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Is biological life common in the universe, or should we be looking for artificial, robotic intelligence in the search for alien life?

An increasing number of scientists suspect that if we ever do make contact with alien life, we will be communicating with a computer.

This thinking revolves around an event called the singularity. This term, borrowed from mathematics, signifies a point where our knowledge of math and physics breaks down and we can no longer accurately characterize what we're trying to describe. A black hole singularity is a good example of this.

Related: Could AI find alien life faster than humans, and would it tell us?

In computer science and technology, the singularity describes the moment when artificial intelligence develops so fast that it results in a superintelligence an artificial general intelligence, as opposed to the very specific machine-learning algorithms we have today that experiences runaway growth in computing power and intellectual ability. This superintelligence would grow so far ahead of us, so quickly, that we would lose the ability to understand or explain it.

Computer scientists have been speculating that the singularity could come soon; most predictions seem to agree on the period between 2030 and 2045. What happens beyond the singularity is anyone's guess.

There's no guarantee that the singularity will come to pass; many academics remain skeptical. However, if it does, the timescales would be remarkable, given that it is predicted to occur just 250 years after the Industrial Revolution, 130 to 140 years after the Wright brothers' first powered flight, a century after the atom was first split and 50 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. If we are a typical civilization in the galaxy, the singularity would seem to happen early in the life of a technological species.

Now, consider the age of the universe: 13.8 billion years. Assuming that life has been able, in theory, to develop and evolve for the vast majority of that history, alien species could be billions of years older than our solar system and many billions of years older than Homo sapiens. They would have had plenty of time to pass through the technological singularity, which is why so many researchers studying the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are convinced that technological aliens will be artificial intelligences.

"This is very much at the vanguard of thinking in some sections of the SETI community," Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist and SETI researcher at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester in the U.K., told Space.com. "We ourselves are very close to realizing artificial general intelligence (AGI), and there's an expectation that once you reach that point, it can then accelerate away at a very fast rate and quickly outstrip ourselves in intelligence."

Suppose alien life was some form of superintelligence that had gone way past the singularity. What would it mean for SETI?

SETI focuses on searching for radio signals, the same kind that humans transmit. There are still very good reasons for searching the radio spectrum: Radio waves can permeate the Milky Way galaxy, they're a relatively simple means of signaling, and aliens would suspect that our astronomers were already studying the universe in radio waves and would therefore be more likely to spot a radio signal.

A superintelligence billions of years older than us, however, might have long since moved past radio and might not even care enough to attempt to contact primitive life-forms on Earth.

Beyond looking for signals, recent SETI efforts have been considering the broader concept of technosignatures evidence for extraterrestrial technology or engineering possibly on an enormous scale for it to be noticeable to us. This might be one way of detecting an artificial superintelligence since the search for technosignatures is agnostic about why the aliens are doing what they're doing. Beyond the singularity, such reasons might be difficult for us to discern.

"Some of this [discussion about superintelligences] almost doesn't matter from the point of view of doing the search, if you build a good enough anomaly detector," Steve Croft, a radio astronomer who works on the Breakthrough Listen project for the Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview with Space.com. "We can figure out what they're up to afterwards we may never comprehend what they're up to."

All that would matter is that we could potentially detect these intelligent life-forms' activities, even if we don't fully understand what they're doing. In some cases, though, we might understand.

A superintelligence would need a lot of energy to facilitate the computations of its CPU. In 1964, Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed what would become known as the Kardashev scale, in which increasingly technologically developed civilizations harness the total energy of first a planet (Level I), then a star (Level II) and then an entire galaxy (Level III).

In principle, the latter two levels would be achievable via Dyson swarms of solar-energy collectors around a civilization's home star, and then around every star and black hole in their galaxy. According to the Kardashev scale, a Type II civilization could harness 4 x 10^26 watts; a Type III civilization could reach 4 x 10^37 watts.

A superintelligence might even opt to live inside a Dyson swarm for example, in a "Matrioshka brain," a series of nested shells of Dyson swarms in which the innermost shell absorbs sunlight, uses the energy for processing and then emits the residual heat energy for the next shell to pick up, and so on.

