#the tension between me and the samsung notes app

[bobandrews]

based off of @roobgumball95 's post

[hemsutme]

What Can Samsung Galaxy Active 2 Watch Do?

The initial Galaxy Watch Active 2, launched in 2018, had a physical revolving bezel you can rely on transform settings. I discovered it extremely habit forming since it provided a satisfying "click" when you turned it and it was a much faster means to browse than counting on the touchscreen alone. 

Samsung Galaxy Active 2 watch bands are also compatible to 20mm no mater you have a 40mm or 44mm model.

This year's Galaxy Watch Energetic shed the bezel as well as you had to use the screen and switches instead. Samsung needs to have listened to my sobs, as the Energetic 2 provides you the most effective of both globes. Instead of a physical dial, you run your finger around the side of the display to scroll with menus with the touch bezel. Haptic feedback makes it (nearly) seem like an actual dial, although in some cases it took me an added try or two to get it to register my touch. The Energetic 2 I obtained for review didn't included the touch bezel triggered, so you may require to enter into the settings, find the advanced area and also switch it on. After a couple of days of wear, I'm impressed with exactly how Samsung has actually boosted the fit and feel of the watch over previous generations. The 40mm version fits perfectly on my smaller sized wrist and also the steel coating looks premium compared with the very first Galaxy Watch Energetic. The aluminum version is offered in black, silver or pink gold with an artificial rubber band, while the stainless-steel variation is available in a silver, black or gold finish, with a natural leather band. The LTE variation is only available in stainless steel. The shade AMOLED screen is intense as well as easy to see in straight sunlight, as long as you have the brightness cranked up to its maximum. And also now the Active 2 usages Gorilla Glass DX And also instead of Gorilla Glass 3, which suggests it needs to stand up to even more bumps and also scrapes than its precursor. It's rated IP68 or 5ATM for water resistance, the same as previously. Health and fitness tracking includes finesse If you've made use of any previous Galaxy Watch there will be not a surprises below when it comes to fitness tracking. You can still track over 39 exercises and see the breakdown of your information in the Samsung Health application or straight on the watch face itself. I still don't assume the Samsung Health app provides your information as perfectly as rivals like Fitbit do (it's just so much easier to aesthetically interpret your workout information in the Fitbit app, for instance). The Active 2 obtains an upgraded running instructor, which gives you audio and also aesthetic signs via seven different running programs, from light jogging to endurance running. It appears great in theory. Yet on my run I was stunned at how well it functioned, as long as you can surpass hearing the robotic Bixby voice. Attach some Bluetooth earbuds and also you'll be able to hear the guide in your ear, along with any type of songs you may have playing, or you can make use of the watch audio speaker to hear the triggers. The trainer informs you to accelerate or reduce based upon your present speed and it also offers you semimotivational comments varying from, "Just how are you feeling?" to, "Attempt to smile if you can," which was equally frustrating and amusing during the house stretch of my run. Would I utilize it more than once or twice? Possibly not in its existing state. What I liked most was having the ability to hear my typical heart rate and my rate after every mile, but I would want to have the ability to transform the voice and tailor the motivates it offered me to make it actually handy. While the running instructor might be a take-it-or-leave-it attribute, I discovered the most helpful health and fitness attribute was really the improved heart rate monitor. With an overall of 8 LEDs on the back to determine your pulse, the heart price screen is now much more precise during workouts than the original Galaxy Watch Active, which just had four LEDs. I'm a big follower of monitoring my heart price throughout cardio-based workouts such as spin class or running as well as located the readings on the Active 2 updated a lot faster during an exercise than the previous variation. I haven't yet evaluated the watch against an upper body band display to contrast results. Since September 2020, the Galaxy Watch Energetic 2 has actually obtained an update to provide it several of the exact same features as the newer Galaxy Watch 3: innovative running metrics, an action of VO2 max and journey detection. In addition to the existing exercises the previous watch can autodetect, like running as well as cycling, the Active 2 includes swimming to the mix, bringing the total variety of exercises it can autodetect to seven. Like the very first Energetic, it does tension tracking and also sleep tracking. The Energetic 2 also now has menstrual monitoring and also you can log your cycle from the Samsung Wellness app. And also to help motivate you to meet your exercise goals each day, the Energetic 2 urges you to close each sector of a heart visuals, like the ring-based system made use of on the Apple Watch. It's