Last week's webinar 

Bogdan Motoc - a near death survivor and author of How to Augment Your Mind's Immunity

HERE

Discussion of our capacity to adapt in the face of rapid changes in technology

FUSION "breakthrough"

Special Session  Thursday 19 January, 17:00–18:00 CET

The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is organizing Episode 4 of its webinar series about the latest breakthroughs and landmark achievements in fusion R&D. In this special episode, experts from the US DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), National Ignition Facility (NIF) will present results from the historic fusion breakthrough announced on December 13, 2022: scientific energy gain for the first time in a fusion experiment.

REGISTER HERE

9:00AM MST or 17:00 CET

How Ignition and Target Gain  was achieved in inertial fusion

Moderator: Omar A. Hurricane, LLNL, USA.  Panel: Jean M. Di Nicola, Annie Kritcher, Andrew MacKinnon, Abbas Nikroo, Bruno Van Wonterghem and Alex Zylstra, LLNL, USA

For many decades, the running joke in fusion research has been that `fusion’ is twenty years away and always will be. Yet, this year we find ourselves in a position where we can talk about the milestones of burning plasmas, fusion ignition, and target energy gain greater than unity in the past tense – a situation that is remarkable! This session will discuss the applied physics challenges that needed to be overcome to achieve these milestones and the strategy LLNL’s team followed. To help understand the story, several key physics principles of inertial fusion will be presented and explained (e.g., burning, ignition, and gain) in the context of inertial fusion research.

To ensure attendance, please download and install WebEx on your laptop/device or join the event in your browser using Google Chrome.  For any question, please contact: M.Barbarino@iaea.org

Note. Today 60 Minutes is also featuring an update on nuclear fusion.  You may also find of interest the views of Isabelle Boemeke, a popular fashion model from Brazil. She is on a mission to convince the public that nuclear energy - specifically fusion, is THE best option for replacing fossil fuels.

https://time.com/6218237/this-influencer-is-using-her-platform-to-help-people-understand-nuclear-energy/

https://www.ted.com/talks/isabelle_boemeke_nuclear_power_is_our_best_hope_to_ditch_fossil_fuels 

AI "breakthrough" ... Jwalant Desai contributor

I thought Google was too quiet.  ChatGPT - the AI language manager, "could" be integrated into Google AdWords and Search, Android, Drive, YouTube, Gmail and more. Microsoft is planning to integrate ChatGPT into Microsoft Office and Bing. If you’ve never heard of them,

DeepMind - a subsidiary of Alphabet, is one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs. It was acquired in 2014 for $500m and made its first profit in 2021. It is best known for Alpha Fold which can predict the 3D structures of proteins known to humans; this has insane potential commercial applications.  It also created Alphago (there is a show on Netflix) the first super computer that beat humans in the Chinese board game ‘Go’. Over the last few months the internet has sent ChatGPT viral and Google was seemingly too quiet. Baring in mind, this is a big threat to their business that has been gaining massive traction. But there was a reason.  According to the CEO of DeepMind, Demi Hassabis: The delay was to work on reinforcement learning-based features that ChatGPT lacks, like citing its sources. “It’s right to be cautious on that front,”. Their competitor ‘Sparrow’ sounds like it’s ready to be released, as an alternative to ChatGPT but they were being extra careful.

My first reaction is that’s it’s clear that the top leaders working on this tech know how powerful and dangerous AI potentially could be once it’s released into the wild. Elon Musk once said “I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned by it.  He has warned about this many times, that AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not — they were harmful to a set of individuals within society, of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole.”

Because of Microsoft’s move with OpenAI and ChatGPT there will be large commercial pressures to release competitors. Morgan Stanley estimate that moves to other language models others than Google Search could be a 1.5% drag on 2025 profits. Sundar Pichai and Google have the tech to fight back, it’s only a matter of time.  It’s highly likely that this year is going to be the year where AI hits the mainstream. Extremely powerful generative AI is here.

Self, Systems, and Survival

Wokeism (derogatory). "A 21st-century leftwing sociopolitical movement inspired by various aspects of Postmodernism and Critical Race Theory, including but not limited to: victimology, subjectivism, illiberalism, intersectionality, antiracism (reverse racism)."  What is prompting the broad movement to reshape our behaviour, perceptions, thoughts? Here is but another example of someone suffering as systems adopt punitive measures of mind-control. E.g. Jordan Peterson is not alone - National Post 

Fighting back against Big Brother’s brainwashing - Troy Media In the last part of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main character, Winston Smith, is arrested by the Thought Police and subjected to a long interrogation process by O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party. “There are three stages in your reintegration,” O’Brien tells Winston, “There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance.”

REQUEST

We are seeking stories of how people are adapting or not to change and the organizations that are or are not helping. Advances in technologies continue to shape our future for good or for otherwise. Are we vulnerable? Are our institutions capable of mitigating the risks of these technologies being used/abused in the interest of advancing utopian visions of post-modernism?  Do you have a story to tell? Let me know. Editor@KEInetwork.net