Hinton flags rapid AI advancements

Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if he had changed his analysis of a potential AI apocalypse and the one in 10 chance of it happening, Hinton said: “Not really, 10 per cent to 20 per cent.”

Hinton’s estimate prompted Today’s guest editor, the former chancellor Sajid Javid, to say “you’re going up”, to which Hinton replied: “If anything. You see, we’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before.”

A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy

What sight could be more moving than a mother nursing her baby? What better icon could one find for love, intimacy and boundless giving? There’s a reason why the Madonna and Child became one of the world’s great religious symbols.

To see this spirit of maternal generosity carried to its logical extreme, consider Diaea ergandros, a species of Australian spider. All summer long, the mother fattens herself on insects so that when winter comes her little ones may suckle the blood from her leg joints. As they drink, she weakens, until the babies swarm over her, inject her with venom and devour her like any other prey.

You might suppose such ruthlessness to be unheard-of among mammalian children. You would be wrong. It isn’t that our babies are less ruthless than Diaea ergandros, but that our mothers are less generous. The mammal mother works hard to stop her children from taking more than she is willing to give. The children fight back with manipulation, blackmail and violence. Their ferocity is nowhere more evident than in the womb.

This fact sits uncomfortably with some enduring cultural ideas about motherhood. Even today, it is common to hear doctors talking about the uterine lining as the ‘optimal environment’ for nurturing the embryo. But physiology has long cast doubt on this romantic view.

The cells of the human endometrium are tightly aligned, creating a fortress-like wall around the inside of the uterus. That barrier is packed with lethal immune cells. As far back as 1903, researchers observed embryos ‘invading’ and ‘digesting’ their way into the uterine lining. In 1914, R W Johnstone described the implantation zone as ‘the fighting line where the conflict between the maternal cells and the invading trophoderm takes place’. It was a battlefield ‘strewn with… the dead on both sides’.

When scientists tried to gestate mice outside the womb, they expected the embryos to wither, deprived of the surface that had evolved to nurture them. To their shock they found instead that – implanted in the brain, testis or eye of a mouse – the embryo went wild. Placental cells rampaged through surrounding tissues, slaughtering everything in their path as they hunted for arteries to sate their thirst for nutrients. It’s no accident that many of the same genes active in embryonic development have been implicated in cancer. Pregnancy is a lot more like war than we might care to admit.

So if it’s a fight, what started it? The original bone of contention is this: you and your nearest relatives are not genetically identical. In the nature of things, this means that you are in competition. And because you live in the same environment, your closest relations are actually your most immediate rivals.

It was Robert Trivers, in the 1970s, who first dared to explore the sinister implications of this reality in a series of influential papers. The following decade, a part-time graduate student named David Haig was musing over Trivers’s ideas when he realised that the nurturing behaviour of mammal mothers creates a particularly excellent opportunity for exploitation.

It is in your mother’s genetic interests, Haig understood, to provide equally for all her children. But your father might never have another child with her. This makes her other children your direct competitors, and also gives your father’s genes a reason to game the system. His genome would evolve to manipulate your mother into providing more resources for you.

In turn, her genes would manoeuvre to provide you with fewer resources. The situation becomes a tug-of-war. Some genes fall silent, while others become more active, counterbalancing them....

Young species LIKE THE HOMO SAPIENS are most prone to Extinction

Published
16 November 2017
at
The Faculty of Science

Young species are more likely to go extinct than those which have existed for a long time. A new study published online this week by researchers from Sweden, Brazil and Switzerland found that the extinction risk in mammalian carnivores, a diverse group including wolves, bears and tigers, has been highest for species just after their origination.