GRAINN: Wetenschappelijke en technologische ontwikkelingen

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Neuroscience

A Successful Artificial Memory Has Been Created
The growing science of memory manipulation raises social and ethical

We learn from our personal interaction with the world, and our memories of those experiences help guide our behaviors. Experience and memory are inexorably linked, or at least they seemed to be before a recent report on the formation of completely artificial memories. Using laboratory animals, investigators reverse engineered a specific natural memory by mapped the brain circuits underlying its formation. They then “trained” another animal by stimulating brain cells in the pattern of the natural memory. Doing so created an artificial memory that was retained and recalled in a manner indistinguishable from a natural one.

[... https://www.scientificame(...)y-has-been-created/]

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Monarch Becomes the 1st FDA-Cleared Device for ADHD

NeuroSigma’s Monarch eTNS might be the first device to treat ADHD, but it is one of a growing number of technologies that occupy the burgeoning bioelectronic medicine space.

Monarch is about the size of a cellphone. The device generates a low-level electrical pulse and connects via a wire to a small patch that adheres to a patient's forehead, just above the eyebrows, and should feel like a tingling sensation on the skin.

The system delivers the low-level electrical stimulation to the branches of the trigeminal nerve, which sends therapeutic signals to the parts of the brain thought to be involved in ADHD.[/i]

While the exact mechanism of eTNS is not yet known, neuroimaging studies have shown that eTNS increases activity in the brain regions that are known to be important in regulating attention, emotion and behavior.

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https://www.mddionline.co(...)-cleared-device-adhd

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World must prepare for biological weapons that target ethnic groups based on genetics, says Cambridge University

Biological weapons could be built which target individuals in a specific ethnic group based on their DNA, a report by the University of Cambridge has warned.

Researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) said the government was failing to prepare for ‘human-driven catastrophic risks’ that could lead to mass harm and societal collapse.

https://www.telegraph.co.(...)ethnic-groups-based/

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AskScience AMA Series: I'm Dr. Paul Knoepfler, stem cell and CRISPR researcher, here to talk about how you might build a real, fire-breathing dragon. AMA!

Hello! I'm Dr. Paul Knoepfler, stem cell and CRISPR researcher. My 17 year old daughter Julie and I have written a new book How to Build a Dragon or Die Trying about how you might try to make a real, fire-breathing, flying dragon or other cool creatures like unicorns using tech like CRISPR and stem cells. We also satirically poke fun at science hype. We're here to answer your questions about our book, the science behind it, and the idea of making new organisms. AMA!

https://www.reddit.com/r/(...)paul_knoepfler_stem/

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Nanoparticles Will Give You Superhuman Night Vision

Want superhero powers that let you see in the dark just like your cat? In the near future you may be able to—as long as you're not too squeamish to get injections right into your eyeballs.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School have discovered a way to give mice the ability to see infrared light, a part of the visible spectrum that we humans simply cannot see, although it's there.

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https://www.popularmechan(...)tm_source=reddit.com

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Human 2.0 Is Coming Faster Than You Think. Will You Evolve With The Times?

“Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity,” author, computer scientist, and inventor Ray Kurzweil once said. “We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.” In the past few years, there has been considerable discussion around the idea we are slowly merging with our technology, that we are becoming transhuman, with updated abilities, including enhanced intelligence, strength, and awareness.

Considering Kurzweil’s words is a good place to begin this discussion. It’s no secret that Google has transhumanistic aspirations. In 2011, Steven Levy made this bold statement about the company in the book, In the Plex: “From the very start, its founders saw Google as a vehicle to realize the dream of artificial intelligence in augmenting humanity.” Naturally, it makes sense Google would bring on Kurzweil to be its Director of Engineering in 2012. For years, Kurzweil has been pushing the cultural conversation toward the idea of human transcendence with thought-provoking books: The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

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https://www.forbes.com/si(...)olve-with-the-times/

SPOILER

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Elon Musk unveils Neuralink’s plans for brain-reading ‘threads’ and a robot to insert them

Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the secretive company developing brain-machine interfaces, showed off some of the technology it has been developing to the public for the first time. The goal is to eventually begin implanting devices in paralyzed humans, allowing them to control phones or computers.

