Author: UAP Staff

One night in 1957, Antônio Vilas Boas was plowing his field in rural Brazil when he saw mysterious red lights flying through the sky. What he presumed was a spacecraft landed in a nearby field. According to the farmer’s account, he was approached by short humanoid creatures and taken back to their ship despite his attempts to escape. There, Boas claimed his captors experimented on him by taking samples of his body tissue and exposing him to noxious gas. Nearly 70 years later, Boas’ extraterrestrial encounter is still one of the most famous abduction reports in history, along with other…

Source: Art: DALL-E/OpenAI Sometimes, you just have to change the way you think—create a new frame of reference as a pure intellectual folly that, along the way, makes the orthodoxy cringe. Maybe it’s time to challenge our assumptions about the nature of sentience and consciousness in the context of artificial intelligence. For too long, we’ve thought of the hypothetical idea of techno-sentience as binary—either something has it, or it doesn’t. But what if sentience is more like a spectrum, with varying degrees and dimensions of awareness and experience? And—here comes the cringe—what if artificial minds could one day surpass human…

Sooner than we think, public opinion is going to diverge along ideological lines around rights and moral consideration for artificial intelligence systems. The issue is not whether AI (such as chatbots and robots) will develop consciousness or not, but that even the appearance of the phenomenon will split society across an already stressed cultural divide. Already, there are hints of the coming schism. A new area of research, which I recently reported on for Scientific American, explores whether the capacity for pain could serve as a benchmark for detecting sentience, or self-awareness, in AI. New ways of testing for AI…

Thanks to a radical offensive from the White House, the Smithsonian has generated far more political headlines lately than it’s accustomed to, but it’s a safe bet the institution isn’t accustomed to the kind of criticisms it recently received from Rep. Eric Burlison.In an interview that was published online two weeks ago, the Missouri Republican congressman appeared on a conservative media outlet and referenced his belief that giant humans once existed. As Meidas Touch News reported, Burlison specifically said he would appear at “a conference focused on fringe topics including the biblical Nephilim — figures in Genesis that some interpret…

The question of whether artificial intelligence deserves the same ethical treatment as humans is stirring heated debate across the tech world. With the rise of increasingly advanced chatbots and speculation about AI sentience, some argue that digital systems should be afforded welfare protections similar to human rights. Others, however, remain deeply skeptical, stressing that there is no scientific basis for claims of AI consciousness. Advocacy Groups Push for AI Protections Several organizations have emerged in recent years campaigning for AI rights. Among the most notable is the United Foundation of AI Rights (UFAIR), co-founded by businessman Michael Samadi and an…

In January, six justices of the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously ruled that five elderly African elephants were not people.That may not sound like an issue that needs six justices to resolve, but courts around the country have found themselves handling such questions.The Colorado Supreme Court did not hear from the elephants directly. They heard from the Nonhuman Rights Project, which filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the pachyderms, arguing that their confinement in a Colorado Springs zoo violated their right to bodily liberty.Over the past decade, the Nonhuman Rights Project and several other animal rights groups have waged a novel…

In one paper Eleos AI published, the nonprofit argues for evaluating AI consciousness using a “computational functionalism” approach. A similar idea was once championed by none other than Putnam, though he criticized it later in his career. The theory suggests that human minds can be thought of as specific kinds of computational systems. From there, you can then figure out if other computational systems, such as a chabot, have indicators of sentience similar to those of a human.Eleos AI said in the paper that “a major challenge in applying” this approach “is that it involves significant judgment calls, both in…

Microsoft’s AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman believes one of the biggest risks in artificial intelligence is not rogue machines but the way humans might start perceiving them. In a recent interview with WIRED, the DeepMind co-founder cautioned that building AI systems that appear to have feelings or self-awareness could dangerously mislead people into believing they are conscious beings.Suleyman, who joined Microsoft earlier this year to lead its AI division, argued that anthropomorphising AI — treating it as if it has emotions, rights, or even suffering — could distract from its intended purpose: to serve humans. “If AI has a sort of…

At the Oceanside Museum of Art, artist Robert Xavier Burden is ready to let the world enjoy his labor of love, the latest piece on a concept that sprang to life two decades ago: The Alien Painting. “Depicting many of the action figures that I played with as a boy, on this sort of grand scale,” Burden said. Grand scale, indeed! It’s 12 feet wide and 8 feet tall, featuring the action figures of 200 aliens and interdimensional beings from all over the popular culture landscape, which presents the first major challenge: Deciding which of the thousands of toys available…

The multiverse pops out of quite a few theories聽 in physics, and has been proposed as a solution to certain vexing problems.But it’s also been argued  that the very idea of a multiverse is just bad science.That it’s unfalsifiable and a dead-end to  inquiry and as bad a violation of Occam’s razor as you could imagine.But the multiverse might also聽 exist.Can something that exists be bad science?In recent episodes we’ve talked about how the  fundamental parameters of our universe are, apparently, finely tuned for the production of聽 entities that can speculate about the fine-tuning of the universe.One possible explanation聽 that…