tough to prevent contrasts to the Apple Watch when it pertains to various other heart-related features. Not just does the Energetic 2 now have high and low heart price detection like Apple's smartwatch (you'll need to have the HR screen set to continual dimension for this to work), it additionally has an integrated ECG to spot prospective indications of atrial fibrillation (aFib). The ECG has finally gotten FDA-clearance as of September 2020 and also I'll be upgrading this testimonial once I've had a possibility to check it out completely. Note that the ECG application is only available if you connect your Active 2 to a Samsung Galaxy phone. Sorry, iPhone customers, you'll need to stay with the Apple Watch or a Fitbit Feeling if you desire ECG. Like its more recent brother or sister, the original Galaxy Watch Energetic released with a feature that had not been turned on at the time of launch, the high blood pressure monitor. Although it is currently readily available through the company's My BP app, it's not yet FDA-cleared. High blood pressure monitoring outcomes are still presently in beta as well as these dimensions are made use of as part of a study with the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. A totally fledged smartwatch with some peculiarities Now that the Galaxy Watch Active 2 offers an LTE variation (from $379, ₤ 249 or AU$ 799) you'll have the ability to get calls as well as send out messages on the go. Similar to with the earlier Galaxy Watch and also Galaxy Watch Active, you can tailor which notifications come through from your phone, regardless of whether you have a Bluetooth or LTE variation. All the versions of the Active 2 currently supply better integration with third-party applications like Twitter and YouTube, so you can communicate with tweets or see videos. Although I'm not quite sure of why you would certainly ever before intend to enjoy videos on such a small screen, it's absolutely a party technique. Customers to Spotify's premium rate can likewise store songs on one's guard for offline listening, or stream over LTE. An integrated audio speaker means you can now listen to songs or take telephone calls without requiring Bluetooth earbuds. I really like the variety of watch deals with offered in the Galaxy Wearable app and also you can download much more from the Galaxy Store. However being able to break an image of your clothing and also match your watch face to the colors of your t-shirt using the My Style feature is possibly my favorite means to customize the appearance of the Energetic 2. Samsung's Tizen OS, which the watch runs on, additionally feels slightly a lot more responsive than on previous versions. You can still tailor positioning of applications as well as widgets. It still did take me time to exercise where some functions are hiding, like the running train as an example, and also I assume the biggest typeface size on the watch might still be also small for some people. I additionally discovered that the Bixby aide started up of its very own choice a couple of times, with no voice triggers or any kind of switch presses. It's an enigma regarding why this happens-- often it's during a workout, other times it's when I have actually been using the touch bezel. Bixby apart, what I appreciate the most regarding the software application on the Energetic 2 is an under-the-hood upgrade that makes it easier to shift back and forth between applications on your watch as well as your phone. You'll be able to use a single sign-on, so if you're logged right into Spotify or Twitter on your phone, as an example, that login will carry over to your watch. Battery life will depend upon the dimension you select as the 44mm watch has a larger-capacity battery, and just how much you make use of functions like the always-on screen as well as LTE. However I didn't have the LTE version to test, so I can not tell you how much using a cellular connection will certainly influence battery life. Yet I can tell you that with regular use, getting notifications, altering watch faces, tracking an interior exercise as well as tracking sleep, I managed to get a day as well as a half from the 40mm Bluetooth watch prior to it needed a fee. I also saw on a different day, when I had the screen readied to always-on during an exercise, using the running train with GENERAL PRACTITIONER as well as paying attention to downloaded music from Spotify over Bluetooth, the battery went from 40% to simply 14% in half an hour. So do bear in mind this watch isn't unyielding. If you have a Galaxy phone like the S20 And Also or Keep In Mind 20 Ultra that supplies wireless power sharing, you can bill the watch from the back of your phone (although it is sluggish). The Active 2 also has Samsung Pay, although using it to tap and pay will just work at NFC-based terminals. Better worth than the newer Watch 3 Thanks to its streamlined layout, health and wellness functions like the ECG as well as trip discovery, plus an LTE alternative, the Galaxy Watch Energetic 2 feels like a complete smartwatch that can take you from job to play without missing a beat. With software updates over the past year given that launch, the Active 2 shares a number of the very same features with the Watch 3 that makes it a fantastic purchase for those on a tighter spending plan. 

[tech-battery]

Huawei P40 Pro review: A new bar in camera performance

If there's one device that I look forward to every year, it's Huawei's P-series smartphones. It's the one where Huawei introduces its latest camera innovations, and the company has done some truly wonderful things.

The P20 Pro introduced the 40-megapixel main sensor, with a 3x zoom lens. It was the first real focus that we've seen on a high-resolution sensor and lossless zoom since the days of Nokia's Lumia 1020. I remember asking someone from Huawei how the firm could possibly improve upon that.

The P30 Pro didn't disappoint with a new RYYB camera sensor. Using yellow instead of green, the sensor allowed in 40% more light. Low-light performance was so amazing that it hasn't been matched by any non-Huawei smartphones in the past year.

And now we have the P40 series. The main sensor is larger with a higher resolution. The telephoto lens is still 5x, but now that sensor is RYYB just like the main sensor. The ultra-wide lens has been jacked up too at 40 megapixels.

Design

Huawei sent me the black model of the P40 Pro, which is obviously the most boring color of any smartphone. It comes in several other colors and finishes, and design is another area where Huawei has really gone above and beyond its competition over the last few years, introducing gradient colors and such. In fact, the Shenzhen firm has gone from emulating the design that other companies have used, to creating smartphone designs that other companies are emulating.

The device is a glass sandwich with a metal frame, as is the standard these days. The black model that Huawei sent me is so glossy and sort of mirrored that it actually reminds me of hematite.

The camera module is placed in the top-left corner, and there's a reason for this. In fact, you might have noticed that the P-series always has it in the top-left corner, while the Mate series has it in the center. It's because the P-series is meant to be more camera-centric, so the phone is meant to be held in landscape mode while taking a picture.

Huawei went for the rectangular with rounded corners camera module design, which is weirdly common over the past year. It's like everyone had the same idea at once. Apple, Google, Samsung, and Huawei are all doing it, although Apple's and Google's designs are square.

On the bottom of the device, there's a USB Type-C port that can charge the device with the included 40W charger. There's also a speaker grille. As you should expect at this point from any company that's not LG, there's no 3.5mm headphone jack.

There's also a dual-SIM slot on the bottom, so you can either use one SIM and an NM card, or two SIM cards. If you're unfamiliar with NM storage, I was too. It's Huawei's expandable storage solution. Think about it like a microSD card that's shaped like a nano-SIM card.

On the right side, there's a power button and a volume rocker. There's no dedicated button for a virtual assistant on this device, which is always nice. Normally, you could hold the power button to launch a virtual assistant, but since there aren't any Google services, there's no Google Assistant. It does feel strange though, because you still have to hold the power button for extra-long to power down the phone or to reboot.

Display

The Huawei P40 Pro has a 6.58-inch 2640x1200 OLED display, which is gorgeous. It has a 90Hz refresh rate, so everything feels a bit smoother. Smartphones with screens that have higher than the normal 60Hz refresh rate have become pretty common over the past year, and it's a welcome change.

Note that some are using 120Hz panels, such as with Samsung's Galaxy S20 series. I really think that 90Hz is the sweet spot here. Remember, just as with a higher resolution display, a higher refresh rate will take a toll on the battery. I don't think that there's enough of a visual distinction between 90Hz and 120Hz to make it worthwhile. The difference between 60Hz and 90Hz, on the other hand, is totally worth it.

The screen is curved on all four edges, and it's inspired by the surface tension of water. The curve is meant to be the same as a cup of water that's just about to overflow. Huawei is always fond of saying that its designs are inspired by nature, so that's the example for the P40 Pro series.

Another thing to note about the screen is that it's OLED, which is particularly meaningful on Huawei devices. With OLED, pixels can be turned off, which is why blacks are true blacks. Huawei actually limits some of its EMUI features to OLED displays, such as dark mode and the always-on display. Luckily, with the P40 Pro, you get both of those things.

The display uses a hole-punch cut-out for the front-facing camera and the depth sensor, and it's the first time we've seen this technique from a Huawei flagship. Once again, there's no speaker on the screen, as the sound during calls comes through the glass.

Camera

The camera on the P40 Pro is an evolution of the P30 Pro. If you want something more revolutionary, go for the P40 Pro+, which is where Huawei packed some crazy camera innovations. The Pro+ has two telephoto lenses, one of which is 3x and one of which is 10x.

As for the P40 Pro itself, several things have changed. For one thing, the main sensor is larger, and it offers a higher resolution at 50MP. It still uses the RYYB technology found in last year's P30 Pro, so it can still work that low-light magic. The telephoto lens is still 5x, but it's RYYB now with a higher 12MP resolution.

Finally, the ultra-wide lens is now 40 megapixels, which is a much higher resolution than before. It's not RYYB though. What's interesting is that with the Kirin 990 chipset, you can now record 4K 60fps video, and that works with all camera lenses, including the ultra-wide, or even the front-facing camera.

Huawei first introduced 4K 60fps video capture in the Mate 30 series, and it was the last to do so. Apple first had it on the iPhone 8/X, and Qualcomm introduced the feature in the Snapdragon 845. While Huawei was late on this, at least when it introduced the feature, it did it right, offering 4K 60fps video capture at all levels of zoom.

