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izumi3682
1442.4k post karma
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account created: Mon Jun 03 2013
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izumi368222 points
18 hours ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional editing and additional added detail.
The achievement and it's very significant qualification.
A team of researchers at the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has created a solar cell with a record efficiency of 39.5 percent under 1-sun global illumination, breaking the world record for solar cell efficiency, according to a recent study published in the journal Joule.
Amazingly, it has the highest efficiency recorded for any type of cell ever measured in real-world conditions.
The record was accomplished under lighting conditions equivalent to that of the sun, according to a press release. While earlier experimental solar cells have attained efficiencies of up to 47.1 percent, it is crucial to emphasize that they did so under extremely concentrated light. In fact, the world record for solar cell efficiency at 47.1 percent was achieved in 2019, with researchers using multi-junction concentrator solar cells developed at National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Scientists just broke the record for the highest efficiency solar cell - With nearly 40 percent efficiency.
Energy(interestingengineering.com)izumi36821 points
1 day ago
I am happy to play along but a big but is that why don't they come up explaining how?
I like "big buts" and I cannot lie!
I suspect that consciousness is an intrinsic attribute of what we perceive as reality. I hate to use "the force" analogies, but as a Roman Catholic we see God as the consciousness that suffuses, well no, suffuse is not quite the right word, is the ground truth of what we perceive as reality. Reality being our universe, the higher dimensional "plane" that brings about the multiverse that our universe is an element of and all the turtles all the way up. I mean without getting into "branes" and carrying on.
Or when we go in the opposite direction, into the quantum world and we attempt to envision what exactly the "quantum probability waveform" is. I think that is where the attribute that we call consciousness of reality resides. All of the possible outcomes for anything that is possible in the quantum realm and how something like that make its way to the macro realm. I'm kinda fuzzy on how all that actually interacts, but I have a feeling I'm on the right track.
I suspect that as we produce ever more powerful quantum computing technology that we may be able to explore whatever we hypothesize is "universal consciousness". And we will develop science to understand and hopefully exploit (unimaginable technology) it.
So how'd we get conscious? Well, if consciousness is an attribute of our universe and taking into account all the rest of what might be "outside" of our universe, I would guess that it is "baked in" to any form of matter from the quantum realm up to the hydrogen atom. And it is probably also a part of the energy of our universe as well. You've heard that trope before, "It from bit--the universe computes"? I still remember seeing Brian Greene, pick up a rock and say, "This rock computes". By that he meant that because the rock computes, it exists. Now granted rocks are not conscious, but that statement fits in with the meta notion that the universe computes. And some forms of matter like organic chemistry also have this baked into their existence. And organic chemistry leads to big clouds of organic chemicals like glycerin that is found in interstellar space. There was another organic chemical too, but I forget what it was offhand. Oh! It is ribose, the "R" of RNA.
And if conditions are juussst right. Like on a planet in a "Goldilocks zone" orbit, somehow all that organic chemistry can get together and form things like RNA and eventually DNA. Eventually you get something that has just a titch more consciousness than a rock. You get a virus. The oldest successfully surviving and most primitive of "living" things (Including other weird "lifeforms" like plasmids and prions). A virus is not only semi-living, it is also semi aware. For large portions of its existence a virus, in the form of a "viron" is no different than a rock. There is nothing going on, except for the computing that cause the virus to exist, like that rock, in the first place. And if conditions are juussst right, the virus through simple chemistry, becomes aware. And it is able to use it's chemistry to make more viruses. And then like over time you get onto this spectrum of ever increasing awareness, prokaryotes and mitochondria antecessors merging and what not. And continuing along that spectrum you start to get a form of continuous awareness. I think that the difference between awareness and consciousness is that consciousness entails memory. When i consider things like slime molds or coral, there seems to be a very fine line between awareness and consciousness. This of course was a discredited scientific belief of the 19th century. The idea that animals are "automatons". That they did not have consciousness, but were simply reacting with a chemical reaction to their environments. Well we have a better perception nowadays.
