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In sci-fi and horror movies, the "mad scientist" rarely begins as a villain. From Dr. Frankenstein to Spider-Man's Doc Ock, they are often the victims of a combination of good intentions, unstoppable curiosity and more than a little hubris. Their plight is as familiar in real life as on screen, most recently with artificial intelligence.

According to the authors of "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," who heavily borrowed from fantasy-genre language to predict a high-tech future, "We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone we are literally making sand think. ... We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder."

Ray Kurzweil is a scientist and futurist who for years now has predicted potential advancements in higher tech, as not just a helpful set of tools for humans to use but also as essential to post-human evolution. By hitching our humanity to artificial intelligence, what he calls "the Singularity," Kurzweil prophesies a new age:

"And this Singularity isn't far off," he says. "I set the date for the Singularity representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today."

Kurzweil sees the Singularity as more than a possibility. He thinks it is a near-absolute inevitability that human intelligence will be equaled, surpassed and eventually merged with our computerized tools.

Though many predictions about AI are still more science fiction than fact, it is advancing faster than many expected. Even Kurzweil, when he was writing in the early 2000s, failed to see the omnipresence of smartphones and social media. Today, it is nearly impossible to identify things produced by programs such as ChatGPT.

For years, Oxford mathematician and devout Christian John Lennox has warned of some of AI's more negative implications. In his book "2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity," Lennox challenged more utopian predictions about AI and highlighted its limits. "A neural network," wrote Lennox, "can pick out a cat on a YouTube video, but it has no concept of what a cat is." Here, Lennox is pointing to a profound limitation of materialism. In fact, only those wedded to the idea that the human mind is merely an organic machine can think that a smart computer is, in any real sense, "alive."

Though AI may never be the golden ticket it's hyped to be, suggested Lennox, its threats to humanity remain. The title intentionally points to George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984." The current situation in China should be enough to reveal that it will not take a fully realized Singularity to enslave millions. It will only take fallen humans with bad ideas and enough power to control some very powerful technologies.

And yet, the promises of AI are amazing. An algorithm can pick out our music, movies and groceries with incredible accuracy, even if it is a bit creepy. The labor- and time-saving potential of AI will save humanity hours of mindless tasks. And we've not even begun to imagine the potential for technical and medical advances.

However, potentials are not actuals, and history is full of the unintended applications and consequences of human technologies. The only way forward in these possible futures is with a clear-eyed perspective on human exceptionalism and human fallenness. We must know the implications of both being created in the image of God and being an heir of Adam's sin.

Adapted from Breakpoint, Feb. 23, 2024; reprinted by permission of the Colson Center, breakpoint.org.

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Breakpoint: The promises and perils of artificial intelligence - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Singularity 6's cosy MMO Palia has reached over 3 million players in six months ahead of its launch on Steam on March 25.

The studio's debut title a fantasy mix of life simulation and MMORPG launched last August with a PC open beta via its own website and launcher, followed by a release on the Epic Games Store in October. The game then launched on Nintendo Switch in December.

As for how Palia achieved this feat, Singularity 6 director of business strategy Yu Sian Tan tells GamesIndustry.biz it was a combination of captivating players and the game's release on Nintendo Switch.

"We believe that we struck a chord with players when we wanted to expand the community sim experience by making it more social, creating an environment that encourages players to be kind to one another and having an overarching narrative that players can dive into," she says, adding that Nintendo's involvement and supporting in development and marketing aided an increase in player numbers.

"[Their support] is invaluable to us as a new game studio," Tan adds. "After our launch on the Nintendo Switch, our partnership with Nintendo has only grown stronger."

Tan says Palia's launch on Nintendo provided a "big boost" to the title compared to the PC open beta due to the "flexibility" of the portable console.

"It also meant we were launching on a new platform and now supported cross-platform play so things definitely got a lot more interesting for the team," she says.

Despite this boost in player numbers, Tan notes that maintaining player engagement is one of the biggest challenges of overseeing the success of a free-to-play MMO.

"The free-to-play approach can be challenging because it involves a bit of a balancing act between offering engaging gameplay for free, but also introducing effective monetisation strategies that do not alienate players or cause unnecessary pressure that would run antithetical to the cosy community sim gameplay we are trying to encourage in Palia," she explains.

Tan highlights that the main obstacle with free-to-play is the ability to engage players over a long period of time when they haven't paid an upfront cost for the game, as well as keeping the game fresh as a live service product.

"I'd love to be able to say it's easy to predict what our players love to play and how they would engage with our content, but every time we release something new to our players, we constantly learn and evolve our understanding of our playerbase," she says.

"Every time we release something new to our players, we constantly learn and evolve our understanding of our playerbase"

"It's a mix of offering up content with our own unique spin on it that appeals to the player archetypes we expect to be attracted to Palia, but also throwing in new experiences to help players discover something that they might not have expected to like."

In terms of the live service aspect of the game, Tan describes adapting the title to this model as a "learning curve" for the studio, and that its live operations team has been instrumental in understanding concerns raised by its development team and ensuring their needs are met.