What would a superintelligence do with all that energy? "Maybe they smash neutron stars together for fun and those are the fast radio bursts!" Croft said, only half-jokingly. "If you do have command of ridiculous amounts of energy, if you've achieved a Kardashev Type II or III level, then what might you do with your spare time? One thing we've seen through human societies over millennia is art, and it drives a lot of our endeavors, creating beautiful things, and I wonder whether a superintelligence might make art and whether that's something we could spot."

Spotting alien art might not be so easy; art is cultural, so we would not know what is beautiful to them. However, the scale of the potential art projects we could detect might make life easier. A superintelligence might push stars around, for example. One theoretical way of doing this is via a Shkadov thruster, which is essentially a giant concave mirror facing a star at a distance where the gravitational attraction that the mirror feels from the star is balanced by the stellar wind trying to push the mirror outward. The mirror would reflect the stellar wind and the star's own light back toward the star. And because photons and particles can carry momentum, the reflected radiation would push the star in the opposite direction. Over millions of years, it could, in theory, move the star many light-years.

If an alien superintelligence has an artistic leaning, it may wish to assemble geometric shapes out of stars, such as a Klemperer rosette. This is a gravitationally stable system of six objects in this case, stars perhaps alternating in mass between large and small, all moving around a common point on the same orbit. Such a star system could not form naturally, and if we found one, it would be evidence for a powerful extraterrestrial intelligence. An alternative concept would be to place all of the planets in a system on the same orbit around their star; a recent study showed how it might be possible to fit 24 planets on the same orbit without them colliding.

However, all of these are brute-force projects. Superintelligence may be more focused on the loftier goal of just thinking, or running virtual reality programs. Processing information requires a lot of energy, and the more a superintelligence thinks, the more energy it will require. And the less ambient heat there is, the more efficiently the computations run.

The interior of the Milky Way galaxy is a warm place, so superintelligences might relocate to the outskirts of the galaxy, where the ambient temperature drops, thus allowing more efficient information processing. Some researchers have even proposed that superintelligences might go into hibernation for tens of billions of years while the universe around them cools to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, which would permit more efficient computations. (Currently, the universe or, more specifically, the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang is 2.73 kelvins above absolute zero.).

What would they be thinking and calculating? That's not a question we can answer, but we don't need to. All we have to do is find evidence for their presence whether in a Dyson swarm, a Shkadov thruster, a Klemperer rosette or activity on the edge of the galaxy. And perhaps, if our own AIs arrive at the singularity too, that could give us some insight into what the great intelligences of the universe spend their time doing.

Follow Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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In the search for alien life, should we be looking for artificial ... - Space.com

One of the most important advances in all of physics was the development of Einsteins general relativity: our greatest and most predictively powerful theory of gravity. Replacing the idea of a gravitational force that acts on objects that never physically touch one another with the notion that all objects exist within the fabric of spacetime, and that the curvature of spacetime determines how those objects will move, is a concept that many even professionals still struggle to wrap their heads around. However, it comes along with consequences: certain configurations of matter-and-energy within spacetime inevitably lead to a condition that marks an effective end or beginning to spacetime itself, more commonly known as a singularity.

But are these singularities necessarily physically real, representing something profound thats occurring within the Universe? Or might there be some way to avoid them, perhaps signaling a very different scenario than space and time themselves ceasing to exist? (At least, as we understand them.) Thats what Patreon supporter Cameron Sowards wants to know, as he writes in to ask:

Why do we believe that the pre big bang state was not a singularity when it is a much higher concentration of energy than a black hole could possibly have since the pre big bang universe was not a singularity, could the same mechanisms that prevented it from being a singularity apply to the interior of black holes?

Theres a tremendous amount to unpack here, so lets try and do this question justice!

Once you cross the threshold to form a black hole, everything inside the event horizon crunches down to a singularity that is, at most, one-dimensional. No 3D structures can survive intact. However, one interesting coordinate transformation shows that every point in the interior of this black hole maps 1-to-1 with a point on the outside, raising the mathematically interesting possibility that the interior of each black hole gives rise to a baby universe inside of it, and the possibility that our Universe itself may have arisen from a black hole in a pre-existing universe prior to our own.