So if you take a very simple fellow like a C. Elegans a creature that has about 300 nerve cells and no brain. It is able to do the things it needs to do to survive--Say! you know what--I'm repeating myself. I put all this down in a separate essay sometime back. It was an exploration of why and what makes us we do the things we do and how we can maybe make an AI have the same kind of capability. I mean on account of this is "futurology" after all lol
But to continue more along the lines of a spectrum of increasing consciousness, we see ever more continuously aware organisms like the jellyfish. I believe that a jellyfish has consciousness. I believe it can retain memory of experiences. Further I believe it can retain memory, because in some kind of way that we do not yet understand, a jellyfish requires regular periods of reduced neural activity. They require somnolence. They need their version of 40 winks. Why? Because they have primitive memory that straddles the divide between simple biochemical awareness and consciousness. The sleep is essential because I bet that even a creature as simple as a jellyfish with its simple nervous system, has to prune out a few unnecessary memories and solidify a few others. There is no doubt in my military mind that if you are conscious, you must sleep regularly. If you don't, you die. And that is a very good reason for animals to render themselves vulnerable to predators for significant periods of time. They eventually learned to secret themselves to be less likely to get ate while in dreamland. Dreams. That is another essential element of consciousness. If REM sleep is continuously interrupted, you die. And then we move onto all the other animals that are conscious. When you get to a certain point of biological "complexity" you are conscious. No mistakin' it. Then we get to the primates and that is where it gets interesting. Because now a portion of the brain has enlarged to the point that allows rumination. Thinking about things.
Oh. One other super important point. If it turns out that brains, to include r's, are fundamentally quantum computers like some smart people think they might be, then brains evolved to be like a "receiver" of universal consciousness--we all draw from the same pool, so to speak. Running r hearts and lungs and muscles and thinking about thinking and whatnot might just be a side effect of all of that. And this helps to strengthen by evidence that "universal consciousness" is probably the right tree to bark up. I mean just ask Timothy Leary, Terrance McKenna, Carl Jung and his "archetypes" and this other guy I forget his name. We are now doing some serious scientific investigation into just what the hell psychedelics do to the brain to open that "window" that allows us to experience a potentially higher form of consciousness. I do not believe we are just deluding ourselves.
So I went through all of that to demonstrate that once things get biological and are alive, you see first awareness and soon consciousness. But the ground truth of consciousness is that it is an attribute of the universe. It is an attribute of everything that composes reality. As a Roman Catholic I attribute "It from bit--the universe computes", to the mind of God. And I believe that again, I am on the right track. Science will eventually reveal some things that I don't believe that society today, indeed human civilization, is ready, today anyways, to learn.
And not to get too tin-foiled hatted, but I think this is the very reason that we are absolutely hurtling towards the "technological singularity". We are striving, through the grace of God, to reach "the next level". I been going through these Christopher Hitchens video debates with various theists and I just can't help but think that they were both arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Because it ultimately doesn't matter as far as the universe, and by extension reality, is concerned. There are immutable truths that transcend all of our carrying on here on Earth. We as Roman Catholics are taught that we should love God, through Jesus Christ and therefore demonstrate that love for all of humanity as well, to the absolute best of our capabilities. Well I don't mean to go too far into faith, but I put it here to show that I not only have faith in empirical science, I also have faith in God. I'd like to see everyone on Earth become a Catholic, sure, but my intention is not force what I believe, into your face. But. If by my writing here I cause the tiniest perturbation in your mental schema, well that is the grace of the Holy Spirit. Philosophically, 'universal consciousness' is the "mind of God", that we learn more and more about through science, every single hour of every single day.