"We have definitely been working on improving our platform testing over time to understand what we need to test and where to test it to ensure we minimise our risk and maximise confidence," she notes.

"We have also been working on unifying the gameplay experience between platforms where it makes sense, without sacrificing the player experience. This has been a conscious effort for us as there are trade-offs we have to make, but this is key to ensure we can sustainably release content on multiple platforms in the future."

Among the lessons learned during development, Tan highlights that the game starting as an open beta on PC enabled the studio to comfortably launch the game on Switch, and helped lay the groundwork to bring the game to a bigger audience.

"There have been so many lessons we have learned along the way from building our own launcher/patcher on PC from scratch [to creating] robust monitoring systems and a scalable infrastructure that could handle the ebbs and flows in our playerbase," she says.

As for advice she has for developers working on similar free-to-play and live service products, Tan says it all comes down to the strength of the development team itself.

"The most important factor is to have a strong development team who trusts each other to band together and support each other throughout the ups and downs," she highlights. "Accept that you cannot plan for everything, so it's important to have established processes for how you deal with issues when they come up and how you take the lessons and apply them going forward."

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Palia reaches over 3m players in six months thanks to "invaluable" Switch partnership - GamesIndustry.biz

I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away Will Knight | Wired When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated intolegacy assistant bots [like Siri and Alexa], they will surely get much more interesting. A year from now, I would expect the experience of using a computer to look very different, says Shah, who says he built vimGPT in only a few days. Most apps will require less clicking and more chatting, with agents becoming an integral part of browsing the web.'

CRISPR Gene Therapy Seems to Cure Dangerous Inflammatory Condition Clare Wilson | New Scientist Ten people who had the one-off gene treatment that is given directly into the body saw their number of swelling attacks fall by 95 percent in the first six months as the therapy took effect. Since then, all but one have had no further episodes for at least a further year, while one person who had the lowest dose of the treatment had one mild attack. This is potentially a cure, says Padmalal Gurugama at Cambridge University Hospitals in the UK, who worked on the new approach.

Apple Vision Pro Review: Magic, Until Its Not Nilay Patel | The Verge The Vision Pro is an astounding product. Its the sort of first-generation device only Apple can really make, from the incredible display and passthrough engineering, to the use of the whole ecosystem to make it so seamlessly useful, to even getting everyone to pretty much ignore the whole external battery situation. But the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead endsthat they cant ever be executed well enough to become mainstream.

Allen Institute for AI Releases Truly Open Source LLM to Drive Critical Shift in AI Development Sharon Goldman | VentureBeat While other models have included the model code and model weights, OLMo also provides the training code, training data and associated toolkits, as well as evaluation toolkits. In addition, OLMo was released under an open source initiative (OSI) approved license, with AI2 saying that all code, weights, and intermediate checkpoints are released under the Apache 2.0 License. The news comes at a moment when open source/open science AI, which has been playing catch-up to closed, proprietary LLMs like OpenAIs GPT-4 and Anthropics Claude, is making significant headway.

This Robot Can Tidy a Room Without Any Help Rhiannon Williams | MIT Technology Review While robots may easily complete tasks like [picking up and moving things] in a laboratory, getting them to work in an unfamiliar environment where theres little data available is a real challenge. Now, a new system called OK-Robot could train robots to pick up and move objects in settings they havent encountered before. Its an approach that might be able to plug the gap between rapidly improving AI models and actual robot capabilities, as it doesnt require any additional costly, complex training.

People Are Worried That AI Will Take Everyones Jobs. Weve Been Here Before. David Rotman | MIT Technology Review [Karl T. Comptons 1938] essay concisely framed the debate over jobs and technical progress in a way that remains relevant, especially given todays fears over the impact of artificial intelligence. While todays technologies certainly look very different from those of the 1930s, Comptons article is a worthwhile reminder that worries over the future of jobs are not new and are best addressed by applying an understanding of economics, rather than conjuring up genies and monsters.

Experimental Drug Cuts Off Pain at the Source, Company Says Gina Kolata | The New York Times Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston announced [this week] that it had developed an experimental drug that relieves moderate to severe pain, blocking pain signals before they can get to the brain. It works only on peripheral nervesthose outside the brain and the spinal cordmaking it unlike opioids. Vertex says its new drug is expected to avoid opioids potential to lead to addiction.

StarlabWith Half the Volume of the ISSWill Fit Inside Starships Payload Bay Eric Berger | Ars Technica We looked at multiple launches to get Starlab into orbit, and eventually gravitated toward single launch options, [Voyager Space CTO Marshall Smith] said. It saves a lot of the cost of development. It saves a lot of the cost of integration. We can get it all built and checked out on the ground, and tested and launch it with payloads and other systems. One of the many lessons we learned from the International Space Station is that building and integrating in space is very expensive. With a single launch on a Starship, the Starlab module should be ready for human habitation almost immediately, Smith said.