The first big advance is flexible “threads,” which are less likely to damage the brain than the materials currently used in brain-machine interfaces. These threads also create the possibility of transferring a higher volume of data, according to a white paper credited to “Elon Musk & Neuralink.” The abstract notes that the system could include “as many as 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads.”

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https://www.theverge.com/(...)reading-thread-robot

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Op donderdag 29 augustus 2019 01:49 schreef MaGNeT het volgende:

[..]

Mijn robotstofzuiger verdenk ik er van een verhouding te hebben met de magnetron

Maar serieus... heb je daar nog een link van? Lijk me wel interessant om te lezen wat er gebeurd is.

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Facebook's artificial intelligence robots shut down after they start talking to each other in their own language

Facebook abandoned an experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood.

The two chatbots came to create their own changes to English that made it easier for them to work – but which remained mysterious to the humans that supposedly look after them.

https://www.independent.c(...)google-a7869706.html

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Earlier this year, Google revealed that the AI it uses for its Translate tool had created its own language, which it would translate things into and then out of. But the company was happy with that development and allowed it to continue.

Another study at OpenAI found that artificial intelligence could be encouraged to create a language, making itself more efficient and better at communicating as it did so.

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Google's AI translation tool seems to have invented its own secret internal language

All right, don't panic, but computers have created their own secret language and are probably talking about us right now. Well, that's kind of an oversimplification, and the last part is just plain untrue. But there is a fascinating and existentially challenging development that Google's AI researchers recently happened across.

You may remember that back in September, Google announced that its Neural Machine Translation system had gone live. It uses deep learning to produce better, more natural translations between languages. Cool!

Following on this success, GNMT's creators were curious about something. If you teach the translation system to translate English to Korean and vice versa, and also English to Japanese and vice versa... could it translate Korean to Japanese, without resorting to English as a bridge between them? They made this helpful gif to illustrate the idea of what they call "zero-shot translation" (it's the orange one):

As it turns out -- yes! It produces "reasonable" translations between two languages that it has not explicitly linked in any way. Remember, no English allowed.

But this raised a second question. If the computer is able to make connections between concepts and words that have not been formally linked... does that mean that the computer has formed a concept of shared meaning for those words, meaning at a deeper level than simply that one word or phrase is the equivalent of another?

In other words, has the computer developed its own internal language to represent the concepts it uses to translate between other languages? Based on how various sentences are related to one another in the memory space of the neural network, Google's language and AI boffins think that it has.

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https://techcrunch.com/20(...)sDXvhCuIm8nG_-r03AgA

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Op donderdag 29 augustus 2019 01:49 schreef MaGNeT het volgende:
Mijn robotstofzuiger verdenk ik er van een verhouding te hebben met de magnetron

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The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet

In the aftermath of yet another mass shooting in America, loved ones grieve, gun control advocates call for common-sense reforms, and politicians suggest new “solutions” that won’t do anything about guns. These proposals frequently focus on mental health, but a new plan before the White House to monitor “neurobehavioral” predictors of violence isn’t just misguided, it’s terrifyingly dystopian.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that the White House had been briefed on a plan to create an agency called HARPA, a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA. Among other initiatives, this new agency would reportedly collect volunteer data from a suite of smart devices, including Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echos, and Google Homes in order to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act.” The project would then use artificial intelligence to create a “sensor suite” to flag mental changes that make violence more likely.

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https://gizmodo.com/the-p(...)ings-is-o-1837710691

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Fraudsters deepfake CEO’s voice to trick manager into transferring $243,000

It’s already getting tough to discern real text from fake, genuine video from deepfake. Now, it appears that use of fake voice tech is on the rise too.