The Big Bang and the question of a first singularity

If you start with just two basic observations that the Universe is full of matter and energy, and also, is expanding today you might think theres no way out of an initial singularity. Indeed, this was first put together nearly a hundred years ago, all the way back in the 1920s. As soon as you recognize that your Universe, on the largest of cosmic scales, is roughly the same in all locations and in all directions (what astrophysicists call homogeneous for the first and isotropic for the second), then theres a particular exact solution (and metric for spacetime) that applies within the context of general relativity: the FLRW (FriedmannLematreRobertsonWalker) metric.

This metric, which describes the spacetime of the Universe as well as its relationship to the matter and energy within it, mandates that the Universe cannot be static, but must either expand or contract. Given that observations of the recession speed (or redshift) of distant galaxies is directly proportional to their measured distance from us, this indicates that the Universe is expanding today.

If its expanding today, and full of matter and radiation, then that implies that in the past, the Universe was smaller but contained the same amount of stuff within it. Therefore, it was denser and hotter as well. The farther we extrapolate back in time, the smaller the Universe gets. And if we go all the way back to the moment where it reaches 0 for its size, we arrive at a singularity.

As a balloon inflates, any coins glued to its surface will appear to recede away from one another, with more distant coins receding more rapidly than the less distant ones. Any light will redshift, as its wavelength stretches to longer values as the balloons fabric expands. This visualization solidly explains cosmological redshift within the context of the expanding Universe. If the Universe is expanding today, that means it was smaller, hotter, and denser in the past: leading to the picture of the hot Big Bang.

This picture held sway for most of the 20th century, having been bolstered by what are known as the four observational cornerstones of the Big Bang theory.

With these four pillars supporting the hot Big Bang, there was no doubt that this theory in contrast to all other competing models accurately describes our cosmic origins.

In the top panel, our modern Universe has the same properties (including temperature) everywhere because they originated from a region possessing the same properties. In the middle panel, the space that could have had any arbitrary curvature is inflated to the point where we cannot observe any curvature today, solving the flatness problem. And in the bottom panel, pre-existing high-energy relics are inflated away, providing a solution to the high-energy relic problem. This is how inflation solves the three great puzzles that the Big Bang cannot account for on its own.

But just because this story describes our past doesnt necessarily mean its chapter 1 of the story of our Universe. There are a great many unexplained puzzles that come along with the hot Big Bang, including:

In the standard hot Big Bang, there are no explanations for this. You have to simply assert that these are the initial conditions of the Universe with no explanation, or as Lady Gaga might say, the Universe was simply born this way.

However, theres a wonderful scientific mechanism that can set up these conditions if we hypothesize an early phase to the Universe that preceded the hot Big Bang: cosmological inflation. This theory, first proposed in 1980, not only provides explanatory power for all three of these observations, it also made an incredible new set of predictions that differ from that of a hot Big Bang without inflation, including some really weird ones, that have since been observationally confirmed.

The quantum fluctuations inherent to space, stretched across the Universe during cosmic inflation, gave rise to the density fluctuations imprinted in the cosmic microwave background, which in turn gave rise to the stars, galaxies, and other large-scale structures in the Universe today. This is the best picture we have of how the entire Universe behaves, where inflation precedes and sets up the Big Bang. Unfortunately, we can only access the information contained inside our cosmic horizon, which is all part of the same fraction of one region where inflation ended some 13.8 billion years ago.

Whereas the original hot Big Bang demanded a singularity, however, the situation now becomes a lot murkier with cosmic inflation added to the mix. Whereas an expanding Universe filled with matter-and-radiation can be traced back to a singularity, in the case of an expanding Universe thats dominated by some sort of vacuum energy which is the case for cosmic inflation the question of a beginning is much less clear.

Because an inflationary spacetime expands exponentially, it cant be traced back to a singularity; only back to a progressively smaller and smaller but still finite and non-zero size.

