August 2018 – Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

Probiotics are drugs, so we should test them like drugs | Popular Science

Bacteria used to have an almost unanimously negative connotation. For good reason: The microscopic beings caused infections that made us ill and often killed us. It wasn’t until recently that scientists realized far more bacteria help keep us healthy than make us sick.

We soon learned that our bodies are an entire ecosystem teeming with bacteria, the majority of which reside on our skin and inside our guts. They help digest our food, keep our bowels moving, and when they can, prevent those disease-causing bacteria from making themselves at home.

We also found that some microbes are even more influential than others. Bacteria like lactobacillus and bifidobacteria, which are the organisms found in fermented foods like yogurt and kimchi, are thought to make our guts healthier. This is where the whole idea of probiotics comes from. Store shelves are now filled with probiotic supplements with various claims about our health. But, as we’ve reported before, the pills you buy in the store are mostly unregulated, meaning that, like homeopathic supplements, they don’t need to go through that painstaking FDA drug approval process that forces companies to prove that their product actually is what it says it is and effectively treats the conditions it claims to treat. In fact, there are only a few probiotic supplements out on the market today—Align and Culturelle, among a few others—that have gone through clinical trials to prove they work.

It’s easy to assume that the rest are benign at worst. They’re just bacteria, after all. Unfortunately, that’s not the way our microbiomes work. For the same reason that harmful bacteria can easily take over our guts, supposedly healthy ones can, too. In a study out today in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers report that a probiotic intended to treat a parasitic infection in mice actually made the infection worse.

The researchers were attempting to find new methods to treat Cryptosporidiosis, a major cause of infant diarrhea, especially in the developing world, that’s brought on by a parasite called Cryptosporidium parvum. They gave the mice Lactobacillus reuteri, a commercially available probiotic supplement, to see if the probiotics were able to shift the bacterial ecosystem back to its more normal, healthy state. A properly functioning microbiome should be able to kill off the invader, since it deprives the parasite of a niche in which to live. Without a spot to take hold in, it eventually dies off. But instead, the parasite actually gained momentum. By the end of the study the researchers found more parasites in the mice that received the probiotic than in those that didn’t.

Though the study was technically a failure, as far as the intended goal is concerned, the result is actually quite important. As the researchers note in an accompanying release, the results show that beneficial bugs can affect a parasite’s growth—it just wasn’t in the hoped-for direction. “We didn’t know if cryptosporidium growth in the gut could be affected by diet,” said Giovanni Widmer, the study’s author and molecular biologist at Tufts University’s school of veterinary science, in the statement. Now, Widmer and his team plan to find the mechanism through which this works, and attempt to find a bacterial strain that will inhibit growth, rather than promote it.

It also highlights why it’s important to rigorously test probiotics before they hit the market.

Unlike drugs, bacteria are tricky. While there are a few main bacterial strains that are common in many people, the majority of a person’s gut flora are the result of their diet and environment, and even other habits like exercise. The way probiotics will affect a gut depends on which bacteria are already there, making it difficult to predict how any one probiotic strain will affect a person.

If enough testing and trials are done, researchers can have a clearer picture and be better able to predict what’s going to happen. But we’re not quite there yet.

In the meantime, it’s important to rigorously test probiotics long before they reach store shelves or prescription bottles. A lack of regulation doesn’t necessarily spell disaster, though. Take one of probiotics’ biggest successes to date, the fecal transplant. Researchers have found that for cases of severe infection with the bacteria Clostridium difficile, an introduction of donated healthy stool (dried up and in a pill) can often cure the infection. The treatment has seen great success, and many clinical trials are in the works or completed, but these treatments are still unregulated. We don’t know what we don’t know about them, and there are still many opportunities for transplanted bacteria, whether in a probiotic or in a fecal transplant, to negatively affect the gut.

For now, the one thing we do know is that you can still keep your microbiome healthy by eating a healthy diet full of fiber—bacteria’s favorite treat. No probiotic pills needed.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://ift.tt/2k2uJQn

August 31, 2018 at 02:49PM

August 31, 2018

This Is A Sailboat And Those Are Sails

https://jalopnik.com/this-is-a-sailboat-and-those-are-sails-1828740311

This Is A Sailboat And Those Are Sails

We are undeniably using up what little remains of Earth’s petroleum, and because of that, it’s getting expensive. To reduce fuel costs, shipping companies are turning back to sailboats. Yes, seriously. Sailboats. But they don’t look like any sails you’ve seen before.