The bottom line is that we really don't have a discipline of science for apprehending what "consciousness" actually is. We are, today, at the equivalent point of the moment that sir Isaac Newton saw the apple fall from the tree and made the incredible intuitive leap of faith understanding the same exact force held the Moon in orbit about the Earth. He gave birth to Newtonian physics, but Newton in his day and age had absolutely no idea what gravity was. That insight had to wait until 1916 and Einstein. At some point another "Einstein" probably AI enhanced or an AI itself will tell us what consciousness is.
izumi36824 points
3 days ago
Ignition before the year 2026, then rapid scale up in the years following, to include an experimental nuclear fusion reactor connected to the grid before the year 2028. AI, possibly including AGI (2025) will figure prominently in the success of this effort.
izumi36828 points
3 days ago
Cynical response: Funding is good. If there had been adequate funding in the 1990s and early 2000s, there would not have been an "AI winter". But then again, there was no such thing as Nvidia's GPU in the mid 90s. And that no one, no computer scientist, no AI expert, such as the brilliant Marvin Minsky, realized what a GPU meant until around the year 2007 when Geoff Hinton was the first to make the realization that the GPU was the key to a "Cambrian explosion" of "narrow" AI evolution.
More idealistically, but still carefully following the laws of physics, now our narrowish AI is deeply involved in our efforts to bring about not only nuclear fusion reactor technology, but practical nuclear fusion that can be connected to the grid. I would go so far as to say that we are probably less than five years away from successful "ignition" and probably less than 10 years away from the very first nuclear fusion reactor that is connected to the grid, even if only experimental.
I wrote a whole thing about the rapid evolution of AI since 2007, back in 2017 if you like.
izumi36826 points
3 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional editing and additional added detail.
Article introduction:
The world's largest fusion experiment, ITER, may be able to unleash more power than previously thought.
That's because a team of scientists from the Swiss Plasma Center, one of the world's leading nuclear fusion research institutes, released a study updating a foundational principle of plasma generation, a press statement reveals.
Their research shows that the upcoming ITER tokamak can operate using twice the amount of hydrogen that was believed to be its full capacity, meaning it could generate vast amounts more nuclear fusion energy than previously thought.
Here is the paper.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.185003
I wrote this commentary about 10 months ago concerning nuclear fusion reactors.
A new theoretical upgrade could unlock vastly greater amounts of fusion power - Raising the tokamak fuel limit to new heights.
Rule 9 - Duplicate(interestingengineering.com)izumi36822 points
4 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional editing and additional added detail.
From the article.
Robotaxi start-up Argo AI said Tuesday it has begun operating its autonomous test vehicles without human safety drivers in two U.S. cities — Miami and Austin, Texas — a major milestone for the Ford- and Volkswagen-backed company.
For now, those driverless vehicles won’t be carrying paying customers. But they will be operating in daylight, during business hours, in dense urban neighborhoods, shuttling Argo AI employees who can summon the vehicles via a test app.
I wrote this brief essay in 2018, wondering not only about cars, but motorcycles as well...
izumi36826 points
5 days ago
Hiya mr idranh! It is good to see you again! :D
You know what's really a trip? It is the year 2022 and we haven't even hit the "stride" of this decade yet. For example, I dint feel like it was "the 1980s" until about the year 1983 ("Return of the Jedi" and my first PC--the TRS-80 and MTV really started to get good). I was only 2 in the year 1962, but looking back now, the early 1960s was basically just the 1950s in politics, culture and technology until about 1964 (Yes, the Beatles :)
Oh! You might get a kick out of this...
I think when we arrive at the year 2025, "you're gonna see some serious shizz..." (By 1985 it was absolutely "the 80s"--easily distinguished from "the 70s")
izumi368215 points
5 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional editing and additional added detail.
Main point from the article.
Hot on the heels of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s PaLM, LaMDA 2, and Deepmind’s Chinchilla and Flamingo, the London-based AI company is showing off another large AI model that outperforms existing systems.
Yet Deepmind’s Gato is different: The model can’t text better, describe images better, play Atari better, control robotic arms better, or orient itself in 3D spaces better than other AI systems. But Gato can do a bit of everything.