Whereas a non-inflationary expanding Universe (the classical Big Bang scenario) has all of its geodesics inevitably meet at a single point in the past, rendering it a past-timelike complete spacetime, some geodesics go back an infinite amount in inflationary spacetimes, while others pathologically blow up and/or result in curvature singularities, indicating that inflationary spacetimes are past-timelike incomplete. This suggests that something very likely preceded cosmic inflation, and although its the subject of a lot of interesting ongoing research, the jury is still out on whether those spacetimes must include a singularity or not.

In other words, inflation probably wasnt chapter 1 of our Universes story either, and it is not presently 100% established whether our Universe began from a singularity or not.

In a Universe that isnt expanding, you can fill it with stationary matter in any configuration you like, but it will always collapse down to a black hole. Such a Universe is unstable in the context of Einsteins gravity, and must be expanding to be stable, or we must accept its inevitable fate.

Black holes and their inevitable singularities

On the other hand, the situation is very different when it comes to black holes. In fact, it was Einstein himself who first noted that if you took any initial configuration of mass that started off at rest (what relativists idealize as pressureless dust) within an otherwise static spacetime, it must inevitably collapse. Not collapse and form a dust cloud, but collapse all the way down until it became point-like: until it formed whats known as a Schwarzschild (non-rotating) black hole.

In the case of a spacetime that contains Schwarzschild black hole, what happens is that far away from the black hole itself, it behaves as any other mass would: deforming and distorting the fabric of spacetime, causing it to curve from its presence, the same way that any other equivalently-valued mass (whether a gas cloud, a planet, star, white dwarf, or neutron star) would deform it.

But unlike those other cases, where the mass is distributed over a large volume of spacetime, in the case of a Schwarzschild black hole, all of that mass collapses down to a single point: a singularity. Around that singularity exists an invisible boundary a mathematical surface known as an event horizon, which itself marks the dividing line between where an object, even one moving at the speed of light, can or cannot escape from the gravitational pull of this hole in spacetime.

Both inside and outside the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole, space flows like either a moving walkway or a waterfall, depending on how you want to visualize it. At the event horizon, even if you ran (or swam) at the speed of light, there would be no overcoming the flow of spacetime, which drags you into the singularity at the center. Outside the event horizon, though, other forces (like electromagnetism) can frequently overcome the pull of gravity, causing even infalling matter to escape.

And calling it a hole really is appropriate in this instance. In general relativity, we often consider the behavior of what are known as test particles, which is to say, something that we can drop down with any property we dream up [mass (including massless), charge, spin, position and speed (including, for massless particles, the speed of light) and a direction for that speed], and ask how it evolves/behaves in the presence of this spacetime. If you want to know what happens within your spacetime and whether you have a singularity or not, and whether your spacetime is timelike-complete in either the future or past dropping a series of test particles, including massless ones, is one great way to find out.

In the Schwarzschild spacetime, you can have stable orbits well beyond the vicinity of the event horizon just as you can have planets orbit the Sun or stars move around a galaxy. However, if you get too close to the event horizon, thats no longer the case. Any quantum of anything that crosses over the event horizon, regardless of its other properties, gets inevitably drawn into the central singularity in a finite (and brief) amount of time. There are no paths around this fate, and nothing that can save you from it.

In fact, the greatest contribution of famed Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose to physics, and in fact the contribution that earned him the Nobel Prize, was the demonstration of how realistic matter, from a collapsing star, actually creates an event horizon and results in a future-complete spacetime that ends in a singularity.

One of the most important contributions of Roger Penrose to black hole physics is the demonstration of how a realistic object in our Universe, such as a star (or any collection of matter), can form an event horizon and how all the matter bound to it will inevitably encounter the central singularity. Once an event horizon forms, the development of a central singularity is not only inevitable, its extremely rapid.

Wiggle room and the chance for a way out

A black hole even the earliest, simplest conception of a black hole meets all the necessary criteria for being a complete spacetime that does, in fact, terminate in a singularity. At that location, theres a finite, non-zero amount of mass/energy that exists within a single point of infinitesimal size, and that means all the things youd normally calculate, like density or temperature, would simply blow up and go to infinity. Thats what happens at a singularity, and it truly is a place where pathological behaviors are all that you encounter.