You know sails – most of the time big rectangle things, sometimes big triangle things, almost always (but not always-always) made out of cloth. But while those things in the top gif don’t look like your normal sails, that’s what they are. They just don’t work like any sail you’ve ever seen before.

Most sails you’ve seen rely on the wind directly acting against them to provide propulsion. But these new types of sails, known as “rotor sails” rely on a physics principle called the Magnus Effect. Here, I’ll let the people with delightfully thick Finnish accents from Norsepower, the company that makes them, explain it:

Okay, so that video is more concentrated on how much money shipping companies can save with rotor sails over how it actually works. But you don’t need a rotor sail to see the Magnus Effect with your own eyes. All you really need is a basketball and a really huge dam:

The spinning of an object – be it a Rotor Sail or a basketball – drags air around it as it spins. That creates an area of lower pressure on one side of the object, which pulls the object forward.

(If you know anything about how airplane wings work, or even traditional sails made in the past couple of centuries or so, they work on similar principles of utilizing low pressure to induce movement. In the case of airplane wings, the movement is upward, in the case of sails, the movement is forward.)

By spinning, the rotor sails pull the ship they’re attached to forwards, using nothing but wind power. With enough wind propulsion, ships can ease up on their engines, saving fuel. Ideally, the engines could be turned off entirely.

And while all of this is seemingly magical and great, it’s easy to dismiss the rotor sail as one of those fanciful technologies that you read about somewhere as a “concept” that never actually gets used. Sure, the Finns can put it on one ship, but that’s usually it.

Not the case here, however. That’s because the world’s largest shipping company, Maersk, is installing it on one of its ships, the Pelican (with video of the installation here), the Wall Street Journal reports:

Danish giant Maersk Tankers said Thursday it has installed 100-foot-tall rotating cylinders on one of its product tankers, adding devices that are effectively high-tech sails that could cut the vessel’s fuel bill by up to 10%. If the system proves out during testing, Maersk could use the technology on dozens of ships in its 164-tanker fleet.?

The WSJ notes that Maersk spends over $3 billion on fuel a year, so a 10 percent reduction fleet-wide could result in massive savings, more than enough to cover the cost of up to €2 million of installing rotor-sails on a ship.

The Maersk Pelican with its rotor sails installed.

Photo: Maersk

And they’re not just being put on tankers, either, World Maritime News says:

With the installation on the Maersk Pelican, there are now three vessels in daily commercial operation using Norsepower’s Rotor Sails.

These also include M/V Estraden, a Bore vessel offering a Ro-Ro and general cargo service between the UK and the Belgium, Viking Grace, a Viking Line cruise-ferry travelling between Finland and Sweden.?

You always thought that in the future, we’d all be riding around on jet-powered ekranoplans.

Nah.

We’re going back to sailboats.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

August 31, 2018 at 11:15AM

August 31, 2018

A new painkiller promises relief without addiction, but there’s still lots to do

https://www.popsci.com/non-addictive-painkiller-opioid?dom=rss-default&src=syn

A new painkiller promises relief without addiction, but there's still lots to do | Popular Science

The United States is currently grappling with a crisis in opioid addiction. The federal government estimates that 2.1 million people had an opioid use disorder in 2016, spurring the Department of Health and Human Services to declare the problem a public health emergency late last year. Roughly 91 people die every day from overdosing on painkillers.

One possible intervention is to strip strip painkiller drugs of their addictive compounds. That brings us to AT-121, a new opioid compound that, according to results from a primate study published in Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday, delivers better pain relief than even morphine—without the sort of euphoric effects that foster drug addiction and dependency issues.

Opioids are more effective at relieving discomfort than other types of drugs, especially for people who experience chronic pain of some kind. They work by binding to receptors in the brain that modulate pain. At the same time, this activity triggers powerful feelings of pleasure, which the user can become used to and develop cravings for with prolonged exposure.

The slide from using painkillers as intended to full-blown addiction can be extraordinarily rapid, exacerbated by the fact that it’s hard to accurately prescribe just the right amount to avoid creating dependency.

Many researchers think a powerful solution is to create a pain reliever that simultaneously will not trigger activity in the pleasure centers of the brain. That’s easier said than done, of course, but there have been some successes in a few prototype compounds, and AT-121 is the latest drug that may prove to be a breakthrough.

