Cosmic Log
Chinese researcher He Jiankui, who stirred up a global controversy last year when he said his experiment produced twin baby girls with gene-edited traits, has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay a $430,000 fine, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.
n the debate over artificial intelligence, whose side is Elon Musk on?
Musk, who’s in charge of SpaceX, Tesla and the Neuralink brain interface venture, sized up the odds with AliBaba founder Jack Ma today during a widely watched one-on-one session at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
The way Musk sees it, the prospects aren’t great for humans if future AI agents decide to go rogue. That’s despite pronouncements from AI researchers who say machines won’t match humans anytime soon when it comes to general intelligence, as opposed to specialized AI applications such as playing chess or Go.
“The biggest mistake I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent,” Musk said. “Yeah, they’re not, compared to AI. And so a lot of them cannot imagine something smarter than themselves.”
Musk said future AI agents will be “vastly smarter” than humans. “So what do you do with a situation like that?” he asked. “I’m not sure. I hope they’re nice.”
For his part, Ma saw more promise than peril in AI.
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Fifty years ago this month, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission transformed the idea of putting people on the moon from science fiction to historical fact.
Not much has changed on the moon since Apollo, but if the visions floated by leading space scientists from the U.S., Europe, Russia and China come to pass, your grandchildren might be firing up lunar barbecues in 2069.
“Definitely in 50 years, there will be more tourism on the moon,” Anatoli Petrukovich, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute, said here today during the World Conference of Science Journalists. “The moon will just look like a resort, as a backyard for grilling some meat or whatever else.”
Wu Ji, former director general of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Space Science Center, agreed that moon tourism could well be a thing in 2069.
“People will go there for space holidays, and come back,” Wu said. “The staff of the hotel will work there. So that will be permanent human habitability on the moon in 50 years.”
“Robotic staff?” Petrukovich asked.
“No, not necessarily,” Wu answered.
Today’s session in Lausanne, titled “The Moon and Beyond,” provided a status report on international space cooperation as well as speculative glimpses at the next 50 years of space exploration.
China wants to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030 — but a new analysis by Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, suggests that Chinese researchers are on track to take the lead well before that.
The analysis is based on a tally of the most impactful research papers in the AI field, as measured by AI2’s Semantic Scholar academic search engine.
“If current trends continue, within five years, China will surpass us in terms of the top, highest-impact papers,” the institute’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, told GeekWire. “The other thing to realize is that citations are what you might call a lagging indicator, because the paper has to be published, people have to read it, and they have to write their own paper and cite it.”
It’s been three months since Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining venture headquartered in Redmond, Wash., was acquired by the ConsenSys blockchain studio — and although the venture currently known as ConsenSys Space hasn’t yet take the wraps off its business plan, another space-centric blockchain venture just might provide some clues.
Singapore-based SpaceChain has been ramping up its activity over the past year, highlighted by the launch of two nanosatellite-based blockchain nodes into orbit aboard Chinese Long March rockets in February and October of 2018.
As big as the Model 3 electric car is for the future of Tesla, the sport utility vehicle known as the Model Y could be bigger, according to CEO Elon Musk.
“I would expect that the demand for the Model Y would be … maybe 50 percent higher than Model 3?” Musk said today during a teleconference reviewing the company’s fourth-quarter financial results. “Could be even double.”
An international space venture called Satellogic says it will have 90 satellites launched by a Chinese company to create an Earth-observing constellation.
The first launch by the China Great Wall Industry Corp. under the newly announced deal, scheduled for later this year, will deliver 13 satellites to low Earth orbit on China’s Long March 6 rocket, Satellogic said today in a news release.
Satellogic’s constellation seems likely to compete with the remote-imaging satellite constellations operated by San Francisco-based Planet and Seattle-based BlackSky. The company promises to remap Earth at 1-meter pixel resolution every week and dramatically reduce the cost of high-frequency geospatial analytics.
Flush from the success of the world’s first rover mission to the moon’s far side, Chinese space officials said today that they’re planning robotic trips to the lunar south pole to prepare the way for a crewed moon base.
The officials discussed future lunar exploration plans less than two weeks after the Chang’e-4 lander’s history-making touchdown, and only a few days after China’s space agency released video of the lander’s descent and lunar surface activities.
Chang’e-4 and its solar-powered Yutu 2 rover are hibernating during the 2-week-long lunar night, but their handlers are already thinking about sending probes to places where the sun almost always shines.
Official Chinese media confirmed that the nation’s robotic Chang’e-4 probe made the first-ever landing on the far side of the moon — but not before issuing, and then withdrawing, an initial set of announcements.
The honest-to-goodness announcement came via several state-run media outlets just after noon Beijing time on Jan. 3 (8 p.m. PT Jan. 2).
That’s about an hour after the Twitter accounts for China’s CGTV network and the China Daily newspaper flashed word of a landing. Within a minute or two, those tweets were deleted, but the media echoes nevertheless continued through the Twitterverse, mailing lists and online reports.
Those outlets apparently jumped the gun on what was intended to be a coordinated release of the news. In its re-issued announcement, CGTV said the landing took place at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time (6:26 p.m. PT), which meshes with the timing for the initial tweeted-then-deleted reports.
Chang’e-4 is the latest in a series of probes named after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology. The combination lander and rover was sent into space in early December, and followed a slow but efficient 4.5-day trajectory from Earth to the moon. The lander made a series of lunar orbits over the past couple of weeks to line it up for the landing.
Communications were facilitated by a relay satellite that was sent to a gravitational balance point about 33,000 miles beyond the moon last May.
In his year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says his to-do list for 2019 includes persuading U.S. leaders to regain America’s leading role in nuclear energy research and embrace advanced nuclear technologies such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture.
“The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change,” Gates wrote in the wide-ranging letter, released tonight. “Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game.”
Gates acknowledged that tighter U.S. export restrictions, put in place by the Trump administration, have virtually ruled out TerraPower’s grand plan to test its traveling-wave nuclear technology in China.