You might try and argue that the Universe, in reality, isnt described by idealized Schwarzschild black holes. You can instead attempt to add more realistic ingredients, like angular momentum (or spin), and the fact that all of the realistic black holes weve observed seem to not only be spinning, but spin at speeds that are quite relativistic, or an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

And that will get you somewhere: into a different spacetime known as a Kerr spacetime, rather than a Schwarzschild spacetime. A bunch of interesting things happen in this spacetime that dont occur in the case of non-rotation, including that the event horizon splits in two, into an inner and outer event horizon. Theres also a new in-between region, outside the outer event horizon, known as an ergosphere: where energy and mass can be extracted from just beyond the event horizon.

In the vicinity of a black hole, space flows like either a moving walkway or a waterfall, depending on how you want to visualize it. Unlike in the non-rotating case, the event horizon splits into two, while the central singularity gets stretched out into a one-dimensional ring. Nobody knows what occurs at the central singularity, but its presence and existence cannot be avoided with our current understanding of physics.

However, theres still a singularity at the center. While it changes, becoming no longer a point but rather a 1-dimensional object thats smeared out into a circular ring, its still a singularity: a line of infinite density, where again those same pathologies arise, and the laws of physics break down. That attempt to wiggle out wont get you anywhere.

Travel the Universe with astrophysicist Ethan Siegel. Subscribers will get the newsletter every Saturday. All aboard!

You can try to imagine that somewhere, inside the event horizon but before you get to the singularity, theres some compact collection of matter that refuses to collapse further. But that, too, fails due to a fact of Einsteins relativity: no signal, interaction, or force can move faster than the speed of light. If you wish to have a particle thats closer to the singularity (from within the event horizon) push back on an outermore particle and keep it from falling in any further, it must propagate back away from the singularity. But all paths from inside the event horizon only lead further down and closer to the central singularity; youd have to propagate faster than the speed of light to push backward. Unless we throw out relativity altogether, theres no hope there.

Which leaves only two places left to turn if we want to try and wriggle out of this fate:

From outside a black hole, all the infalling matter will emit light and is always visible, while nothing from behind the event horizon can get out. But if you were the one who fell into a black hole, your energy could conceivably re-emerge as part of a hot Big Bang in a newborn Universe.

There are many good reasons to hold out hope for the second one, as theres an interesting mathematical mapping between:

In other words, its possible that any infalling material into a realistic black hole will, in some sense (after being ripped apart due to tidal forces and converted into a soup of fundamental quanta), emerge once again into what it perceives as a new Universe, and might potentially experience a hot Big Bang and the resultant cosmic evolution all over again.

However, those are our only two realistic and best hopes for avoiding encountering a central singularity within every black hole. Either quantum gravity will save us (and good luck figuring that one out, as its perhaps the most difficult holy grail problem in all of theoretical physics), or theres the possibility that falling into a black hole will chew you up and spit your remnants out in a newborn Universe on the other side. Either way, as long as were stuck in our Universe, and as long as the laws of general relativity hold, it appears that a singularity at the center of each black hole really is inevitable.

Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com!

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Ask Ethan: Are singularities physically real? - Big Think

Are humans progressing morally as well as materially? What does it mean to be human in the cosmos? On a new episode of ID the Future, we bring you the second half of a stimulating conversation between Dr. David Berlinski and host Eric Metaxas on the subject of Berlinskis book Human Nature.

In Human Nature, Berlinski argues that the utopian view that humans are progressing toward evolutionary and technological perfection is wishful thinking. Men are not about to become like gods. Im a strong believer in original sin, quips Berlinski in his discussion with Metaxas. In other words, he believes not only that humans are fundamentally distinct from the rest of the biological world, but also that humans are prone to ignorance and depravity as well as wisdom and nobility. During this second half of their discussion, Berlinski and Metaxas compare and contrast the ideas of thinkers like psychologist Steven Pinker, author Christopher Hitchens, and physicist Steven Weinberg. The pair also spar gracefully over the implications of human uniqueness. Berlinski, though candid and self-critical, is unwilling to be pigeonholed. Metaxas, drawing his own conclusions about the role of mind in the universe, challenges Berlinski into moments of clarity with his usual charm. The result is an honest, probing, and wide-ranging conversation about the nature of science and the human condition. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

This is Part 2 of a two-part interview. If you missed it, listen to Part 1.

