GeekPress

Ezra Klein in New York Times: "The Government Knows A.G.I. Is Coming"

For the last couple of months, I have had this strange experience: Person after person -- from artificial intelligence labs, from government -- has been coming to me saying: It's really about to happen. We're about to get to artificial general intelligence. 

What they mean is that they have believed, for a long time, that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being could do behind a computer -- but better. They thought it would take somewhere from five to 15 years to develop. But now they believe it's coming in two to three years, during Donald Trump’s second term. 

They believe it because of the products they're releasing right now and what they're seeing inside the places they work. And I think they're right...

Full interview by Ezra Klein with Ben Buchanan, the former special adviser for artificial intelligence in the Biden White House here.

Video: "Brett Adcock: Humanoid Robots, Trillions of Dollars & The Future of Humanity"

I think his company FigureAI is very exciting, and could be a household name in a few years.  

Key quote (at 12:47 minutes), "The world of the future is going to be crazy and in such a good way!"

"They’ve [Gen Z] just simply not had the opportunity for making and receiving telephone calls. It is not the main function of their phones these days, they can do anything on the phone, but we automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill," she explained...

The session involves practicing a series of scenarios where you have to make a phone call, for example, calling the doctors to make an appointment, calling in sick to work, and other everyday scenarios. The pupils are expected to sit back to back to mimic a regular phone call where they can’t see the person on the other end and practice by using scripts. 

Baxter said attending just one session boosts pupils’ confidence because it demystifies how phone calls really work.

"Additional Observations Continue to Reduce Chance of Asteroid Impact in 2032"

Observations made overnight on Feb. 19 - 20 of asteroid 2024 YR4 have further decreased its chance of Earth impact on Dec. 22, 2032, to 0.28%. NASA’s planetary defense teams will continue to monitor the asteroid to improve our predictions of the asteroid’s trajectory. With this new data, the chance of an impact with the Moon increased slightly to 1%.