Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrive to the Senate bipartisan Artificial Intelligence (AI) Insight Forum on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on September 13, 2023. (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) hosted an "AI Insight Forum" in the Senate's office building about potential AI regulation. Attendees included billionaires and modern-day industry titans such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. But this heavily corporate guest list—with 14 out of 22 being CEOs—had some scratching their heads.

"This is the room you pull together when your staffers want pictures with tech industry AI celebrities. It's not the room you'd assemble when you want to better understand what AI is, how (and for whom) it functions, and what to do about it," wrote Signal President Meredith Whittaker on X.

The CEO-heavy list had others questioning the technical AI acumen of the attendees. "I hope that Schumer and others pivot to hear counterpoints from the many technical people who are good at explaining tech," said Dr. Margaret Mitchell of AI platform Hugging Face, whose CEO attended the meeting. "These CEOs are largely not. And they are very much incentivized to obscure critical details, to the extent they themselves understand them."

Enlarge / The Ig Nobel Prizes honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Curious about why geologists lick rocks or how many nose hairs there are on a human cadaver? Perhaps you'd like a snazzy dead wolf spider to use as a biodegradable robotic gripper? How about a "smart toilet" that analyzes your urine stream and fecal deposits while taking a picture of your anus for good measure? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2022 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit.

Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a "non-opera" featuring various songs about water, in keeping with the evening's theme. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Enlarge / Despite the gaudy clothing, this guy is remarkably crafty. (credit: Arthur Morris)

One of the ways we try to understand the origins of human intelligence is by looking at its equivalents elsewhere in the animal world. But that turns out to be more complicated than it might seem. Humans have a large package of behavioral traits that we lump together as intelligence, while many other creatures only have a limited subset of those traits. Some aspects of intelligence appear in species widely scattered across the evolutionary tree, ranging from cuttlefish to giraffes.

Even in animals with widely acknowledged intellectual capacities like birds, it can be difficult to understand whether evolution has directly shaped their intelligence or their smarts emerged as a side effect of something else that evolution selected for.

A study released today complicates the picture a little further. It does persuasively show that the ability to learn complex new songs is associated with problem-solving in a large range of bird species. But it also shows that other things we associate with intelligence, like associative learning, seem completely unrelated.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg/Getty)

Google announced today that it's extending Chromebooks' automatic update support from 8 years to 10 years for devices released from 2019 and later. The move follows increasing criticism from consumers, schools, and advocacy groups around the many Chromebooks in use and on sale with looming death dates.

"All Chromebook platforms will now get regular automatic updates for 10 years," Google's blog post says. Numerous Chromebooks released in 2019 were about to expire next year. Now, no Chromebooks should be expiring within the next two years.

Google's blog continues: