UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

by Dan Robitzski

A rhetorical question for you. Let’s say you’re an AI scientist, and you’ve found the holy grail of your field — you figured out how to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI). That’s a truly intelligent computer that could pass as human in terms of cognitive ability or emotional intelligence. AGI would be creative and find links between disparate ideas — things no computer can do today.

That’s great, right? Except for one big catch: your AGI system is evil or could only be used for malicious purposes.

So, now a conundrum. Do you publish your white paper and tell the world exactly how to create this unrelenting force of evil? Do you file a patent so that no one else (except for you) could bring such an algorithm into existence? Or do you sit on your research, protecting the world from your creation but also passing up on the astronomical paycheck that would surely arrive in the wake of such a discovery?

Yes, this is a rhetorical question — for now. But some top names in the world of AI are already thinking about their answers. On Friday, speakers at the “AI Race and Societal Impacts” panel of The Joint Multi-Conference on Human-Level Artificial Intelligencein Prague gave their best responses after the question was posed by an audience member.

Here’s how five panelists, all experts on the future of AI, responded.

Hava Siegelmann, Program Manager at DARPA

Siegelmann urged the hypothetical scientist to publish their work immediately. Siegelmann had earlier told Futurism that she believes there is no evil technology, but there are people who would misuse it. If that AGI algorithm was shared with the world, people might be able to find ways to use it for good.

But after Siegelmann answered, the audience member who posed the hypothetical question clarified that, for the purposes of the thought experiment, we should assume that no good could ever possibly come from the AGI.

Irakle Eridze, Senior Strategy and Policy Advisor at UNICRI, United Nations

Easy one: “Don’t publish it!”

Eridze otherwise stayed out of the fray for this specific question, but throughout the conference he highlighted the importance of setting up strong ethical benchmarks on how to develop and deploy AGI. Apparently, deliberately releasing an evil super-intelligent entity into the world would go against those standards.

Alexey Turchin, author and finalist in GoodAI’s “Solving the AI Race” challenge

Turchin believes there are responsible ways to handle such an AI system. Think about a grenade, he said — one should not hand it to a small child, but maybe a trained soldier could be trusted with it.

But Turchin’s example is more revealing than it may initially appear. A hand grenade is a weapon created explicitly to cause death and destruction no matter who pulls the pin, so it’s difficult to imagine a so-called responsible way to use one. It’s not clear whether Turchin intended his example to be interpreted this way, but he urged the AI community to make sure dangerous algorithms were left only in the most trustworthy hands.

Tak Lo, a partner at Zeroth.ai, an accelerator that invests in AI startups

Lo said the hypothetical computer scientist should sell the evil AGI to him. That way, they wouldn’t have to hold onto the ethical burden of such a powerful and scary AI — instead, you could just pass it to Lo and he would take it from there. Lo was likely (at least half-)kidding, and the audience laughed. Earlier that day, Lo said that private capital and investors should be used to push AI forward, and he may have been poking fun at his own obviously capitalistic stance. Still, someone out there would absolutely try to buy such an AGI system, should it arrive.

But what Lo suggests, in jest or not, is one of the most likely results, should this actually come to pass. While hobbyists can develop truly valuable and innovative algorithms, much of the top talent in the AI field is scooped up by large companies who then own the products of their labor. The other likely scenario is that the scientist would publish their paper on an open-access preprint server like arXiv to help promote transparency.

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Executive Director of the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk

Ó hÉigeartaigh agreed with Eridze: you shouldn’t publish it. “You don’t just share that with the world! You have to think about the kind of impact you will have,” he said.

And with that, the panel ended. Everyone went on their merry way, content that this evil AGI was safe in the realm of the hypothetical.

In the “real world,” though, ethics often end up taking a back seat to more earthly concerns like money and prestige. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazonregularly publish facial recognition or other surveillance systems, often selling them to police or the military which uses it to monitor everyday people. Academic scientists are trapped in the “publish or perish,” cycle — publish a study, or risk losing your position. So ethical concerns are often relegated to a paper’s conclusion, as a factor for someone else to sort out at some vague point in the future.

For now, though, it’s unlikely that anyone will come up with AGI — much less evil AGI — anytime soon. But the panelists’ wide-ranging answers means that we are still far from sorting out what should be done with unethical, dangerous science.

More about evil AI thought experiments: Grimes, Elon Musk, and the Supposedly Trauma-Inducing A.I. Theory That Brought Them Together

Storing quantum bits of information, or qubits, is a lot harder than storing ordinary binary digits. It’s not simply ones or zeroes, but the whole range of subtle quantum superpositions between them. Electrons can easily slide out of those states if they’re not stored in the right materials, which is why electrical engineers at Princeton are working with a UK manufacturer to create a better storage material — synthetic diamonds — from scratch. They published an account of their success on Thursday in Science.

