SpaceX Now Claims They Might Return Humans to The Moon Even Before 2024; The origin of consciousness; The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think with Analogies; The US military may soon declassify a secret space weapon; and This Hacker Is Teaching a Smartphone App to Drive Your Car

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SpaceX Now Claims They Might Return Humans to The Moon Even Before 2024 - In 2020, SpaceX was awarded a contract for the Artemis Human Landing System (HLS). This led to protests from competitors, Blue Origin and Dynetics as well as a stop-work order from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). However, the stop-work order has now been lifted and NASA has begun issuing payments. In follow-up, the Everything Artemis twitter account asked Elon Musk, "do you expect to have Lunar Starship ready to land humans in 2024 (despite other delays)?", and Musk replied, "Probably sooner".

The origin of consciousness (be prepared to hit mute.. the web site auto-starts an obnoxious audio file of some sort) - In Darwin's time, philosophers used the word, "Mind" to describe consciousness, and they thought that Mind and intelligence were inseparable. In modern times, artificial intelligence (AI) is calling that assumption into question. Working with evolutionary theory, these researchers have described a minimal set of eight characteristics to describe consciousness and theorized that consciousness emerged as a consequence of the evolution of learning. Against that backdrop, the team spent a year searching, "genes, proteins, anatomical brain regions and neurophysiological processes". At long last, they identified a "transitional marker" for consciousness, namely, "a capacity for open-ended associative learning, which we called unlimited associative learning" (UAL). Next, the team scoured more than a century's worth of literature and identified this transitional marker in just three groups, "most of the vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals), some of the arthropods (e.g., crabs, bees, crickets, cockroaches) and some mollusks (the cephalopod – squid, cuttlefish and octopus)". With this knowledge in hand, they looked at the archaeological record and found evidence that the marker could have emerged as early as 542 million years ago, and that it may have emerged again, independently 250 million years ago (in cephalapod mollusks).

-h/t RealClear Science

The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think with Analogies - According to the University of Santa Fe's, Melanie Mitchell, the ability to make analogies is central to numerous desirable AI capabilities. These include abilities like common sense, making predictions, and retrieving memories that are currently relevant. Despite the fact that analogy-making is central, she also argues that it has not been heavily studied. Instead, she argues that researchers incorrectly thought that the ability to generalize would emerge from training on massive amounts of data. There is a gap, she suggests, between the ability to ingest massive amounts of data and the ability to understand it. She refers to this gap as the, "barrier of meaning", and claims that the barrier can only be crossed by the abilities to generate abstractions and analogies.

Here is a video embed of Mitchell discussing the topic:

For more about Melanie Mitchell on the Steem blockchain, see Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 3, 2019 and Perceptrons To A.I. To Common Sense.

The US military may soon declassify a secret space weapon - According to an online report in Breaking Defense, the Pentagon may be on the verge of declassifying and demonstrating a mysterious space weapon. It is thought that the reason behind this may be to respond to advances in anti-satellite weaponry from Russia and China. In particular, it is thought that knowledge of the device may have a deterrent effect. The details of the weapon are unknown, but it may be a ground-based mobile laser that can blind reconnaissance satellites; radio frequency jammers that are onboard military satellites and triggered by proximity; or a high powered microwave system that can "zap" electronics and be carried on satellites. -h/t RealClear Science

This Hacker Is Teaching a Smartphone App to Drive Your Car - You may recognize the name George Hotz, who became famous as a teenager when he was the first person to jailbreak an iPhone, but now he's the CEO at comma.ai. In this video, he talks about his firm's efforts to create a self-driving car that foregoes expensive LiDAR equipment that's used by other firms. Instead, Hotz claims that they can solve the self-driving problem at lower cost by using vision. The difference, Hotz claims, is that competitors have a brittle hand-coded layer between perception and action where his company's design doesn't. It's not just about technology, but it's about philosophy, too. The transcript closes with this excerpt:
According to Hotz, comma.ai's commitment to open-source software also represents a philosophical split with companies like Waymo that are building closed systems with centralized control. In the self-driving space and the larger tech industry, Hotz is optimistic this will be a "decade of decentralization," and predicts that the 2020s will see distributed systems powered by blockchain technology—including cryptocurrencies like bitcoin—overtake corporate giants like Visa in both trust and value to consumers.
And here is the interview:

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