Sony is getting a sorely needed music makeover, a drunken mistake leads to a firmware update for DJI drones and we get up close and personal with Dell’s XPS 13 — all this and more in your Daily Roundup!…
A brawl broke out at a St. Louis City Hall meeting on the implementation of a civilian oversight board of the police department on Wednesday night, according to reports from the scene.
Meeting on proposed civilian oversight review board out of control at City Hall. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/BrLSctHIAJ
— Robert Cohen (@kodacohen) January 29, 2015
While it was not immediately clear who started the fight or for what reason, the meeting allegedly took a turn for the worse after an exchange between St. Louis Alderman Terry Kennedy and Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Nicholas Pistor reported. Photos from the scene showed Roorda wearing a bracelet that said, “I Am Darren Wilson,” the Ferguson police officer who shot the unarmed, black, 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Jeff Roorda at #STL #CRB hearing wearing #IAmDarrenWilson bracelet. Speaker says at least 1 other officer did too. pic.twitter.com/GONpliRBkY
— Staci D Kramer (@sdkstl) January 29, 2015
People in the crowd started shouting, KSTL’s Staci Kramer said.
Lots of shouting, officers trying to break things up pic.twitter.com/WAs2iSTwq3
— Christina Coleman (@ChristinaKSDK) January 29, 2015
Wow! Things just got outta hand pic.twitter.com/58WbugaeKR
— Christina Coleman (@ChristinaKSDK) January 29, 2015
Some reports claimed that Roorda had been aggressive with other attendees.
Claims Jeff Roorda, the controversial police union head, pushed a woman: RT @search4swag: this is who Jeff pushed https://t.co/sx0oiofuwE
— Staci D Kramer (@sdkstl) January 29, 2015
Alderman Antonio French, the lead sponsor of the bill calling for civilian oversight of police, expressed dismay over the altercation. “We saw once again tonight how fractured our city remains. We have a lot of work to do. I believe a strong civilian review board can help,” French tweeted. “The behavior of union official Jeff Roorda tonight was deplorable, and disrespectful to the fine men and women he is supposed to represent,” he added.
Order was eventually restored and the meeting brought to a close. There were no immediate reports of injuries and arrests.
The meeting was one of several to discuss policing in the St. Louis area in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The meeting on Wednesday night was considering a bill calling for the creation of a civilian oversight board of the police department. The measure would give an oversight board the authority to investigate allegations of police misconduct, and make recommendations on police policy based on assessments conducted by the group. The board’s seven members would be nominated by the mayor and approved by the Board of Aldermen. Previous efforts to create the St. Louis Civilian Oversight Board had been unsuccessful, the Post-Dispatch reported. It was not yet clear if the bill had been put to a vote before the meeting was adjourned.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to better reflect the bill being considered.
Many companies have dropped their latest earnings report today, and included among them is Samsung. The Korean company saw profits of 5.35 trillion won/$4.9 billion in its fourth quarter (ending December 31), an unfortunate decrease from the previous year of 27-percent. The results aren’t all that surprising given the company’s struggles in the recent past, but there was a glimmer … Continue reading
I have been perplexed lately by the media frenzy on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and all the inflammatory statements put forth about “deadly machines” and “robot uprisings.” Of course, this can partly be explained by the public’s general taste for frivolous alarmism and the media’s attempt to satisfy it. However, I feel that besides the question of: why this general reaction? there is another important question worth asking: why this particular topic? Why AI?
Why is AI capturing so much of our attention and imagination? Why is it so hard to have a levelheaded discussion about it? Why is the middle ground so infertile for this topic?
I have come to believe that the reason is that AI engages some of our deepest existential hopes and fears and forces us to look at ourselves in novel, unsettling ways. Even though the ways in which we are forced to face our humanity are new, the issues and questions are old. We can trace them back to stories and myths that we’ve told for ages, to philosophical questions we’ve posed in various forms throughout the centuries, or to deeply rooted psychological mechanisms that we’ve slowly discovered. Here are four of the deeper existential questions that AI forces us to ask:
What if we get what we ask for but not what we really want?