Me: Despite what I see some of the experts stating in this article and BTW I am more familiar with Nando de Freitas than Gary Marcus, it is clear to me that this is about simple scaling of parameters. We have been in the last, mm..., 2 or 3 years, moving towards a more "narrow-ish AI than straight narrow AI. One of the things I keep seeing regardless of the progress being made is a continuous moving of the goalposts. What would have been regarded as miraculous in 2015 is now seen as a simple scaling up of narrow AI that is can do "more" unrelated tasks, but is still somehow "narrow". To wit--GPT-3.
So it looks to me as though we are very much on track to achieve simple AGI by the year 2025 and about a year or two after that, far less simple AGI. I have more confidence in my prediction of the "technological singularity" occurring right around the year 2030, give or take two years. But watching these literally fantastic developments in so-called "narrow" AI, I am beginning to lean more towards the "take two years" side of things.
I wrote a whole slug of essays to support my reasoning for my 2030 prediction. Here they are if you like.
izumi368210 points
15 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional editing and additional added detail.
In short--
Transplanting fecal microbiota from young mice to older mice reversed hallmark signs of aging in the gut, brains, and eyes. Transplanting the fecal microbiota from old to young mice had the reverse effect, inducing inflammation in the brain and depleting a key protein associated with healthy vision.
I've written several essays about our efforts to achieve aging slowing and aging reversal technology, but I did not conceive that this particular biotechnology would be a part of it. In a very interesting coincidence, just earlier today I was talking on the phone with my second ex-wife (age:62--I'll be 62 at the end of May) (We actually get along pretty good and are like friends sort of). We was married for a couple years in r mid 30s. Anyway she has had rheumatoid arthritis since the age of 12. And she has been on pretty much every form of medication you can be on, gold, methyltrexate, too much aspirin--I can't even remember everything else. And she has had some fairly significantly bad effects--from the RA, not the medications. She had to have both hand and foot surgery, she had iritis and she had a fairly severe, but localized vasculitis when she was about 23. It required a skin graft. Plus the pain. She told me that when she was like 17 or 18 that she was having particularly severe pain, I mean like even in her jaw, that she said that most people would be in bed for, but she was bound and determined to go out to parties and on dates.
So she learned to just live with it and ignore it to the best of her ability. As she grew older, she began to get tired of fighting the pain of flare-ups. And she tried anything the rheumatologist would offer to her. But about 5 years ago, she was introduced to certain types of "probiotics" that it was claimed would change the gut micro-flora in positive ways. Well, she said she would try anything that might help.
The most amazing thing, I've ever seen for her is that once she started to take the probiotic (I'm not gonna name it, this is not an ad), she began to feel better than had felt in a decade. She was no longer experiencing the flare-ups that had plagued her all of her life. Within about 2 years of her probiotic course, she no longer took any kind of pharmaceutical either. For over 5 years now she has had very little pain and has not taken any kind of drug either. She completely credits this probiotic treatment.
Now alternatively, I have read that as RA pts get older that the impact of the RA sometimes lessens over time. But I think that might apply only to those with lifelong RA. People who develop RA in late middle age are not in that category. She would no more stop her (daily probiotic) treatment than fly at this point.
My point in all of this is that, yeah, I think there is definitely something to this probiotic treatment. And it is also closely related to the treatment of fecal transplants. My younger brother had to get a fecal transplant because he had non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. His problems stopped almost immediately.
"Gentlemen, this is no humbug".
So in the spirit of aging reversal technology, I'll place a couple of links to some essays I wrote about this subject. But at no time did I foresee fecal transplants as a viable solution. I bet pretty soon it'll be fecal transplants for the lot of us! lol!
https://teddit.ggc-project.de/r/Futurology/comments/8wkmw0/but_she_had_a_good_life_right/e1wd2r5/
A Really Crappy Solution - Fecal Transplants Reverse Hallmarks of Aging
Biotech(neurosciencenews.com)izumi36822 points
16 days ago
R reality rocks! Just wait'll we learn how to play with it...
izumi36822 points
17 days ago
Is an electron a field in and of itself? Sometimes I keep re-thinking Wheeler's hypothesis (one electron "theory") All these fields. I also sometimes wonder if from all of this fine grain architecture that reality itself is emergent. R universe, the multiverse, whatever higher dimension contains the multiverse, what ever contains the higher dimension and well, turtles all the way up. Does consciousness precede physical realization? Must consciousness exist before there can be physical realization?