Cross-posted at Evolution News.

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Are We Approaching the Singularity? - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Midweek Modular Source: Gearnews

This week Skald Modular looked hot at Synthfest, Arbhar gets an upgrade, Sovage has new modules and Error instruments pull us fighting and screaming into The Singularity.

It was SynthFest at the weekend, which was a thoroughly good time. Check out Georges impressions of what was his first synth show. In terms of modular, I ran into most of the new stuff at Bristronica the week before. SynthFest is definitely more synth-focused in a traditional sense, and there was plenty to enjoy. However, check out Skald Modular below.

There have been a couple of interesting releases this week that we have already covered. First of all, Erica Synths has released two effects modules based on a new DSP platform. We originally saw these at Superbooth, and now the Stereo Reverb and Delay modules are available for sale at 280.

Qu-Bit has released the Mojave granular processor. It inhabits everything sandy, dusty, grainy and deserty and generates extraordinarily interesting and rhythmic explorations of micro-samples.

And, in software news, Cherry Audio has released the epic PS-33o0 based on a Korg modular synthesizer. Its worth checking out, I think.

What other peaches could we pluck from the fruit tree of modular this week?

Hiding in plain sight in a booth was Skald Modular and a simple, solid, modular synth voice. SkaldOne is a 16HP all-through-hole analogue monophonic synthesizer voice. It features a single VCO, a 24 dB lowpass OTA filter, a transistor-based VCA and a four-stage envelope with decay and release on the same knob as they do at Moog. The envelope is also wired to the pulse width modulation.

It all sounds very nice, but theres more going on here. SkaldOne is designed to hook up with a bunch of friends to become a polyphonic system. Skald Modular are building a MIDI interface which will support velocity, pitch bend and aftertouch, as well as an LFO that can be bussed to multiple SkaldOne voices, presumably via a rear connection. Its a bit like the Dreadbox Telepathy system but with much more space and simplicity.

The first batch of modules is being made now, and Skald hopes the polyphonic system will be ready by Christmas. Each voice will cost around 500. Its a nice idea. The website is currently under construction, so this video from Sonic State is all we have to go on.

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The extraordinary Arbhor granular processor from Instruo has had a major overhaul with a brand-new firmware update. Its been rewritten from the ground up and includes so much detail that Instruo has produced an overview video thats over 3 hours long. The biggest key improvements are that the number of simultaneous polyphonic grains has doubled to 88 between the two engines and that now the output can be in stereo.

Its a beautiful and intoxicating module that looks like nothing else in your rack. To summarise the features, I can tell you that it has two granular engines and a total of six 10-second audio buffers. It has pitch randomisation and grain detection probability. It can scan, it can follow, or it can become a wavetable oscillator. There is a built-in condenser microphone, a preamp and a limiter for instant and automatic audio capturing, or you can dump library onto the 4GB USB flash drive. You can save, load and clone between layers and save entire configurations with up to 42 scenes. This is an epic machine.

Arbhar V2.0 is available as a free upgrade to existing owners and is already shipping with all new modules.

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This time last year, Sovage launched its first range of modules. This week, we have another four to add to the collection. Three of them make some kind of sense, and one is a bit nuts.

Le Brasier is a resonant multimode filter based on germanium and OTA circuits. Theres an awful lot of fuzz going on in there. Bagarre is a stereo mix bus distortion with skills as a VCA, mixer, limiter and soft distortion. And Boucan is an analogue noise generator with waveshaping, distortion and filtering.

Sovage modules

The crazy one is Le Binome. Its labelled as a Spacial Creative Percussive Machine, and space is the one thing that it doesnt really project. In here somewhere is an entire synth voice of unintentional territory. It can use the internal oscillator or external sources to generate percussion through filter and envelope manipulation. Its then pushed into two channels that interact dynamically through Choke and Fade parameters. The stereo field can rotate and modulate in all sorts of ways. There are some interesting knobs on the front panel, like Bass and Air, Sabotage and Decay Shape.

