Consciousness is Software.
The mother of all lawnmowers.
“News Items is the first thing I read every morning.” — Jack Leslie, former chairman of Weber Shandwick and a past member and chair of the Duke Global Health Institute’s Board of Advisors.
Editor’s note: We’re having a “domain name” issue that is causing some “access” problems. It should be fixed later today.
1. A team at Eon Systems PBC, led by senior scientist Philip Shiu, has demonstrated the world’s first embodied whole-brain emulation. Not an AI trained to mimic biology. Not a reinforcement learning policy. A literal copy of a biological brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, running inside a physics-simulated body…Eon’s mission is clear: scale from fly to mouse (70 million neurons) and eventually to human. With expansion microscopy mapping every neural connection and massive calcium/voltage imaging datasets capturing activation patterns, the groundwork for a digital mouse—and eventually a digital human—is being laid. Meaning the first digital human won’t be built by OpenAI or DeepMind. It will be copied from someone already alive. Your consciousness is software. And someone just proved it can be copy-pasted. (Sources: eon.systems, linkedin.com, xrom.in. Italics mine.)
2. Biotech startup Cortical Labs is working on two small data centers run by human brain cells, putting lab-grown neurons onto silicon in an experiment that could one day challenge chips from the likes of Nvidia Corp. The Australia-based startup unveiled its first biological data center in Melbourne and is building another in Singapore with partner DayOne Data Centers Ltd., it said in a statement on Tuesday. Instead of racks of servers running on conventional processors, the facilities will house biological computers known as CL1 units, powered by human brain cells. (Source: bloomberg.com)
3. The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, well into its second week, has now involved at least 12 nations, with economic and political shocks reverberating around the world. Neither side has achieved its strategic objectives so far, and both boast that they can outlast the other. If the conflict turns into a protracted war of attrition, Russia looks set to become a clear beneficiary, raking in profits from spiking oil and natural-gas prices, while the Western economies, Gulf states and even China will all feel spreading pain. While we are still in the early days, both sides appear to have miscalculated how the other would behave, triggering an ever-expanding conflict with few clear ways out in the foreseeable future. (Source: wsj.com)
4. Eurointelligence:
In Donald Trump’s war with Iran, his most serious enemies aren’t Mojtaba Khamenei, or even the Revolutionary Guards. They are Brent and West Texas Intermediate. Absent of any genuine change in policy, the best way to interpret his statements yesterday about the war effectively being over is as an attempt to talk down the oil prices. This might work for a few hours, or even days if Trump is lucky. But if the strait of Hormuz remains blocked, then the basic problem persists. (Source: eurointelligence.com)
5. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Tuesday they would not allow “one litre of oil” to be shipped from the Middle East if U.S. and Israeli attacks continue, prompting a warning from President Donald Trump that the U.S. would hit Iran much harder if it blocked exports from the vital energy-producing region. The heightened rhetoric did little to quell a sharp retreat in crude prices and a rally in global shares, which came after Trump expressed confidence in a swift end to hostilities even after Iran appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as its new supreme leader in a signal of defiance. (Source: reuters.com)
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