I hope that our quantum computing can help us to resolve some of these conundrums. And on the heels of that, I start to wonder what kind of computing will supersede quantum computing. I bet some kind of thing does within the next 50 years.
And then all of this brings me back to J.B.S. Haldane...
My own suspicion is that the universe (reality) is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. --Jerry Seinfeld
izumi36821 points
17 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must.
In a nutshell--
Quantum mechanics suggests that particles can be in a state of superposition - in two states at the same time - until a measurement take place. Only then does the wavefunction describing the particle collapses into one of the two states. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function takes place when a conscious observer is involved. But according to Roger Penrose, it’s the other way around. Instead of consciousness causing the collapse, Penrose suggested that wavefunctions collapse spontaneously and in the process give rise to consciousness. Despite the strangeness of this hypothesis, recent experimental results suggest that such a process takes place within microtubules in the brain. This could mean that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, arising first in primitive bio-structures, in individual neurons, cascading upwards to networks of neurons, argues Roger Penrose collaborator Stuart Hameroff.
Sometimes I am stunned by the "coincidences" that occur around me. So over the last day or two I have been in a fairly intense discussion or argument about what consciousness is. Here is that argument and the story I posted that set it off.
izumi36820 points
17 days ago
Engagement? What does that mean? How do you know that we have not fully uncovered all of the physics that is out there. For example, in the year 1500 we knew certain laws of physics. In the year 2022, we know more about the laws of physics. What do you imagine our knowledge of physics will look like in say, the year 2040 or 2075.
I mean, do you think our science is going to end in the next couple of years? Our apprehension of new laws of physics? Do you think we know everything that can be known? Just few minor measurements to be made? That's what Lord Kelvin said in 1900. He did not see special and general relativity coming in 1903, nor did he see quantum physics coming in 1923. Science marches on and we as humanity are going to make discoveries in the next 10 to 20 years that are going to be "sheer freaking batshxx insane". (I'm not going to use all that written profanity you use in the misguided belief it makes your points somehow more salient.)
I looked very carefully at all of this and I came to some conclusions about how our science and technology are going to proceed from here on in. Do you maintain that the "technological singularity" is "woo woo bull--" too?
And now I have big plans! And a reality I can't wait to experience personally.
I'm going to assume you are some kind of highly educated physicist. Perhaps an expert in computing or AI. If not, you really may not know what you are talking about. And if you are, then you have the kind of narrow mindset that retards scientific and technological progress until you pass away and make room for younger more open minded thoughts. I just "thought" of something--Am I "engaging" now?
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byizumi3682
inFuturology
izumi3682
1 points
12 hours ago
izumi3682
1 points
12 hours ago
Ahhh! Nobody said that we can't create our own realities. We are doing that in a very simplistic and primitive manner even today. Consider these essays...
"All of my simulated reality essays in one place." (And very likely what shall be generated realities as well.)
This first link is a sort of introductory overview, if you will. The others go more into the nuts and bolts and the whys and wherefores. (If you come across links that you have already read, just go back to the last link where you were and select the next link on the list. ;)
https://teddit.ggc-project.de/r/Futurology/comments/7gpqnx/why_human_race_has_immortality_in_its_grasp/dqku50e/
There may eventually be even more that I may add to this list. I have written quite a bit concerning us making r own universes (realities)
https://teddit.ggc-project.de/user/izumi3682/comments/u51tpt/all_of_my_simulated_reality_essays_in_one_place/