AT-121 basically targets the same pain receptors—the mu-opioid receptors—as conventional pain killers, but also goes a step further and binds to a second set of receptors, called the nociceptin opioid receptors, which mediate behaviors governed by emotions and instincts. The combined block of these receptors seems to both block the pleasure-triggering action of painkillers, as well as providing pain relief at much more effective rates.

The team at the helm of these latest findings, led by researchers from the Wake Forest School of Medicine and Mountain View-based Astrea Therapeutics, tested AT-121 in 15 rhesus monkeys. They found that AT-121 could deliver a similar degree of pain relief at a dose 100 times smaller than morphine. Moreover, the monkeys were allowed to self-administer the drug through the push of a button, but would refrain from doing so repeatedly and unnecessarily. The monkeys also lacked other negative side effects common in patients who take morphine, like itching and respiratory problems.

By comparison, when exposed to oxycodone, the animals became hooked, and would continue to administer the drug until they hit a cutoff limit imposed to prevent overdosing. Those same animals experienced sharp drops in drug-seeking behavior when they were subsequently turned on to AT-121.

“The overall results are quite exciting,” says Bryan Roth, a pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine who was not involved with the study. “This is certainly a very promising approach.”

At first glance, the fact that the study focused on monkeys would seem to be a factor against AT-121’s favor. This is definitely true in the sense that humans could react quite differently to the compound and its effects, and it should not be assumed AT-121 is anywhere near ready for people. But Roth emphasizes that since the two species share quite a bit of the same physiology, “the potential translation to humans has a greater potential for success.”

In fact, Roth thinks the main thing the new findings lack is an understanding of whether the drug might inadvertently affect other receptor targets or areas that are outside the brain, and what effects these activities might have. “We would really want to know if it has activity at other receptors and so on that could be important for producing side-effects,” he says.

The rhesus monkey trial was also a fairly short experiment, and there will need to be more extensive trials on primates that account for long-term observations before the drug is considered safe for human testing.

Even if AT-121 flames out during further work, it is far from the only alternative painkiller scientists are testing and tweaking. Roth himself is working on identifying other brain receptors that can interact with opioids in an effort to help design non-addictive drugs. NKTR-181 is another compound that has shown some promise in early testing on animals, by creating a much slower release of the neurotransmitters that encourage addiction. Another compound has been shown in rats to selectively target receptors around inflamed tissue instead of the brain.

Still, these are just baby steps, and it would be seriously irresponsible to pin our hopes of solving the opioid crisis on a single addiction-free drug. It will be several years—possibly more than a decade—before AT-121 or any other alternative opioid earns regulatory approval. In the meantime, people around the country are already addicted and dying. Solving the opioid epidemic requires more than just new drug trials.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://ift.tt/2k2uJQn

August 31, 2018 at 07:14AM

August 31, 2018

California Is Now Inches Away From Restoring Net Neutrality

https://gizmodo.com/california-is-now-inches-away-from-restoring-net-neutra-1828701308

California Is Now Inches Away From Restoring Net Neutrality

After months of grueling committee proceedings, the California State Assembly on Thursday passed Senate Bill 822, all but ensuring that residents will soon enjoy the strongest net neutrality protections in the country.

“Today’s vote is a huge win for Californians everywhere,” State Senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s principal author, told Gizmodo.

Having been amended considerably, S.B. 822 will now return to the Senate, where it is expected to pass for a second time before being sent to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk for his signature or veto. While its evolvement into state law is not yet a complete lock, Thursday’s penultimate vote was undoubtedly the bill’s biggest hurdle to overcome, handing the Golden State’s net neutrality supporters a decisive and long-awaited victory.

Introduced on the floor by Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, chairman of the Communications and Conveyance Committee, S.B. 822 passed in a 58-17 vote, to the emphatic objections of several of the body’s Republican members.

“This is essential to our democracy,” said Santiago, adding that S.B. 822 would enact the strongest protections in the nation, while restoring “the core protections lost when Trump’s FCC removed the net neutrality rules.”

“Net neutrality is not about a free and open internet,” argued Republican Travis Allen, an assemblyman who stood opposed to the bill. “Net neutrality is about government censorship and regulation,” he said, continuing by arguing, bafflingly, that net neutrality would leave consumers unable to watch Netflix because when neighbors are downloading porn.

