MAROKO133 Hot ai: MIT scientists shrink light-bending devices 2,000 times in a major break

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: MIT scientists shrink light-bending devices 2,000 times in a m

Researchers have developed a new shrinking technique that enables the creation of tiny 3D photonic devices capable of manipulating visible light. The method, named implosion carving (ImpCarv), creates vacancies within a material before shrinking it to nearly 1/2,000 of its original volume, producing nanoscale structures with highly detailed features.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team fabricated devices in various complex shapes, including helices and butterfly wing-inspired designs. The breakthrough could support future optical computing systems and other technologies that rely on controlling light at extremely small scales. “We envision ImpCarv as a scalable and cost-effective platform for fabricating nanoprecise 3D metastructures,” said the team in their research paper.

Laser vacancy fabrication

Photonic devices, which manipulate and transmit light, could serve as energy-efficient alternatives to semiconductor chips in future optical computing systems. However, existing manufacturing methods have struggled to achieve the 100-nanometer resolution needed to guide visible light, which has wavelengths ranging from 380 to 750 nanometers.

Two-photon lithography can create 3D nanoscale structures using light, but its resolution remains above 100 nanometers. Electron-beam lithography can produce smaller features on silicon chips, though it is limited to flat, two-dimensional structures.

To overcome these limitations, MIT researchers developed a method called “implosion carving,” based on the earlier concept of implosion fabrication. The technique uses a laser to create tiny vacancies within a hydrogel by exciting a photosensitizing dye that generates reactive oxygen species. These reactive molecules cut the hydrogel’s chemical bonds, forming precisely targeted voids with different optical properties from the surrounding material, MIT News reported.

After the vacancy pattern is formed, the hydrogel is shrunk through a two-step process involving ion soaking and supercritical drying. The material contracts more than tenfold in each dimension, reducing its volume by roughly 2,000 times while preserving nanoscale features.

Tiny optical networks

To demonstrate the flexibility of their technique, the researchers created several complex 3D structures, including a helix and a design inspired by a butterfly wing. Some of these structures were too thin and had aspect ratios too high to be fabricated using conventional two-photon lithography methods.

The team also developed a photonic device capable of performing a simple digit-classification task commonly used to evaluate neural networks. In the demonstration, the device received an input digit, such as 1 or 5, and illuminated a specific output location corresponding to the detected number, according to the press release .

The device functioned through carefully patterned vacancies distributed throughout the hydrogel structure. As light passed through multiple patterned layers, the vacancies diffracted the incoming light, allowing the output to depend on the shape of the digit entered into the system. Researchers described the setup as a purely optical system capable of performing optical computing.

According to the team, the technology allows material properties to be controlled at millions of tiny locations, creating complex design challenges that can be addressed using deep-learning algorithms to optimize optical system performance.

The researchers now plan to apply the same principles to optical devices that can classify cells flowing through microfluidic systems, potentially enabling the detection of rare circulating tumor cells in blood samples. The method could also support high-throughput imaging and the fabrication of 3D nanofluidic devices.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Man Behind Simulation Hypothesis Warns That Extinction of H

Even if you don’t know Nick Bostrom’s name, you’re almost certainly familiar with the idea he’s most famous for.

Back in 2003, when he was at Oxford, Bostrom penned an influential philosophical paper with the incredible title of “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Loosely speaking, his argument was that sufficiently advanced civilizations will eventually build sophisticated simulations of their own ancestors — and that, given enough time in the simulation, those simulated beings will develop their own simulation inside the simulation, where a new set of simulated ancestors will do the same thing, ad infinitum.

You probably get a sense where this is headed: with all these layers of simulated reality, Bostrom thinks that it’s very unlikely that us humans are actually living in the original “base” reality. Instead, we’re statistically probably in some tranche of an Escher-esque cosmic videogame.

Needless to say, the whole thing sparked decades of debate. Big names including Elon Musk have become proponents, while many other experts have argued against the idea.

For his part, Bostrom has moved his attention to a new hot topic: artificial intelligence. For a while, he seemed to be moving in the direction of an AI doomer, issuing a grave warning in 2019 about how AI posed a greater risk to humankind than climate change.

Since then, though, he seems to be changing tack, albeit with his signature flare for ideas so outrageous that they almost sound like parody. In a new working paper, for instance, he argues that developing advanced AI may well result in the extinction of humankind — but that it’s worth the risk, because the upsides of superintelligence could be so profound.

“I call myself a fretful optimist,” Bostrom told Wired‘s Steven Levy in a new interview, deploying a term he’s used before. “I am very excited about the potential for radically improving human life and unlocking possibilities for our civilization. That’s consistent with the real possibility of things going wrong.”

“I guess I’ve been irked by some of the arguments made by doomers who say that if you build AI, you’re going to kill me and my children and how dare you,” he continued, taking aim at his fellow public intellectual Eliezer Yudkowsky. “Like the recent book ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.’ Even more probable is that if nobody builds it, everyone dies! That’s been the experience for the last several 100,000 years.”

Levy pushes back, pointing out that “in the doomer scenario everybody dies and there’s no more people being born. Big difference.”

“I have obviously been very concerned with that,” Bostrom retorted. “But in this paper, I’m looking at a different question, which is, what would be best for the currently existing human population like you and me and our families and the people in Bangladesh? It does seem like our life expectancy would go up if we develop AI, even if it is quite risky.”

These already head-scratching lines hit different when you remember that Bostrom believes it’s likely that we’re already living inside a computer simulation — in his head canon, do all those levels of simulated ancestors develop their own superintelligence, and what does that have to do with the new simulations they feel compelled to build? If AI wipes out humankind, does it build its own simulation? If so, is it simulating its human ancestors, or its creation by humankind? Heck, if our entire world is simulated, are we AI?

We’ll leave it up to readers to take another bong hit while they try to make sense of it all. Perhaps nobody could sum it up better than Levy, who ended the interview with a disclaimer that it had been “edited for length and coherence.”

More on AI: Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You’ll Never Guess What Happened

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🔗 Sumber: futurism.com