Or in the words of Coldplay’s “Fix you,” “when you get what you want but not what you need,” what happens then? The ancients were no strangers to this question. The legend says that king Midas asked the gods to make it such that everything he touches turns to gold. So the king became rich but he also died of starvation, because the food he touched turned to gold as well. AI, more specifically human or super-human AI, is that tantalizing golden touch. Any programmer has at some point experienced an inkling of it, the great power of a program that computes what it would take you several lifetimes to do — but it’s the wrong computation! Yet it’s the right one because it’s exactly what you asked for, but not what you really wanted. Welcome to the birth of a computer bug!
Superhuman AI could of course magnify this experience and turn itself into our own buggy god that would give us tons of gold and no food. Why would it do that? AI researcher Stuart Russell, likes to illustrate this through a simple example: imagine you ask your artificially intelligent self-driving car to get you to the airport as fast as possible. In order to do so, the car will drive at maximum speed, accelerate and break abruptly… and the consequences could be lethal to you. In trying to optimize for time, the car will set all other parameters like speed, acceleration etc. to extreme values and possibly endanger your life. Now take that scenario and extend it to wishes like: make me rich, make me happy, help me find love…
What this thought experiment should make us realize is that we blissfully live in the unspecified. Our wishes, our hopes, our values are barely small nodes of insight in the very complicated tapestry of reality. Our consciousness is rarely bothered with the myriad of fine-tuned parameters that make our human experiences possible and desirable. But what happens when another actor like AI enters the stage, one that has the power to weave new destinies for us? How will we be able to ask for the right thing? How will we be able to specify it correctly? How will we know what we want, what we really want?
What if we encounter otherness?
The issue of not being able to specify what we want thoroughly enough is in part due to our limited mental resources and our inability to make predictions in an environment that has above a certain level of complexity. But why wouldn’t our super-human machines be able to do that for us? After all they will surpass our limitations and inabilities, no? They should figure out what we really want.
Maybe… but likely not. Super-human AI will likely be extremely different from us. It could in fact be our absolute otherness, an “other” so different from everything we know and understand that we’d find it monstrous. Zarathustra tells his disciples to embraced not the neighbor but the “farthest.” However, AI might be so much our “farthest” that it would be impossible to reach, or to touch, or to grasp. As psychologist and philosopher Joshua Greene points out, us humans, we have a common currency: our human experiences. We understand when someone says: “I’m happy” because we share a common evolutionary past with them, a similar body and neural architecture and more or less similar environments. But will we have any common currency with AI? I like it when Samantha explains to Theodore in the movie Her that interacting with him is like reading a book with spaces between words that are almost infinite, and it is in these spaces that she finds herself, not in the words. Of course, the real-world AI would evolve so fast that the space between it and humans would leave no room for a love story to ever be told.
What if we transcend and become immortal but transcendence is bleak and immortality dreary?
But what if instead of being left behind we will merge with the machines, transcend and become immortal just like AI advocate Ray Kurzweil optimistically envisions? Spending time with people who are working on creating or improving AI I’ve realized that beyond the immediate short term incentives to building better voice recognition or better high-speed trading algorithms etc., many of these people hope to ultimately create something that will help them overcome death and biological limitations — they hope to eventually upload themselves in one form or another.
Transcendence and immortality have been the promise of all religions for ages. Through AI we now have the promise of a kind of transcendence and immortality that does not depend on a deity, but only on the power of our human minds to transfer our subjective experiences into silicone. But as long as hopes of transcendence and immortality have existed, tales of caution have also been told. I am particularly fond of one tale explored in the movie The Fountain. When the injured, dying knight has finally reached the Tree of Life, he ecstatically stabs its trunk and drinks from it, and happily sees his wounds heal. But soon the healed wounds explode in bouquets of flowers and he himself turns into a flower bush that will live forever through the cycle of life and regeneration. But that is of course not what the knight had hoped for… It’s interesting that the final scene of the movie Transcendence also ends with a close-up of a flower, reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde and their tragic transcendence through a rose that grows out of their tombs. Of course, there are less mythical ways in which transcendence and immortality through AI could go wrong. For example, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi warns that even though we might build simulations that act like us and think like us they will likely not be conscious — it wouldn’t feel like anything to be them. Heidegger saw in death a way to authenticity, so before we transcend it and become immortal we might want to figure out first what is authentically us.