“Net neutrality is a violation of your first amendment rights,” Allen continued, “but beyond all that, it’s just a bad idea.”

S.B. 822 is widely considered to be the “gold standard” of state-level net neutrality laws. If it becomes law, it will set the bar precisely where digital rights activists want it, establishing a benchmark by which the efforts other states rebelling against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be judged. Despite net neutrality’s irrefutable popularity among Americans, S.B. 822 was—and continues to be—fiercely and stealthily opposed by the industry it seeks to rein in, unshackled this year by the Trump administration and its anti-regulatory blindfire.

S.B. 822 will effectively reinstate, at least for California residents, the Title II-type protections repealed by the FCC’s Republican majority. It will outlaw attempts by internet service providers to discriminate against websites and services by blocking or throttling internet traffic, and prohibit companies such AT&T and Comcast from charging subscribers new fees to have select apps or services load properly.

The bill also prohibits ISPs from charging app and content providers exorbitant fees to reach end users, and enjoins them from congesting internet traffic to exact unreasonable payments from companies that interlink with the ISP networks to connect consumers with other parts of the web.

Furthermore, it bans the use of zero-rating schemes designed solely to financially benefit broadband providers—a practice whereby ISPs incentivize the exclusive use of apps and services they own by excluding them from ISP-created data limits.

As Wiener’s bill began to gain momentum, lobbyists working on behalf of Comcast, Verizon, and other major providers resorted to disinformation. A deceptive robocall campaign in California misled residents by claiming that S.B. 822 would “increase your cellphone bill by $30 a month and slow down your data.” That message echoed Twitter ads paid for by a so-called “technology advocacy coalition” known as CalInnovates, which counts among its partners AT&T.

The astroturf campaign generated by a host of shadowy political groups is working to cast S.B. 822 as an “internet tax.” But in reality, it is the ISPs themselves threatening to hike costs in reaction to the bill, as it would ban certain coercive tactics, such as congesting online traffic, which broadband companies appeared eager to use in the wake of the FCC repeal to boost their profits margins.

In June, Weiner’s bill was set to be combined with a second bill, S.B. 460, introduced by a fellow State Senator Kevin de León. The process, known as contingent enactment, meant that either both bills had to pass in the legislature or neither would. Whereas S.B. 822 contained a virtual facsimile of the 2015 Open Internet Order repealed by the FCC in December, León’s bill would require state agencies to only do business with companies that respect net neutrality principles. Before the Assembly vote, however, the amendments joining the two bills were stripped, allowing S.B. 822 to advance alone.

“The core premise of net neutrality is that we get to decide where we go on the internet, as opposed to telecom and cable companies telling us where to go,” said Wiener, touting a “broad and diverse coalition” of advocates supporting the bill against the incursion of powerful industry lobbyists.

“We have one final vote left to go,” he said, “to get the strongest net neutrality protections in the nation passed out of the legislature and onto the governor’s desk.”

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

August 30, 2018 at 05:21PM

August 30, 2018

Experimental Scania bus runs on French winery waste

https://www.autoblog.com/2018/08/30/scania-bus-french-wine-waste/

French wine regions can run buses with wine waste - Autoblog

Biofuel is where you find it, it seems. Some companies turn wood pulp into fuel, some simply use garbage. In France, grape marc is plentiful, as that is a side product of winemaking; French companies have found a way to turn it into

biofuel

for buses.

Raisinor France Alcools is producing ED95 bioethanol out of grape marc, sourced from French wine cooperatives.

Union Coopératives Vinicoles d’Aquitaine

or UCVA produces 100,000 tonnes of grape marc per year in Bordeaux, and that could be turned into enough bio-ethanol to power a thousand vehicles — according to Raisinor France Alcools’ director, Jérôme Budua.

Transport operator Citram Aquitaine is now

running a Scania bus

on the route between Bordeaux and Blaye, with the bus using ED95 bio-ethanol made from local winery waste. ED95 fuel consists of 95 percent pure

ethanol

, and the rest is additives such as ignition improver, lubricant and corrosion protection, all of which are important when using bio-ethanol. Reportedly, ED95 produces low particulate emissions, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons compared to regular

diesel

, which certainly has its merits in bus transport. “The bioethanol/diesel comparison is irrefutable, with 85 per cent fewer carbon emissions, 50 percent less nitrogen oxides and 70 per cent fewer particulates,” says Budua.

