Scary Science

[Locutus]

Wow!

[Bo D]

Had your breakfast yet? 

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/10/pills-made-feces-cure-serious-gut-infections?et_cid=3519052&et_rid=54725525&location=top

Pills made from feces cure serious gut infections

Doctors have found a way to put healthy people's poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections—a less yucky way to do "fecal transplants." Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help.

[Locutus]

[Y]

Um-hm, poop pills!  NOT!   

That's like those folks who drink urine.  Bllllllleeeeeeeechhh!

[libby]

Um-hm, poop pills!  NOT!   

That's like those folks who drink urine.  Bllllllleeeeeeeechhh!

What about using it to make cheese? I first read about it    in a novel I read when I was a girl -- about a Chinese boy in Tibet.  Fascinating book for a girl living in a 'holler' in West Virginia.   

[me]

My thoughts on the subject are......... 

[Bo D]

This really is scary .....


Could Chess Robots Cause Judgment Day?

Next time you play a computer at chess, think about the implications if you beat it. It could be a very sore loser!

.... humans should be very careful to prevent future systems from developing anti-social and potentially harmful behaviour.

Like a plot from The Terminator movie, we are suddenly faced with the prospect of real threat from autonomous systems unless they are designed very carefully.

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2014/04/could-chess-robots-cause-judgment-day?et_cid=3890852&et_rid=54725525&location=top

[Locutus]

Holy cow!

It makes perfect sense that could happen though. 

[Y]

This really is scary .....


Could Chess Robots Cause Judgment Day?

Next time you play a computer at chess, think about the implications if you beat it. It could be a very sore loser!

.... humans should be very careful to prevent future systems from developing anti-social and potentially harmful behaviour.

Like a plot from The Terminator movie, we are suddenly faced with the prospect of real threat from autonomous systems unless they are designed very carefully.

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2014/04/could-chess-robots-cause-judgment-day?et_cid=3890852&et_rid=54725525&location=top

Hey Bo!  Do you remember our conversation where I pointed out that science in general should have some deep discussions about forethought and that there are some directions that would be better off not pursued?

[libby]

Talk about scary science! 

Here's the paper edition headline of an article in today's Washington Post:

Implants eyed for tackling brain disorders.

Defense agency aims to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD with advanced technologies

--  and the online version:

Pentagon investigates brain-zapping implants to help wounded warriors

By Tanya Lewis and Live Science, Published: June 2 , 2014

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is launching a program to develop technologies to treat psychiatric disorders by electrically stimulating the brain.

DARPA's SUBNETS program (short for Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies) will fund teams of researchers to develop brain interfaces, computational models of brain activity and clinical therapies for such illnesses as depression, chronic pain, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. The project is part of the Obama administration's BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), a collaborative effort between government agencies and industry to revolutionize understanding of the human brain.

"The neurotechnologies we will work to develop under SUBNETS could give new tools to the medical community to treat patients who don't respond to other therapies, and new knowledge to the neuroscience community to expand the understanding of brain function," Justin Sanchez, the DARPA program manager for SUBNETS, said in a statement.

In health and disease, brain activity is not confined to distinct parts of the brain, but rather is distributed over different neural systems. The brain is also very plastic: It can adapt its anatomy and physiology over time. The SUBNETS program will take advantage of these characteristics to develop treatments, inspired by deep-brain stimulation, that aim to restore normal brain function in people with neural illnesses, program officials said.

"Real-time, closed-loop neural interfaces allow us to move beyond the traditional static view of the brain and into a realm of precision therapy," Sanchez said.

The program will fund two research teams, one at the University of California at San Francisco and the other at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

The San Francisco team aims to develop an implanted device that targets brain regions involved in an individual's psychiatric or neurological disease. The device would record signals from and stimulate neurons to rehabilitate the malfunctioning brain circuitry. If the approach is successful, the device might be removed after treatment, DARPA officials said.

The Boston team will work to identify common components of neurological and psychiatric illnesses, such as increased anxiety, impaired memory or inappropriate reactions to things in the environment. The team will use behavioral testing as well as detailed recordings of individual neurons to discover these common features. The researchers will then work with Draper Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., to develop an implantable brain device that would be effective throughout a person's life.

