Storytelling Computers Will Change the Course of Human History

Weekend Edition

This weekend’s stories include The Great Filter can provide insight into the long-term futures of technologies that we don’t fully understand, like artificial intelligence and Sound waves could be key to discovering alien life, and more.

AI has hacked the operating system of human civilization--Storytelling computers will change the course of human history, says the historian and philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari.

Webb Telescope Reveals New Clues in the Search for Alien Life--The disk surrounding a young red dwarf contains a surprising mix of chemicals that could inform the search for life in these common systems, reports Becky Ferreira for Vice Science. "J160532, which is a red dwarf about 15 percent as massive as the Sun that is located 500 light years from Earth. J160532 is only a few million years old, making it a newborn in stellar terms—especially given that red dwarfs are expected to live for trillions of years.

Mysterious dark energy is spread evenly across the cosmos, reports Robert Lea for Space.com—The anti-gravity force that is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe appears to be distributed uniformly across space and time.

Could AI be the Great Filter? What Astrobiology can Teach the Intelligence Community about Anthropogenic Risks, explores Astrobiology. " From an intelligence perspective, framing global catastrophic risk (particularly risks of anthropogenic origin) within the context of the Great Filter can provide insight into the long-term futures of technologies that we don’t fully understand, like artificial intelligence."

Tension grows in the debate over the expansion of the universe, reports Axios. "It's important to measure the Hubble Constant in a number of independent ways," argues University of Chicago astronomer Wendy Freedman.

The Biggest Explosion in the Cosmos Just Keeps Going--For three years, telescopes have monitored “one of the most luminous” events ever: a supermassive black hole,perhaps a billion times as massive as the sun, consuming a gigantic cloud of interstellar gas, reports Dennis Overbye for New York Times Science.

Sound waves could be key to discovering alien life--Did you know your voice would sound different on Mars and Uranus? reports Chris Young for Interesting Engineering. "Timothy G. Leighton, professor of ultrasonics and underwater acoustics at the University of Southampton in the U.K., designed a software program that predicts how human voices might change on distant planets."