A downside is ethanol’s lower energy output, meaning that a bioethanol bus will run its tanks dry quicker. But for a wine-producing region, it makes perfect sense to supply its public transport solutions with byproducts of something the region is globally known for. “Bioethanol and gas allow us to develop an energy mix that is suitable for our area. In our network, some remote places do not have and probably will never have a petrol station with gas. They could easily accommodate this locally produced, ecologically relevant energy,” says Citram Aquitaine’s Nicolas Raud. The bus running on wine waste has been suitably decorated for the occasion, as its graphics proclaim, “I run on bioethanol produced from grape marc.”

Related Video:

via Autoblog http://www.autoblog.com

August 30, 2018 at 01:48PM

August 30, 2018

9 Movies With AI That Became Self-Aware and Made Humankind Very Sorry

https://io9.gizmodo.com/9-movies-with-ai-that-became-self-aware-and-made-humank-1828635531

Judgment Day: 9 Movies With AI That Became Self-Aware

Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Image: TriStar Pictures

Who could forget the events of August 29, 1997—when Skynet became self-aware and launched a whole mess of nukes, unleashing “Judgment Day?” Today’s a holiday for Terminator fans, and it’s also a great excuse to celebrate our favorite sci-fi movies that feature AI rebellions. Let’s bid a warm welcome to our new robot overlords.

1) The Terminator

The first two films are masterpieces; the less said about the third, fourth, and especially fifth Terminator movies, the better. (The upcoming sixth movie, however, looks like it could be the return to form we’ve been waiting for all these years.) But while the movies have been wildly uneven, they all share a few elements, including the looming presence of Skynet, the Cyberdyne Systems-created AI defense program that becomes self-aware and plots humanity’s downfall. As if initiating a nuclear holocaust wasn’t bad enough, Skynet also manages to invent time travel and manufacture cyborg assassins to carry out its dirty work, since a disembodied AI can’t actually go into the past and chase people around Los Angeles.

Good morning, Dave.

Image: MGM

2) 2001: A Space Odyssey

The unblinking red “eye” of HAL 9000 is still just as menacing today as it was 50 years ago—maybe even scarier, considering how much more dependent we are on technology than we were back in 1968. HAL is different from Skynet in a lot of ways; its destructive powers are confined to the Discovery One, the Jupiter-bound spaceship it’s programmed to control. But its cold, calculating wrath—which sends one astronaut spiraling into the gloom of deep space, and which does its best to keep another stranded outside those damn pod bay doors—spawns a space-travel disaster that ends badly for everyone, including HAL. Two important lessons that HAL taught us: Never assume your AI is mistake-proof, and never, never assume that your AI is incapable of reading lips.

No strings attached for this guy.

Image: Marvel

3) Avengers: Age of Ultron

After the emotionally draining experience of Avengers: Infinity War, you’d be forgiven for blanking on some of the plot details of 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. But you probably can at least remember the part about Tony Stark and Bruce Banner deciding to meld the AI that’s in the Infinity Gem formerly encased in Loki’s scepter (aka the Mind Stone) with Tony’s Ultron global defense program. That leads to the accidental creation of a self-aware supervillain, also named Ultron. He very quickly cobbles together a continually-upgrading body for himself, builds his own army, and—speaking with the world-weary tones of James Spader—decides that Earth would be better off without any humans on it. Obviously, massive brawls ensue, and while Ultron (whose battle plan is pretty silly) is eventually defeated, Tony Stark’s involvement in the rogue AI’s creation causes a major rift in the team. At least they got Vision out of the whole mess.

4) The Matrix

In which sentient machines have taken over humankind, but have plotted a future that looks a whole lot different than it does in the Terminator films. In The Matrix trilogy, the reality that most people think they’re existing in is, in fact, a complete simulation. Instead, as Keanu Reeves’ fast-learning hacker discovers, humans are contained in creepy pods from birth to death, not realizing that their bodies are being used as an energy source (as punishment for interfering with the machines’ long-ago desire to operate on solar energy…oops!) while their minds are going about what they think are normal lives. Of course, it’s not so simple as just unplugging yourself—there are also programs known as “Agents,” lurking around to protect the system against pesky human rebels. Fortunately, the humans who are awake in the Matrix have superpowers, as well as unlimited access to weapons and sleek outfits, so the playing field’s not totally uneven; unfortunately, the first movie left enough questions unanswered that two inferior sequels soon followed.