DARPA hopes these studies will lead to more-accurate diagnoses and more-targeted treatments of psychiatric disorders.

— Live Science

[Bo D]

Huh??? What the ... ????

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2015/12/computing-time-travel?et_cid=4993876&et_rid=54725525&location=top

[libby]

Huh??? What the ... ????

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2015/12/computing-time-travel?et_cid=4993876&et_rid=54725525&location=top

Quantum physics is scary stuff, but add computers, and  I read somewhere that Bluefield, WV's Nobel prize winning John Nash was delving into the subject when he went bonkers.

The subject fascinates me, but I don't have the math to study it formally, and I guess that's a good thing, considering the following, from the book The Cosmic Code, by Heinz R. Pagels:

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?" because you will go "down the drain" into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.  -- Richard Feynman

[libby]

"Don't cuss in front of the children, and be careful what you teach the robot, dear." (I knew it would happen sooner or later. I grew up reading sci-fi. The following is from today's Washington Post).

"Microsoft axes chatbot that learned a little too much online

FILE - This July 3, 2014, file photo, shows the Microsoft Corp. logo outside the Microsoft Visitor Center in Redmond, Wash. Artificial-intelligence software designed by Microsoft to tweet like a teenage girl has been suspended after it began spouting offensive remarks, according to the company Thursday, March 24, 2016. Microsoft said it is making adjustments to the Twitter chatbot after users found a way to manipulate it to tweet racist and sexist remarks and made a reference to Hitler. (Associated Press)
By Brandon Bailey | AP March 24 at 9:19 PM
SAN FRANCISCO — OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks.

Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the chatbot known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh!

Well, he didn't really say that. But computer scientist Kris Hammond did say, "I can't believe they didn't see this coming."

Microsoft said its researchers created Tay as an experiment to learn more about computers and human conversation. On its website, the company said the program was targeted to an audience of 18 to 24-year-olds and was "designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation."

In other words, the program used a lot of slang and tried to provide humorous responses when people sent it messages and photos. The chatbot went live on Wednesday, and Microsoft invited the public to chat with Tay on Twitter and some other messaging services popular with teens and young adults.

"The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you," the company said.

But some users found Tay's responses odd, and others found it wasn't hard to nudge Tay into making offensive comments, apparently prompted by repeated questions or statements that contained offensive words. Soon, Tay was making sympathetic references to Hitler — and creating a furor on social media.

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"Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," Microsoft said in a statement.

While the company didn't elaborate, Hammond says it appears Microsoft made no effort to prepare Tay with appropriate responses to certain words or topics. Tay seems to be a version of "call and response" technology, added Hammond, who studies artificial intelligence at Northwestern University and also serves as chief scientist for Narrative Science, a company that develops computer programs that turn data into narrative reports.

"Everyone keeps saying that Tay learned this or that it became racist," Hammond said. "It didn't." The program most likely reflected things it was told, probably more than once, by people who decided to see what would happen, he said.

The problem is that Microsoft turned Tay loose online, where many people consider it entertaining to stir things up — or worse. The company should have realized that people would try a variety of conversational gambits with Tay, said Caroline Sinders, an expert on "conversational analytics" who works on chat robots for another tech company. (She asked not to identify it because she wasn't speaking in an official capacity.) She called Tay "an example of bad design."

Instead of building in some guidelines for how the program would deal with controversial topics, Sinders added, it appears Tay was mostly left to learn from whatever it was told.


"This is a really good example of machine learning," said Sinders. "It's learning from input. That means it needs constant maintenance."

Sinders said she hopes Microsoft will release the program again, but only after "doing some work" on it first.

Microsoft said it's "making adjustments" on Tay, but there was no word on when Tay might be back. Most of the messages on its Twitter account were deleted by Thursday afternoon.

"c u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx," said the latest remaining post.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed."

www.washingtonpost.com

[Locutus]

Haifa-based scientist Jeff Steinhauer has simulated a black hole in his laboratory, and it might be the breakthrough that helps celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking win the Nobel Prize. CNN's Ian lee reports.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2016/08/26/black-hole-breakthrough-lee-pkg.cnn

[Locutus]

Now what could possibly go wrong with that?