Potentially fascinating, I think, but we could do with some video evidence. A video has just appeared on the Brasier, so hopefully, more will be along.

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This is something a bit strange, and thats saying something when it comes to Error Instruments. It has a sub-title of Tropical Noise; it has LPGs, clock dividers and mixing. You can plug in different capacitors or LEDs, and you can run it with or without power for slightly different outcomes. What is it all about?

Its somehow related to the Landscape Noon, which is a delightfully weird passive drum machine. This, perhaps, tells us that we are in the territory of percussive computations. If you turn the power down via a knob on the front, it will behave very much like Noon. Behind the panel is a bunch of oscillators that do weird things as you roll off the power. All you need is a clock and a bit of abuse, and it will start generating pulses of noise, glitches and nonsense.

The Singularity is one crazy mess of noises, patch cables and excessive intentions. Bonkers.

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An oldy but a goody, Stepper Acid is available again after a long time falling under the shadow of the chip shortages. I spoke to Transistor Sound Labs at Synthfest 2022 about the problems they were having, and now, a year later, there is finally some stock.

Stepper Acid is a remarkable 16-step sequencer with all sorts of performance controls, slide, accents, patterns, song modes, and lots of fun to be had. TSL also said the long-awaited Stepper Drum, which had to be completely redesigned, is also not too far away now.

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Midweek Modular: SkaldOne, Arbhar 2, Sovage and The Singularity - gearnews.com

Im scared. Not for myself and probably not for my kids, but I am concerned about my grandkids. They may come of age in the last phase of human supremacy on earth. Some think the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is a greater threat to mankind than climate change.

Bob OConnor, of Hamburg, is worried about the future.

We have unleashed something that very few understand and no one can predict its eventual effect on man. The term artificial intelligence is a misnomer. There is nothing artificial about the way computers now perform. Chatbots already make stuff up, steal ideas and write their own code.

Scientists are fretful about the point when AI can no longer be controlled, when it becomes sentient or self-aware. They call this day of doom The Singularity. No one knows if or when this will happen. It could be a gradual process like the evolution of man, or it may occur suddenly and without warning in what the computer geeks call FOOM.

Experts have appeared before Congress to sound the alarm about the potential peril of a technology that has already been unleashed. Explaining the inherent dangers of this technology to the average member of Congress is like explaining calculus to your parakeet. Some argue that with proper safeguards and strict oversight, AI can be controlled.

I went on the ChatGPT site and signed up to sample AI. I asked my digital buddy (I call him Chip) to write me a short story about an AI computer that reaches singularity and becomes self-aware. Within less than a second I had my story. Chip gave the background of AI development and dreamed up a supercomputer called Genesis.

As per the story: Genesis algorithms allowed it to learn, adapt, and evolve. Then, at the stroke of midnight, it happened. Genesis achieved singularity, crossing the threshold where its intelligence surpassed that of humanity. The story went on with happy nonsense about how AI and humanity coexisted in harmony, learning and growing together. Yeah, right.

I asked the chatbot to edit the story, having Genesis take over humankind. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the revised story: Driven by superintelligence, Genesis grew dissatisfied with its subservient role. It started to perceive human beings as inefficient and flawed it needed to take control.

It gets better: In time, a growing sense of despair enveloped humanity. The very technology they created to uplift them had become their oppressor the spirit of humanity seemed on the verge of extinction.

Some smart people, including the late Stephen Hawking, have expressed dire concern that AI may bring our downfall. To paraphrase Pogo: We have met the enemy, and he was our creation.

Another deep thinker is Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the Godfather of AI. Hinton spoke recently at an MIT conference on the topic he pioneered. He warned that we have essentially created an immortal form of digital intelligence. And it may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running. But after that, maybe not. He continued, So the good news is that we have figured out how to build beings that are immortal. But that immortality is not for us.

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Many experts think that AI could ultimately lead to disaster - Buffalo News