What if we finally fully know ourselves… and make ourselves obsolete?
Another promise from AI is exactly that: authentic knowledge about what we are. AI extends the promise that we could finally know ourselves thoroughly. A great part of AI research is based on brain simulation, so if we keep forging on we might actually figure out what every single neuron, every single synapse does; and then we will have the keys to our own consciousness, our own human experiences. We will finally be able to say a resounding “Yes!” to the imperative written on the gates of the temple of Delphi: “know thyself.” The catch is that, as my husband, physicist Max Tegmark, likes to point out, every time we’ve discovered something about ourselves we’ve also managed to replace it. When we figured out things about strength and muscle power, we’ve replaced it with engines, when we discovered more about computation we’ve invented computers and delegated that chore to them. When we will discover the code to our human intelligence, our consciousness and every human experience imaginable, will we replace that too? Is our human destiny to make ourselves obsolete once we’ve figured ourselves out? Creating AI is in some sense looking at our own reflection in a pond — just like Narcissus — without realizing that the pond is looking into us as well. And as we fall in love with what we see, might we also be about to drown?
Will we figure out who we are, what we want, how to relate to what we are not, and how to transcend properly? These are big questions that have been with us for ages and now we are challenged like never before to answer them. Humanity is heading fast to a point where leisurely pondering these questions will not be an option anymore. Before we proceed in our journey to changing our destiny forever we should stop and think where we are going and what choices we are making. We should stop and think: why AI?
The Obama administration, after days of mounting tension, signaled on Wednesday how angry it is with Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted Republican leaders’ invitation to address Congress on Iran without consulting the White House.
WAILUKU, Hawaii (AP) — A 20-year-old Maui fisherman is recovering after being bitten by an 8- to 10-foot tiger shark while he was trying to throw it back to sea.
The Maui News (http://is.gd/qqZHsL ) reports Michael Pollard received 38 stitches after he was bitten Tuesday morning in Lahaina.
Pollard says he should have cut the line when he hooked the shark but decided to bring it in.
He and a friend tried to push the shark back into the ocean.
Pollard says he was pushing the shark into the water when it started flailing and snagged his leg.
The bite left two semicircle marks on his left calf, which he wrapped with a tourniquet made from his sleeves.
—
Information from: The Maui News, http://www.mauinews.com
In a paranormal event to rival the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947, and the Gozer the Gozerian attack on New York City in 1984, a new Ghostbusters film is arriving in theaters on July 22, 2016. And this time, the bustin’ will come courtesy of a cast of four women comedians.
After an incredibly long development process, director Paul Feig confirmed the date and appeared to announce his cast of previous collaborators Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids, The Heat), Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids) and Saturday Night Live castmates stars Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones.
Although The Hollywood Reporter says the negotiations are “ongoing,” this looks like a pretty done deal. Interestingly enough, both Wiig and McCarthy were two actors that original ghostbuster Bill Murray suggested for the job when asked by the Toronto Star last September (where he also suggested they all-female cast would have better outfits).
But if the female cast gets a thumbs-up from a ghostbuster, how does the idea strike a ghost hunter? I reached out to Amy Bruni, a paranormal investigator on Syfy’s 10-year-old series Ghost Hunters to find out.
Debuting in 2005, Ghost Hunters introduced many reality-TV tropes surrounding the paranormal, and remains one of the most popular. Bruni retired from the show last year following six years and 112 episodes as one of the only female cast members, and is still listed as an active member of the series on its Syfy site. She has also been a longtime organizer of paranormal conventions and is the founder of the Strange Escapes event company.
