The Download: a new kind of IVF, and the AI consciousness debate

When Dina Radenkovic, CEO of Gameto, a startup engineering stem cells to craft a light-weight model of IVF, injected herself with a needle loaded with hormones final December, she wasn’t making an attempt to get pregnant. As an alternative, she’d signed up for her personal firm’s examine of the best way to “mature” human eggs in a lab dish as an alternative of inside their our bodies.

Gameto is amongst a gaggle of startups making an attempt to simplify the IVF course of, in addition to getting it to suit into girls’s busy schedules extra simply. However specialists say its know-how nonetheless has some technique to go earlier than it may be embraced extra broadly. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

The nice AI consciousness conundrum

AI consciousness isn’t only a devilishly difficult mental puzzle; it’s a morally weighty drawback with probably dire penalties that philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers alike are at the moment grappling with. 

Fail to establish a aware AI, and also you may unintentionally subjugate a being whose pursuits must matter. Mistake an unconscious AI for a aware one, and also you danger compromising human security and happiness for the sake of an unthinking, unfeeling hunk of silicon and code.

Over the previous few many years, a small analysis neighborhood has doggedly attacked the query of what consciousness is and the way it works. The trouble has yielded actual progress. And now, with the speedy advance of AI know-how, these insights may provide our solely information to the untested, morally fraught waters of synthetic consciousness. Read the full story.