speed of AI research with the speed of a real AI once built. Those are two very different things. What's more, there's no reason to believe that an AI won't show a sudden huge leap in intelligence, resulting in an ensuing "intelligence explosion" (a better term for the Singularity)."

"A new algorithm, however, is attempting to identify specific syndromes much sooner by screening photos for characteristic facial features associated with specific genetic conditions, such as Down's syndrome, Progeria, and Fragile X syndrome."

"Software is writing news stories with increasing frequency. In a recent example, an LA Times writer-bot wrote and posted a snippet about an earthquake three minutes after the event. The LA Times claims they were first to publish anything on the quake, and outside the USGS, they probably were."

"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."

""With the ability to learn from emerging patterns and discover new correlations, Watson's cognitive capabilities hold enormous potential in Africa - helping it to achieve in the next two decades what today's developed markets have achieved over two centuries," Kamal Bhattacharya, the director of IBM's Research - Africa, said in a news release."

"We're tempted to file this one under "the more things change, the more they stay the same." A wristband, called Nymi, that taps the user's heartbeat as a biometric marker, will also double as a bitcoin wallet."

"The benefits of mobile technology in a healthcare setting have not, it's safe to say, gone unnoticed. A throng of companies are trying to turn the smartphone into an assortment of medical devices, from blood pressure cuffs to otoscopes. Such devices offer patients a chance to keep up with chronic conditions and send data to their doctors on occasion."

"Sequencing cancer to find the breaks has become easy and cheap. But information on which drugs might or might not work on particular mutations remains buried in PDF files and scattered across medical journals."

"Meet GIST, a gesture-controlled wearable device that helps the visually impaired navigate the world around them. University of Nevada computer scientists Vinitha Khambadkar and Eelke Folmer recently debuted GIST at a technology conference."