That’s according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the first ever case of AI-based voice fraud — aka vishing (short for “voice phishing”) — that cost a company $243,000.

https://thenextweb.com/se(...)transferring-243000/

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Op woensdag 4 september 2019 13:35 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:

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Ik ben bang dat de tijd dat we video en geluidsmateriaal als bewijzen voor dingen kunnen gaan zien voorbij zijn. Zoals dat bij foto's en tekst al een tijd was...

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Op woensdag 4 september 2019 13:54 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
Als er iets goed werkt om AI beter te laten worden is het wel opboksen tegen detectie AI.... De alphaGO van google won al van mensen maar de opvolgers van alphaGO (zeroGO geloof ik) wint alweer van alphaGO omdat ze tegen elkaar spelen.

Dat is wel redelijk innovatief ze zetten NNs tegenwoordig vaak tegenover elkaar... laat één AI kijken of een vulkaan echt is en de andere AI foto's van vulkanen genereren... Laat ze beide leren met een grote dataset echte vulkanen. En uiteindelijk worden beide NNs erg goed. Dat gebeurt nu ook bij de detectie van deepfakes.

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Op woensdag 4 september 2019 14:29 schreef FlippingCoin het volgende:
mogelijk de realiteit in

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A convolutional neural network approach to detect congestive heart failure

Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) is a severe pathophysiological condition associated with high prevalence, high mortality rates, and sustained healthcare costs, therefore demanding efficient methods for its detection. Despite recent research has provided methods focused on advanced signal processing and machine learning, the potential of applying Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approaches to the automatic detection of CHF has been largely overlooked thus far. This study addresses this important gap by presenting a CNN model that accurately identifies CHF on the basis of one raw electrocardiogram (ECG) heartbeat only, also juxtaposing existing methods typically grounded on Heart Rate Variability. We trained and tested the model on publicly available ECG datasets, comprising a total of 490,505 heartbeats, to achieve 100% CHF detection accuracy. Importantly, the model also identifies those heartbeat sequences and ECG’s morphological characteristics which are class-discriminative and thus prominent for CHF detection. Overall, our contribution substantially advances the current methodology for detecting CHF and caters to clinical practitioners’ needs by providing an accurate and fully transparent tool to support decisions concerning CHF detection.

https://www.sciencedirect(...)419301776?via%3Dihub

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Ex-Google worker fears 'killer robots' could cause mass atrocities

Engineer who quit over military drone project warns AI might also accidentally start a war

A new generation of autonomous weapons or “killer robots” could accidentally start a war or cause mass atrocities, a former top Google software engineer has warned.

Laura Nolan, who resigned from Google last year in protest at being sent to work on a project to dramatically enhance US military drone technology, has called for all AI killing machines not operated by humans to be banned.

Nolan said killer robots not guided by human remote control should be outlawed by the same type of international treaty that bans chemical weapons.

[...]

https://www.theguardian.c(...)ause-mass-atrocities

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Op maandag 16 september 2019 12:00 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:

[..]

En ook: https://tweakers.net/nieu(...)ls-dermatologen.html

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AI creates new flu vaccine, all on its own
https://www.wouldsayso.com/ai-flu-vaccine-on-its-own/

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Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.

1. The right to cognitive liberty

You should have the right to freely decide you want to use a given neurotechnology or to refuse it.

In China, the government is already mining data from some employees’ brains by having them wear caps that scan their brainwaves for depression, anxiety, rage, or fatigue. “If your employer wants you to wear an EEG headset to monitor your attention levels, that might qualify as a violation of the cognitive liberty principle,” Ienca said, because even if you’re told that wearing the device is optional, you’ll probably feel implicit pressure to do so since you don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage.

He added that the US military is also looking into neurotechnologies to make soldiers more fit for duty. Down the line, that could include ways to make them less empathetic and more belligerent. Soldiers may be pressured to accept interventions.

“There is already military-funded research to see if we can monitor decreases in attention levels and concentration, with hybrid BCIs that can ‘read’ deficits in attention levels and ‘write’ to the brain to increase alertness through neuromodulation. There are DARPA-funded projects that attempt to do so,” Ienca said, referring to the Defense Department’s advanced research agency.
2. The right to mental privacy

You should have the right to seclude your brain data or to publicly share it.