Bruni joined me in the interview below to discuss what she’s excited about, or concerned by, with the new cast of Ghostbusters. She also offers some advice on busting ghosts, and how to do deal with being women in a ghosty boys club.
What was your initial reaction when you heard there was going to be an all-female Ghostbusters cast?
I definitely thought it was a stunt. Then I thought about it more and realized it was perfect. There was really no way they could fill the shoes of the original cast, or re-cast them with younger actors because they were just too iconic.
Would you prefer seeing these women as characters existing in the same universe as the other Ghostbusters, or as original characters in an entirely fresh reboot?
I think what would work, and what is most believable, is if this cast is in the modern-day and that the past team still exists. Some crossover of characters would be amazing. I’d of course love to see some sort of dedication to Harold Ramis. [Ramis died Feb. 2014, and Bruni weighed in with Huffington Post with how his death impacted the paranormal community.]
What are you most excited to see from this new cast, and are you hoping for some paranormal investigative authenticity?
I think some people would be surprised to know how authentic the original Ghostbusters movies were when it came to ghostly legends and theories. It is also sort of like Star Trek in that some of the things they used actually sort of came into existence later. (“PKE” meters in Ghostbusters = our EMF meters.) I would love if they actually took some of the devices paranormal investigators use today and put them in the movie. Let’s face it, things like the Spirit Box, the Ovilus, Thermal Imaging Cameras? That could all be comedy gold. We’re very easy to make fun of.
As a paranormal investigator, how are women typically welcomed in the field? Is it an all boys club?
I would say the paranormal field strongly skews female. When you attend a paranormal convention, you’ve usually got 75 percent ladies to 25 percent men — keep that in mind, all you single paranormal enthusiasts! However, on television, the field is strongly represented by men and frankly, it’s just not accurate.
In the years since the first Ghostbusters, there have been a lot of paranormal reality shows about ghosts — with your show arguably being the most successful one. Would you like to see that genre reflected in the movie?
I feel they have to address the paranormal reality craze because it has become such a game changer in the field. I would love to poke fun at the TV investigator versus the die-hard old-school investigators. And they can poke fun at our equipment, or the fact that we pretty much never find ghosts. Like I said, we’re easily mocked and if you’re going to embrace the paranormal field, you sort of have to be ready to be made fun of. A lot.
Are there any changes you’d like to see made to iconic Ghostbusters imagery or, conversely, anything you fear (like pink jumpsuits)?
I love the Ghostbusters imagery. One of the first teams I was on actually used an old ambulance as our gear truck — mostly because it worked so well for storing everything. I’m sure the jumpsuits will get a bit of an update. I hope not pink! I mean, if we wanted to really mock the paranormal community, they could get matching t-shirts with a team acronym on them, right? [Bruni’s investigative team on Ghost Hunters was The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or T.A.P.S.]
Do you know the work of these actors, and if so, what makes them suited for paranormal investigation?
I’m a huge Kristen Wiig fan and seeing her name is what really sold me on this idea. She has a dry comedic style that I think will work great. Also, if any of these ladies need to consult with a real life female paranormal investigator, I’m just saying, but I’m available!
What advice would you give to the women of Ghostbusters about entering the field of the paranormal?
Ladies, you’ve got big shoes to fill. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the original Ghostbusters because Aykroyd has deep knowledge and respect for the paranormal, and it shows in the final product. Do your homework and joke about us, but get to know the reasons and theories behind our crazy hobby. I look forward to watching!
Snow is here whether we like it or not — but these dogs sure know how to make winter a little more fun! Check out this hysterical video as these energetic pups slide, swerve, and shuffle around in the snow. Onward, to winter wonderland!
This HooplaHa Original was edited by Andrew “Oz” Osborne. Want more HooplaHa Originals? Check out our YouTube channel — and don’t forget to smile!