9 Retrofuturistic Predictions That Came True Maxwell Zeff | Gizmodo Commentators and reporters annually try to predict where technology will go, but many fail to get it right year after year. Who gets it right? More often than not, the world resembles the pop culture of the pasts vision for the future. Looking to retrofuturism, an old version of the future, can often predict where our advanced society will go.

Can This AI-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me. Kevin Roose | The New York Times Intrigued by the hype, I recently spent several weeks using Perplexity as my default search engine on both desktop and mobile. Hundreds of searches later, I can report that even though Perplexity isnt perfect, its very good. And while Im not ready to break up with Google entirely, Im now more convinced that AI-powered search engines like Perplexity could loosen Googles grip on the search market, or at least force it to play catch-up.

Image Credit:Dulcey Lima / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 3) - Singularity Hub

The pace of the green energy transition has accelerated significantly in recent years. Figures released at the end of last year show roughly 40 percent of US electricity production is now emission-free.

With growing concern that climate change is accelerating, rapidly decarbonizing power generation is more important than ever. The US has long been seen as dragging its heels in the shift towards green energy, but that now seems to be changing as investments in renewables jump, particularly in solar.

And the latest statistics from the US Energy Information Administration suggest this trend is already filtering through to electricity markets. According to Ars Technica, figures released in December show carbon-neutral power sources like renewables and nuclear are getting close to edging out fossil fuels as the countrys primary source of energy.

The EIA data only covers the period up to October, which means the final figures for 2023 could differ slightly. Solar typically has its strongest months over the summer, while fossil fuel plants often make up for extra demand in the colder months. Nonetheless, the picture painted by the figures suggests a growing shift towards cleaner forms of energy.

Nuclear powers contribution to the energy mix has stayed more or less level, making up 18 percent of generation. And thats unlikely to change much in the next decade with no major new plants in the pipeline, according to Ars.

Wind has also remained largely unchanged, accounting for 10 percent, while hydroelectric power has seen a small drop from 6.1 to 5.8 percent. But solar power has grown by a fifth, going from 5 to 6 percent since last year. Thats enough to push combined carbon-free emissions above 40 percent for the first time, and with a massive build out of solar power underway, its likely to continue rising fast.

Almost as important as the rise in emission-free power, is a significant drop in coal, the dirtiest form of fossil fuel generation. In 2022, coal provided nearly 20 percent of the countrys power, but in 2023, it was down to 16.2 percent. Thats a precipitous decline and means wind and solar combined now account for roughly the same amount of generation.

Its worth noting that not only solar had a good year though. Natural gas is the fastest-growing source of generation, jumping from 40 percent in 2022 to 43.3 last year. While increasing fossil fuel use might not sound like good news, gas is a much cleaner energy source than other fossil fuels, so if its eating into coals share then that is still a win for the environment.

Another positive from the data is the fact electricity production fell slightly this year, dropping by just over one percent since 2022. This is most likely thanks to greater energy efficiency across the economy, according to Ars, despite continued economic growth and a rising population.

Whether the pace of change is enough to meet climate goals remains to be seen. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is spurring massive investment into green energy, but these projects will take considerable time to come online.

There is growing pessimism that progress will be fast enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. At the latest COP28 climate talks, oil and gas lobbyists successfully watered down calls to phase out fossil fuels to a commitment to transition away instead, suggesting that fossil fuels will remain a prominent part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future.

Either way, progress is progress, and the latest figures clearly show renewables are ascendant and coal is on the decline. And forecasts suggest that momentum is building and green energy is likely to have another banner year in 2024.

Image Credit:Ernest Brillo / Unsplash

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EIA Says 40 Percent of US Electricity Is Now Emission-Free for the First Time - Singularity Hub

A New Dawn for Mankind

In the intricate tapestry of human evolution, there comes a pivotal moment that defines the trajectory of our species. We stand at the cusp of such a monumental epoch, an era where the boundaries between man and machine blur, leading us towards the singularity a concept as enigmatic as it is transformative.

The singularity, a term steeped in the realms of science fiction, yet increasingly a topic of serious scientific contemplation, refers to a future where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, not just in computational capabilities but in creativity, emotional intelligence, and social understanding. Its a moment of convergence, where technology becomes indistinguishable from humanity, ushering in a new era of existence.

As we approach this horizon, the question isnt merely about the technological advancements but how these advancements redefine our very essence. Our psychological frameworks, evolved over millennia, are rooted in survival, procreation, and the social structures that support these imperatives. The singularity challenges these foundational principles, thrusting us into uncharted psychological territories.

In a post-singularity world, traditional human roles and identities undergo a metamorphosis. The very notion of what it means to be human might need reevaluation. If machines can think, create, and feel, perhaps better than we do, where does that leave humanity? Does our purpose shift from being creators and thinkers to something entirely different?

The singularity will reshape social structures. Current systems, whether political, economic, or social, are designed around human abilities and limitations. A world where artificial intelligence permeates every aspect of life demands a rethinking of these systems. The potential for a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities, alongside the risk of an

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The Crossroads of Humanity: Embracing the Singularity | by Michiel Meire | Jan, 2024 - Medium