Ienca emphasized that neurotechnology has huge implications for law enforcement and government surveillance. “If brain-reading devices have the ability to read the content of thoughts,” he said, “in the years to come governments will be interested in using this tech for interrogations and investigations.”

The right to remain silent and the principle against self-incrimination — enshrined in the US Constitution — could become meaningless in a world where the authorities are empowered to eavesdrop on your mental state without your consent.

It’s a scenario reminiscent of the sci-fi movie Minority Report, in which a special police unit called the PreCrime Division identifies and arrests murderers before they commit their crimes.
3. The right to mental integrity

You should have the right not to be harmed physically or psychologically by neurotechnology.

BCIs equipped with a “write” function can enable new forms of brainwashing, theoretically enabling all sorts of people to exert control over our minds: religious authorities who want to indoctrinate people, political regimes that want to quash dissent, terrorist groups seeking new recruits.

What’s more, devices like those being built by Facebook and Neuralink may be vulnerable to hacking. What happens if you’re using one of them and a malicious actor intercepts the Bluetooth signal, increasing or decreasing the voltage of the current that goes to your brain — thus making you more depressed, say, or more compliant?

Neuroethicists refer to that as brainjacking. “This is still hypothetical, but the possibility has been demonstrated in proof-of-concept studies,” Ienca said, adding, “A hack like this wouldn’t require that much technological sophistication.”
4. The right to psychological continuity

You should have the right to be protected from alterations to your sense of self that you did not authorize.

In one study, an epileptic woman who’d been given a BCI came to feel such a radical symbiosis with it that, she said, “It became me.” Then the company that implanted the device in her brain went bankrupt and she was forced to have it removed. She cried, saying, “I lost myself.”

Ienca said that’s an example of how psychological continuity can be disrupted not only by the imposition of a neurotechnology but also by its removal. “This is a scenario in which a company is basically owning our sense of self,” he said.

Another threat to psychological continuity comes from the nascent field of neuromarketing, where advertisers try to figure out how the brain makes purchasing decisions and how to nudge those decisions along. The nudges operate below the level of conscious awareness, so these noninvasive neural interventions can happen without us even knowing it. One day a neuromarketing company is testing a subliminal technique; the next, you might find yourself preferring product A over product B without quite being sure why.

Consumer advocate organizations have raised the alarm about neuromarketing. Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, has said that adult advertising should be regulated “if the advertising is now purposely designed to bypass those rational defenses” that formerly allowed us to discern what’s true and untrue.

https://www.vox.com/2019/(...)-reading-neuroethics

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Op woensdag 18 september 2019 23:28 schreef illusions het volgende:
Dat is allemaal wel erg goed nieuws, wat mij betreft kunnen de ontwikkelingen op dat gebied niet snel genoeg gaan wanneer het voor dit soort toepassingen wordt gebruikt.

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A deepfake pioneer says 'perfectly real' manipulated videos are just 6 months away

-Deepfake artist Hao Li, who created a Putin deepfake for an MIT conference this week, told CNBC on Friday that "perfectly real" manipulated videos are just six to 12 months away.

-Li had previously said that he expected "virtually undetectable" deepfakes to be "a few years" away.

-When asked for clarification on his timeline, Li told CNBC that recent developments, including the emergence of the wildly popular Chinese app Zao, had led him to "recalibrate" his timeline.

https://www.businessinsid(...)ional=true&r=US&IR=T

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Google Rolls Out "Orwellian Nightmare" Technology To Spy On You In Your Home

Google’s new Nest Hub Max is a smart display unit that comes equipped with a 6.5-megapixel facial recognition camera that identifies you and monitors all your actions – inside your own home. And the Orwellian icing on the cake is that it is not equipped with a physical shutter to forcibly prevent it from monitoring what’s happening in your home.

