Elon Musk: Creating Artificial Intelligence Is Akin to Summoning a Demon

In 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired an episode in which technology enthusiasts downloaded a contained demon into a robot vessel, effectively exploring a supernatural version of the worst-case scenario regarding exponential technological advancement. Almost eighteen years later, SpaceX founder, CEO or Tesla Motors, and well-known artificial intelligence alarmist Elon Musk is making the same comparison, claiming that at the rate we're going, humanity could just as easily lose control of AI as a poor schmuck in a horror movie inevitably loses control of the demon he summoned.

The answer starts at 1:07:20

"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," said Musk. "You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out."

His words of caution are accompanied by a call for increased government regulation of artificial intelligence: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that." he said. "I'm increasingly inclined to thing there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish."

In the above interview, he also claims that he invests in technology companies working on artificial intelligence companies "just to keep an eye on it." This dramatic rhetoric follows another recent inflammatory AI sound bite, in which he claimed that it might be more dangerous than nuclear warfare.

Weeks after winning a Nobel Prize for his microscope, Eric Betzig just revolutionized microscopy again

Earlier this month Eric Betzig shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on high-resolution microscopes -- specifically the one he'd designed and built on a friend's living room floor.

But when Betzig, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, got news of his win, his best work yet was still a few weeks away from being published. Thursday in Science, he and a team of his colleagues reported on a new microscopy technique that allows them to observe living cellular processes at groundbreaking resolution and speed.

Betzig came up with his Nobel-winning microscope (PALM) when he'd grown frustrated with the limitations of other microscope technologies. The so-called lattice light-sheet microscopy that he describes in Thursday's paper was the result of his eventual boredom with PALM.

"Again, I just started to understand the limits of the technology," Betzig said. PALM was great at looking at living systems, but only when they moved slowly. It couldn't take  measurements quickly enough to get high-resolution pictures of fast cellular divisions.

Trying to understand biology using these microscopes is like piecing together a football game from high-resolution photos, Betzig said: You can see images of a pass, and a touchdown, and of the cheerleaders doing a pyramid. But the rules of the game would only become clear once you saw a game on video.

"I'd been looking at those pictures my whole life," Betzig said. "It was time to take a look at the living stuff in action."

Until now, the best microscope for viewing living systems as they moved were confocal microscopes. They beam light down onto a sample of cells. The light penetrates the whole sample and bounces back.

But even though a scientist can only focus his lens on one small section of the sample, light is being blasted onto the cells from above and below. This causes two problems: It creates a sort of haze around the area being focused on, and it's also damaging to the cell sample. The light is toxic, and degrades the living system over time.

Betzig's new microscope solves this by generating a sheet of light that comes in from the side of the sample, made up of a series of beams that harm the sample less than one solid cone of light. Scientists can now snap a high-res image of the entire section they're illuminating, without exposing the rest of the sample to any light at all.

The researchers involved have presented videos of 20 different biological processes in unprecedented clarity, and that's just a small sampling of what the technique can accomplish. By observing the way cells truly behave as they divide and grow, Betzig said, we'll have a better shot at understanding the causes and development of cancer, as well as how different congenital problems develop as embryos experience cell division.

Harvard professor of cell biology Tomas Kirchhausen wasn't involved in the new microscope's development, but he was blown away when he saw it in action at Betzig's lab last year.

"I was so impressed by the instrument and its potential capabilities that I asked if it would be possible to clone it for my own lab," Kirchhausen said. "And Eric generously agreed."

Kirchhausen's version of the microscope has been functional since August. For the work his lab does looking at living cells and tissues, it's been "transformative," he said.

For the first time, his group was able to get accurate measurements as they observed cells changing shape and size while undergoing division. "This simple question of whether cells change their volume and surface area when they change shape to divide just wasn't possible to study before. This works fantastically," he said.

The microscope allows his group to see cellular biology unfold in the context of real cells and tissues, Kirchhausen said -- instead of on glass slides.

Betzig is eager to get his new microscope into as many hands as possible, and believes that this development will have more of an impact on biological research than the work that earned him a Nobel Prize.

"Every week we have new research groups coming in," he said, "and not to pat my own back too much, but I feel a bit like Galileo -- everywhere you point this thing, you're going to learn something new."

But Betzig already has hopes of moving past the groundbreaking new tech. Lattice light sheet microscopy is advanced, but it still has its limits: Like all light-based microscopes, it can only take clear images of the surface of an object.

"The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems," Betzig said.

And he certainly has the faith of his scientific peers. "It's great that we could clone the microscope for my lab," Kirchhausen said, "But I wish we could clone Betzig, too."

Chemists Discover Why This Mushroom Tastes Like Maple Syrup

Candy cap mushrooms have become a trendy food. 

These unusual little things taste exactly like maple syrup - to the point where the extract from them is put in cakes and ice cream.  Chemists finally found out why, after over twenty-five years of research.

When they're put on menus, candy cap mushrooms tend to raise eyebrows. This is because they are typically on dessert menus. People put the extract from them in ice cream, cakes, and frosting. The practice continues because candy cap mushrooms, when dried, taste and smell exactly like maple syrup.

This puzzled Darvin DeShazer so much that he asked, William Wood, a Humboldt State University researcher, about it. He asked the question in 1985. The two worked on it, off and on, for the next twenty-seven years. Their main stumbling block was gas chromatography. This method of chemical analysis, which vaporizes compounds and allows scientists to analyze their component parts, gave samples that were too impure to be understood. Solid-phase microextraction is a technique that allows scientists to extract small samples of a compound. The technique can be used before gas chromatography, and allows for better samples. This is what helped uncover the mystery of the candy caps.

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The mystery turned out to be more complicated than anyone expected. First of all, the mushroom don't give off the odor of maple syrup when fresh. Only when they dry do they start smelling sweet. The chemists determined that the amino acids in the drying mushroom combine to form quabalactone III, a chemical that is one of the many "esters." Esters are combinations of organic and inorganic chemicals that form strongly fragrant compounds. They show up in perfumes and food flavorings.

Quabalactone III isn't what smells of maple syrup. The syrup smell comes when quabalactone III combines with water to form sotolon. You eat sotolon all the time, if you eat fake maple syrup. It's one of the chemicals made by food companies and added to sugar solutions to make the fake maple syrup scorned by New Englanders. Essentially, the mushrooms are making unnatural maple syrup through natural processes.

A tiny adjustment to candy cap biology and everything could have turned out different. It's not just the presence of sotolon that makes candy caps taste and smell like maple syrup - it's the concentration. At low concentrations, sotolon smells like maple syrup. At high concentrations, it smells like curry or fenugreek. Candy caps would have been added to curries or pasta sauce recipes. We could have had mushrooms that tasted spicy, but then it's doubtful that anyone would have been curious enough about them to study them for twenty-seven years.