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

“You could potentially bypass the damaged areas and deliver stimulation to the premotor cortex,” said Kevin A. Mazurek, a co-author of the study. “That could be a way to bridge parts of the brain that can no longer communicate.”

In order to study the premotor cortex, Dr. Mazurek and his co-author, Dr. Marc H. Schieber, trained two rhesus monkeys to play a game.

The monkeys sat in front of a panel equipped with a button, a sphere-shaped knob, a cylindrical knob, and a T-shaped handle. Each object was ringed by LED lights. If the lights around an object switched on, the monkeys had to reach out their hand to it to get a reward — in this case, a refreshing squirt of water.

Each object required a particular action. If the button glowed, the monkeys had to push it. If the sphere glowed, they had to turn it. If the T-shaped handle or cylinder lit up, they had to pull it.

After the monkeys learned how to play the game, Dr. Mazurek and Dr. Schieber had them play a wired version. The scientists placed 16 electrodes in each monkey’s brain, in the premotor cortex.

Each time a ring of lights switched on, the electrodes transmitted a short, faint burst of electricity. The patterns varied according to which object the researchers wanted the monkeys to manipulate.

As the monkeys played more rounds of the game, the rings of light dimmed. At first, the dimming caused the monkeys to make mistakes. But then their performance improved.

Eventually the lights went out completely, yet the monkeys were able to use only the signals from the electrodes in their brains to pick the right object and manipulate it for the reward. And they did just as well as with the lights.

This hints that the sensory regions of the brain, which process information from the environment, can be bypassed altogether. The brain can devise a response by receiving information directly, via electrodes.

Neurologists have long known that applying electric current to certain parts of the brain can make people involuntarily jerk certain parts of their bodies. But this is not what the monkeys were experiencing.

Dr. Mazurek and Dr. Schieber were able to rule out this possibility by seeing how short they could make the pulses. With a jolt as brief as a fifth of a second, the monkeys could still master the game without lights. Such a pulse was too short to cause the monkeys to jerk about.

“The stimulation must be producing some conscious perception,” said Paul Cheney, a neurophysiologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who was not involved in the new study.

But what exactly is that something? It’s hard to say. “After all, you can’t easily ask the monkey to tell you what they have experienced,” Dr. Cheney said.

Dr. Schieber speculated that the monkeys “might feel something on their skin. Or they might see something. Who knows what?”

What makes the finding particularly intriguing is that the signals the scientists delivered into the monkey brains had no underlying connection to the knob, the button, the handle or the cylinder.

Once the monkeys started using the signals to grab the right objects, the researchers shuffled them into new assignments. Now different electrodes fired for different objects — and the monkeys quickly learned the new rules.

“This is not a prewired part of the brain for built-in movements, but a learning engine,” said Michael A. Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Mazurek and Dr. Schieber only implanted small arrays of electrodes into the monkeys. Engineers are working on implantable arrays that might include as many as 1,000 electrodes. So it may be possible one day to transmit far more complex packages of information into the premotor cortex.

Dr. Schieber speculated that someday scientists might be able to use such advanced electrodes to help people who suffer brain damage. Strokes, for instance, can destroy parts of the brain along the pathway from sensory regions to areas where the brain makes decisions and sends out commands to the body.

Implanted electrodes might eavesdrop on neurons in healthy regions, such as the visual cortex, and then forward information into the premotor cortex.

“When the computer says, ‘You’re seeing the red light,’ you could say, ‘Oh, I know what that means — I’m supposed to put my foot on the brake,’” said Dr. Schieber. “You take information from one good part of the brain and inject it into a downstream area that tells you what to do.”

When it comes to identifying existential threats posed by technological innovations, the popular imagination summons visions of Terminator, The Matrix, and I, Robot — dystopias ruled by robot overlords who exploit and exterminate people en masse. In these speculative futures, a combination of super-intelligence and evil intentions leads computers to annihilate or enslave the human race.

However, a new study suggests that it will be the banal applications of A.I. that will lead to severe social consequences within the next few years. The report — “Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence” — authored by 26 researchers and scientists from elite universities and tech-focused think tanks, outlines ways that current A.I. technologies threaten our physical, digital, and political security. To bring their study into focus, the research group only looked at technology that already exists or plausibly will within the next five years.

machine learning

Image recognition software has already surpassed human competence.

What the study found: A.I. systems will be likely expand existing threats, introduce new ones and change the character of them. The thesis of the report is that technological advances will make certain misdeeds easier and more worthwhile. The researchers claim that improvements in A.I. will decrease the amount of resources and expertise needed to carry out some cyber attacks, effectively lowering the barriers to crime:

The costs of attacks may be lowered by the scalable use of AI systems to complete tasks that would ordinarily require human labor, intelligence and expertise. A natural effect would be to expand the set of actors who can carry out particular attacks, the rate at which they can carry out these attacks, and the set of potential targets.

The report makes four recommendations:

1 - Policymakers should collaborate closely with technical researchers to investigate, prevent, and mitigate potential malicious uses of AI.

2 - Researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence should take the dual-use nature of their work seriously, allowing misuserelated considerations to influence research priorities and norms, and proactively reaching out to relevant actors when harmful applications are foreseeable.

3 - Best practices should be identified in research areas with more mature methods for addressing dual-use concerns, such as computer security, and imported where applicable to the case of AI.

4 - Actively seek to expand the range of stakeholders and domain experts involved in discussions of these challenges

How A.I. can make current scams smarter: example, spear phishing attacks, in which con artists pose as a target’s friend, family member, or colleague in order to gain trust and extract information and money, are already a threat. But today, they require a significant expenditure of time, energy, and expertise. As A.I. systems increase in sophistication, some of the activity required for a spear phishing attack, like collecting information about a target, may be automated. A phisher could then invest significantly less energy in each grift and target more people.

And if scammers begin to integrate A.I. into their online grifts, it may become impossible to distinguish reality from simulation. “As AI develops further, convincing chatbots may elicit human trust by engaging people in longer dialogues, and perhaps eventually masquerade visually as another person in a video chat,” the report says.

We’ve already seen the consequences of machine-generated video in the form of Deepfakes. As these technologies become more accessible and user friendly, the researchers worry that bad actors will disseminate fabricated photos, videos, and audio files. This could result in highly successful defamation campaigns with political ramifications.

neural network

In just four years, generative neural networks learned to create photorealistic human faces.

Beyond the keyboard: And potential malfeasance isn’t restricted to the internet. As we move toward the adoption of autonomous vehicles, hackers might deploy adversarial examples to fool self-driving cars into misperceiving their surroundings. “An image of a stop sign with a few pixels changed in specific ways, which humans would easily recognize as still being an image of a stop sign, might nevertheless be misclassified as something else entirely by an AI system,” the report says.

SpotMini is relentless. Credit: Boston Dynamics / Youtube.

Other threats include autonomous drones with integrated facial recognition software for targeting purposes, coordinated DOS attacks that mimic human behavior, and automated, hyper-personalized disinformation campaigns.

The report recommends that researchers consider potential malicious applications of A.I. while developing these technologies. If adequate defense measures aren’t put in place, then we may already have the technology to destroy humanity, no killer robots required.