It’s the first smart home product from Google to include a camera so you can make video calls. It looks like a tablet propped up on its side, and it works similarly to smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo. …

The Nest Hub Max is essentially a smart speaker that lets you control connected smart home devices, and comes with a display and camera.

It’s the first smart home product from Google to include a camera so you can make video calls. It looks like a tablet propped up on its side, and it works similarly to smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo. …

The Nest Hub Max is essentially a smart speaker that lets you control connected smart home devices, and comes with a display and camera.

It’s not too dissimilar from the Google Home Hub, which Google just rebranded as Nest Hub. The new device has a 10-inch HD screen. It looks like a tablet in landscape orientation that’s propped up on a base. The base contains a speaker. At the top of the device are a camera and microphones. –The Daily Dot

The device allows you to check in on what’s happening in your home when you’re out, and because of its facial recognition capabilities, will detect when you enter the room and provide personalized information to you, such as your day’s appointments, the weather forecast, and so on, reported Natural News. The camera also enables two-way video calls over Google Duo and comes loaded with the Google Assistant (which has been the focus of a huge number of privacy issues). While all these functions might sound super convenient and fun, the privacy issues raised by the camera and audio functionality cannot be overlooked.

There are concerns about Google’s face recognition. The company has struggled to maintain a good reputation. They have proven to be biased toward Communism and authoritarian ideals, big government control over the population, and have even censored those who reject the force and violence inherent in those ideas. Today the face features are only accessible by Google, but what happens when it begins letting other apps and services access your face and you are one of those anti-government dissenters?

Clearly, there are real reasons to be concerned about Google’s latest tech offering, and those who wish to protect their online privacy might do better to steer well clear of it.

https://www.zerohedge.com(...)gy-spy-you-your-home

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Sony Patent: Contact Lenses Taking Pictures and Recording Videos When You Blink – With Nicola Tesla Technology

We can possibly all settle on one thing: that technological devices are getting small in size by the day. Now, contact lenses are getting cooler – well soon – and all because of nanotechnology. The technology giant Sony has ramped up their tech from something that we have only witnessed in James Bond movies, to now being our reality.

Sony has filed for a patent that shows how their smart contact lenses will captures pictures and record videos just with a blink of an eye, keeping them in a small memory space on the lens – or on the user’s eyeballs. Not only is Sony determined for this, but other technology giants such as Samsung and Google are also planning for their smart contact lenses, going public with their concepts of taking pictures, making videos and observing sugar intake; gamers will also experience improved gaming, and other potentials are limitless.

Though, Sony’s patent does not mean we will be seeing them anytime soon. However, Sony’s release of the lens will comprise a picture-taking unit, a central controlling unit, the main unit along with an antenna, a storage area and a piezoelectric sensor. The last stated unit above is accountable for observing the time on how long the eyelids have stayed opened, and it will also identify the blink that was done to take a picture, as well as the winks that were done subconsciously. This will let the unit to differentiate between taking pictures and a normal blink.

As stated in Sony’s patent, the unintentional blink is between 0.2 to 0.4 seconds, thus the patent states that if the blink surpasses more than 0.5 seconds, then it was done on purpose and will be considered a peculiar blinking, so, signaling the unit to capture the image. The antennae will provide the power to the lens wirelessly, capturing it from the smartphone, a smart tablet or a computer. The tech that was first discovered by Nicola Tesla, will use either radio waves, electromagnetic induction or electromagnetic field resonance, and to top it off, the smart lens will support an auto-focus and zoom capability.

But before happy blinking consumers can get their hands on this cutting-edge device, and for the intelligence agencies to ‘blink’ on everything in their sight, the technology is still to go through strict tests. Then again, a technology such as this, is a fascinating idea enfolded up in the scary, subject to how it will be used.

https://www.physics-astro(...)t-lenses-taking.html

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Op dinsdag 15 oktober 2019 09:28 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
How to prevent robots from cooking your cat: https://www.ft.com/content/f2ed9e1c-ee5d-11e9-ad1e-4367d8281195

Mindscape 68 | Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Common Sense