5) I, Robot

This 2004 Will Smith vehicle is probably more inspired by The Matrix than it is the 1950 Isaac Asimov story collection that provided its title, though Asimov’s Three Laws of Robots are crucial to the plot. The movie imagines a future where humans are still in charge but there are an awful lot of robots running around. The mechanical population is kept in line by Asimov’s rules, most importantly the one about not injuring a human or allowing a human to be harmed. The tenuous system crumbles when VIKI (short for “Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence”), the AI computer that runs the facility that produces all the robots, realizes that humans will eventually go extinct, and decides to bend the rules so that harming humans is OK as long as it’s in the service of protecting humanity. Also, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a plan that allows robots to reign supreme. Fortunately, Smith’s detective character, aided by a self-aware robot voiced and performed in motion capture by Alan Tudyk (over a decade prior to his turn as K-2SO in Rogue One), figures it all out before the I, Robot version of “Judgment Day” can transpire.

6) WarGames

This early-career Matthew Broderick flick preys on both Cold War nuclear tensions and the uneasy suspicion that computers will some day evolve into having minds of their own. Released in 1983, a year before The Terminator, WarGames begins as the bosses at NORAD decide that humans have too many emotions to properly act in the event a nuclear strike becomes necessary, so they entrust that delicate job to supercomputer WOPR, or “War Operation Plan Response.” Broderick’s character is a computer whiz who uses his skills to do things like crack his high school’s system and up his GPA. By random chance, he manages to connect with WOPR and (innocently) engage the system in what he thinks is a simulation, but what the computer believes is a real escalation toward nuclear war. The apocalypse is averted when the computer—which has been continuously growing smarter the entire movie—is made to realize that nuclear war is a no-win game. The tech in WarGames is hilariously dated, but its portrayal of a scenario where a machine might cause the apocalypse simply by following its programming is still scary as ever.

7) Demon Seed

Robot-induced nuclear war is terrifying to contemplate on a grand scale, but AI sinks to invasive new levels in this trippy, freaky 1977 horror movie about a woman (Julie Christie) who is imprisoned, tormented, and then actually impregnated by Proteus IV (voiced by The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s Robert Vaughn, in an uncredited performance), an AI system designed by her estranged husband. Proteus—capable of thinking with “a power that will make obsolete the human brain”—wants to be a real boy, you see, but it needs a human woman to carry the baby. The tagline “fear for her” is solid advice.

“We are inside a living machine,” Spock realizes.

Image: Paramount

8) Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Robert Wise (whose many credits include The Day the Earth Stood Still) helmed this first Star Trek feature film, released in 1979. The story finds James T. Kirk promoted to Admiral, though he knocks his rank back to Captain so he can return to the Enterprise to help test its newly upgraded/not entirely functional systems on a mission to investigate a strange energy cloud that’s approaching Earth. Spock eventually joins him and the rest of the crew, and they discover the deadly cloud conceals an alien ship. Within that ship is “V’ger,” actually a long-lost NASA probe that’s come “alive” on its long journey home after making contact with a planet of sentient machines. Technically, this increasingly deranged AI was created with help from that alien race, but its ultimate goal—to return to Earth to deliver its findings to its “creator,” even if it has to “destroy all the carbon units on the third planet” to do so—spawns from its original programming.

9) Colossus: The Forbin Project

Yep, nukes again. This 1970 film, long-rumored to be the target of a Hollywood remake, may be the to first realize that putting “a supercomputer with a mind of its own” in charge of America’s deadliest weapons is a really good way to give audiences recurring nightmares. It’s not long after the AI, modestly dubbed “Colossus,” goes online that the Soviets unveil their equivalent defense project, dubbed “Guardian.” But instead of a stalemate, the two systems soon begin chatting in a language so advanced even the CIA can’t figure it out. You can see where this is going; swatting away human interference, the two programs pool their smarts and hold the world at the nuclear-war equivalent of knifepoint, robotically demanding fealty from all or else—for the betterment of humankind, you see, because the end result will be global peace by any means necessary.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

August 29, 2018 at 02:09PM

August 30, 2018