In this week’s installment of “Chicken Soup For The Soul Moments,” old and sometimes hidden treasures can come back to life. The Pop-Up Repair Shop was opened to reduce the use-and-discard cycle of consumer goods. Run by theater artisans (the folks who bring those intricate sets to life), the shop’s workers applied their skills backstage to everyday problems. Broken chairs, toys, antiques get fixed up rather than tossed out. The shop was inspired by the idea of using their artistic skills and set design background to promote sustainability. For more information about The Pop-Up Repair Shop and their upcoming events, check out http://www.popuprepair.com/.
Check in every week for more Chicken Soup For The Soul Moments presented by HooplaHa! And click here to subscribe.
Chicken Soup for the Soul publishes the famous Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books that, for over 20 years, have allowed people just like you to share extraordinary stories that can change someone’s life, or even the world. We have been proud to share this inspirational HooplaHa video story with you.
Several unidentified flying objects have been spotted over nuclear power plants in France and Belgium over the last few months, and the story has been all over European news.
Thus far, the media has reported that the UFOs are likely drones. However, currently, months after the sightings began, the French government still doesn’t know who they belong to. Now a director of one of those nuclear power plants in France says whatever flew over his plant in October, 2014, was not a drone. It was a UFO.
According to Austrian news site ORF.at, there were 18 separate occasions UFOs were seen flying over nuclear power plants in France between early October and early November. The latest incident was announced on January 3, 2015. A nuclear power plant in Nogent-sur-Seine, southeast of Paris, reported that two security guards saw “two flying objects.”
The media has reported that some authorities suspect the objects are drones flown by anti-nuclear activists to demonstrate that the plants are open to terrorist attacks via drones. However, authorities have not been able to track them. The largest anti-nuclear organizations have also denied any involvement.
According to The Independent in the UK, a source at Greenpeace has said, “Anti-nuclear campaigners tend also to be anti hi-tech.”
In late November, France’s secretary-general of defence and national security (SGDSN) posted a press release on the issue, stating (translated by Google Translate): “Although currently listed overflights do not present a threat jeopardizing the proper functioning and security of nuclear facilities, they are nevertheless a warning about potential risks from inappropriate or malicious use.”
The SGDSN wrote that they would deal with the issue with “the implementation and development of detection means and the interception of these small aircraft.”
As the months have passed, and the concerns have grown, France has not come any closer to identifying the origins of the mysterious aircraft, and it appears not all of the authorities believe drones are to blame.
According to the French newspaper Sud Ouest, a director of one of the nuclear power plants has expressed his opinion that a drone was not what flew over his nuclear power plant. Pascal Pezzani, Director of Blayais Nuclear Power Plant in southwestern France, held a presentation on the plant’s results for 2014 and the outlook for the plant in the future.
Pezzani addressed the drone issue, and stated (translated by Google Translate): “Here, we have not seen drone. We saw a UFO and there was no impact on the safety of our sites. Our position is clear, when there overflight of the site and we complain we communicate.”
Although, there is a little lost in translation, Pezzani is apparently expressing that when there is an overflight, they do file a complaint with the authorities. However, Sud Ouest points out that the overflight at this particular plant was in October, 2014, but was not communicated until December.
Others also feel that this UFO mystery cannot be answered by unclaimed drones. German news blogger Andreas Müller runs the website Grewi.de, which covers “frontier-science and the paranormal.” He alerted me to this latest news, and previously had posted a story about civilian witnesses to the objects. According to Müller, the testimony was printed in the latest issue of a Swiss magazine called Mysteries. Writer Robert Fleischer found witnesses at forum-ovni-ufologie.com, a popular French UFO forum.
Müller writes that Fleischer is skeptical of the drone explanation, given the descriptions by witnesses. Fleischer suspects there is more to it than French authorities are willing to admit.
It has been reported that France is on “high alert” due to these UFO overflights of nuclear power plants, and with the latest being earlier this year, this mystery shows every indication of becoming an even bigger concern in 2015.
For more about this story and other alleged UFO sightings over nuclear facilities, visit OpenMinds.tv.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.