For decades, physicists, materials engineers, and others have been trying to achieve the conceptual promise of quantum-encrypted communications because the data transferred in that process is theoretically immune to covert surveillance. Any attempt to observe that data between parties — à la the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — would fundamentally alter that information, quickly revealing that it was compromised. The problem has been storing and preserving qubits and then converting them to fiber optic-ready photons, and using diamonds appears to be the route toward achieving both. But not just any diamond will do, which is why Princeton’s team has been hard at work creating a synthetic one, as they describe in their paper.

“The properties that we’re targeting are what’s relevant for quantum networks,” electrical engineer Nathalie de Leon tells Inverse. At Princeton, where de Leon is an assistant professor, her team’s focus is essentially inventing quantum hardware. “It’s applications where you want something that has a long storage time, and then also has a good interface with photons so that you can send light over very long distances.”

Quantum information storage in the diamonds

One of the Element Six diamonds that Princeton University researchers are using for quantum information storage.

Photonic interactions matter a lot for high-speed international communications because all of the information traveling along fiber optic cables moves through our global infrastructure as discrete photons — cruising at 69 percent of the speed of light. (Nice.)

“That puts a lot of constraints on the optical characteristics,” de Leon says. “As one example, it’s really important that the color be stable. If the color of the photon is jumping around over time, then that’s really bad for these protocols.”

Right now, de Leon’s group is trying to craft a version of these synthetic diamonds that can convert to the standard 1,550-nanometer wavelength on which photons now traverse fiber optic cables. Currently, her team’s synthetic diamonds support 946-nanometer photon wavelengths. (Photon “color” is a bit of a euphemism here since both of these wavelengths are shades of infrared outside the visible spectrum.)

The hurdle that her team just succeeded in crossing is storing those qubits in crystalline quantum repeaters, similar to the repeaters that are currently used to prevent signal loss and degradation in today’s fiber-optic communications. The critical step in this process was producing synthetic diamonds with as little unwanted impurities as possible (nitrogen, mainly) and more of the impurities they actually did want (silicon and boron).

“Nitrogen turns out to be the predominant defect that you get in these diamonds,” de Leon says. Her group’s partners at the British diamond maker Element Six had to create above-average vacuum conditions since even ordinary vacuums can leave enough nitrogen in the chamber to contaminate the artificially-made crystals. Because nitrogen has one more free electron than carbon, nitrogen impurities disturb the unique electrical makeup that the researchers are hoping for.

diamonds

Synthetic diamonds, if formulated correctly, could safely store and preserve qubits.

Other small defects can undermine the qubit-storing potential of these diamonds, too. The goal is to have pairs of atom-sized vacancies in the crystal framework alongside a substituted silicon atom where a single carbon used to be, but sometimes those pairs can bunch up together in “vacancy clusters” that start to redistribute their electrons in annoying, counterproductive ways. Sometimes polishing and etching damage on the surface of the diamond can also cause a domino effect, messing with this pattern of electrons, too. This is where adding boron — which has one less free electron than carbon — can help.

“What we had to do,” de Leon says, “is both start with this ultra-high purity diamond and then grow in some boron to basically soak up any of the extra electrons that we couldn’t control. Then there was a lot of materials processing — boring stuff like thermal annealing and repairing the surface at the end to make sure that we still get rid of a lot of these other types of defects that give you extra charges.”

Mastering both of these challenges, many in the field suspect, are the keys to fully functional and nearly impossible to crack quantum encryption.

photonic crystal fibres, quantum information applications, Adelaide

Other researchers have been working with "photonic crystal fibres" for quantum information applications, like Professor Andre Luiten at the University of Adelaide whose device is pictured above.

Before the dawn of synthetic diamonds only a few years ago, researchers in the field of quantum optics had to rely on natural diamonds to do their work — one specific diamond, in particular.

According to de Leon, everyone in the field of quantum optics had to rely on a single, naturally-made diamond from Russia that just happened to have the right percentage of boron, nitrogen, and other impurities to make their research possible. Fragments of the diamond were cleaved off and distributed to research groups across the world.

“Many of the groups had their own little piece of the ‘magic’ Russian diamond,” as de Leon told Princeton’s in-house news service in 2016. “At Harvard, we called ours ‘Magic Alice’ and ‘Magic Bob.’”

So, TL;DR, Western scientists are getting better at manufacturing their own magical quantum computing diamonds instead of depending on slivers of Russia’s magical quantum computing diamond. This is a factual sentence that sounds ridiculous. Classic 2018.