Free Republic

Artificial intelligence will create so much wealth that every adult in the United States could be paid $13,500 per year from its windfall as soon as 10 years from now. So says Sam Altman, co-founder and president of San Francisco-headquartered, artificial intelligence-focused nonprofit OpenAI. "My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe," Altman, who posted Tuesday. "Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do." Altman calls it an "AI revolution," and compares it in magnitude...

Instead, a new investigation showed that by mid-August the death rate in those hospitalized with coronavirus-related illness had dropped from 27 percentage points to about 3 percentage points. Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study showed that a younger, healthier group of people were getting infected and were arriving at the hospital with less-severe symptoms than those infected in the spring. However, the researchers’ analysis showed that these factors accounted for only part of the improvement in survival. The rest, they suspect, resulted from health care providers’ growing experience with the coronavirus. For example, physicians learned...

Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics? Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question. The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well...

Baptist posted a meme that included Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s official 2020 campaign logo. But instead of “Joe 2020” in the blue circle, it reads “Jo and the Ho.” He shared the photo on Facebook without comment.

WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary broadside punctuated with profanity, the Navy’s top leader accused the fired commander of the coronavirus-stricken USS Theodore Roosevelt of being “too naive or too stupid” to be in charge of an aircraft carrier. He delivered the criticism to sailors who had cheered the departing skipper last week. Hours after the remark was widely reported in the news media, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly issued a written public apology, saying he does not believe Capt. Brett E. Crozier is stupid or naive. “I apologize for any confusion this choice of words may have caused,” Modly wrote...

Defense Secretary Esper backed acting Navy Secretary Modly’s decision to relieve Capt. Crozier of command over memo seeking help in protecting sailors amid coronavirus outbreak on board

But there are other sources of doubt too, including how many coronavirus victims would have died of other causes if no pandemic had occurred. In a typical year, around 56m people die around the world — an average of about 153,000 per day.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said early signs show social distancing is paying off, as the exponential rate of new hospitalizations has slowed. “The evidence suggests that the density control measures may be working,” Cuomo said at a news conference on Wednesday. The number of hospitalizations, which on Sunday were doubling every two days, are now doubling nearly every five days. However, the governor showed some hesitation to believe things could slow that much.

March 21 (Reuters) - Investors betting on declines in U.S. stocks saw big profits in the last month as equities crashed while the global spread of coronavirus darkened economic prospects and net increases in short selling implying no turnaround in bearish sentiment. Short sellers borrow shares in the hope of buying them back at a cheaper price and pocketing the difference. U.S. shorts saw a one-month paper profit of $343.67 billion from the S&P 500 and Nasdaq's Feb. 19 peaks through to March 19, according to the latest data from financial technology and analytics firm S3 Partners, which measures bets...