Gallery: Huawei P40 Pro samples

Most of the pictures that I took were at night, because I really wanted to try out the low-light photography on the P40 Pro. I want to note again that the main sensor can still take low-light pictures that show more than I can actually see.

The first time I went out at night, I took the P40 Pro to the darkest spot I could find in my apartment complex (yes, I am limited in where I can roam around thanks to COVID-19), which ended up being an area with a bunch of trees. You'll notice some clear inconsistencies between the main lens and when zoomed, as it's much darker at 5x zoom. This disappointed me, as I was really hoping that the RYYB sensor would make a big difference there.

I did notice some inconsistencies between how those photos were handled in the software though, which gives me hope that this can be resolved via a software update. Speaking of software, I did notice that the ultra-wide sensor does pretty well in low-light, and Huawei told me that it's using software to try and make the three lenses more consistent.

In the first few images, I did max out the zoom at 50x, just to see what it can do. It's not really any different than 50x zoom was on the P30 Pro. One thing I will say is that 30x zoom looks way better than it does on the Samsung Galaxy S20+. A lot of companies these days are boasting about the max zoom on their smartphone, but this still isn't meant to be something that you use regularly. There's never been a phone where max zoom looks good.

Ultimately, I still love Huawei's camera-making abilities. While I wish there was more consistency with the 5x zoom lens at night, this is still the best camera around, in my opinion. When I go on a trip, when I got married and went on my honeymoon, or any other time where I want to capture memories in the best possible images, I take a Huawei phone. They're the only phones where people comment on social media how good the pictures look.

But again, this is more or less an evolution of the P30 Pro. There are definitely improvements here, but both the P20 Pro and P30 Pro were mind-blowing improvements. If you want revolution, look to the P40 Pro+.

Huawei Mobile Services

As I'm sure you know, there are no Google services on Huawei devices, and Huawei is using its own Huawei Mobile Services. When I reviewed the Honor 9X Pro, the point that I made is that it's possible to live without Google services, but the hardware has to be good enough to be willing to deal with a few workarounds.

And when I say the hardware needs to be good enough, I'm actually talking about a Mate-series or P-series flagship. In this case, I absolutely do think that it's worth the workarounds, so let's break down how this can work.

There's no Google Play Store or Google apps. That means no Chrome, Gmail, Google Calendar, and so on.

As for the Google Play Store, you need an alternative. Huawei's AppGallery is there, but many of the apps you'll want are missing. There's no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. Some Microsoft apps are there, which was a nice surprise, but I still installed the Amazon Appstore, where I found most of what I need.

You can also use Huawei's Phone Clone app. That will bring over most of your apps from another device, and it doesn't need to be a Huawei device either.

OK, you've got the bulk of your apps, and you might need to sideload a couple, but you're there. Now, on to things like Chrome, Gmail, Google Calendar, and YouTube. Huawei has its own browser, Opera is available from AppGallery, and I was able to use Edge just from bringing it over through Phone Clone. You won't have your synced data from Chrome, but that's all your missing out on.

There are tons of ways to use Gmail without a Gmail app. Huawei's stock Email app is fine, or you can use something like Outlook. You can even just pin the Gmail web app to your home screen. The same goes for Google Calendar and YouTube, although for some reason, the Google Calendar mobile website looks like it's a decade old. For Google Maps, you can use something like HERE WeGo, which is a fantastic navigation app.

Now for the last item, which is that some apps won't work correctly, such as Twitter notifications. I didn't have any problems, but I would also rather throw my phone against a brick wall than receive Twitter notifications. A friend of mine drives for DoorDash, and that's an app that wouldn't work because it relies on Google Maps.

It took me a day or so to get things just the way that I like them, but once I did, I was fine without Google services. For the apps that I actually use, and for how I use them, everything worked fine.

Performance and battery life

The Huawei P40 Pro uses the company's in-house HiSilicon Kirin 990 chipset, which first debuted in the Mate 30 series. All you really need to know is that it's a flagship chipset, which means that it gets the job done. It also comes with 8GB RAM, which is plenty, so it doesn't get choked up.

Battery life is phenomenal as well. At the end of the day, I never had less than 30% left, and that's with the high refresh rate and Smart Resolution turned on. Smart Resolution will automatically lower the screen resolution at times to save power. You can manually set it to 2460x1200 or 1760x800 if you'd like, and you can adjust the refresh rate between 60Hz or 90Hz. My setting of 90Hz and Smart Resolution is the default.

The P40 Pro comes with a 40W charger, so it charges really fast if you need it in a pinch. Note that if you get the regular P40, it only supports 22.5W charging. This device also gets you 27W wireless charging if you've got a Huawei SuperCharge Wireless Charger, and it's life-changing.

For benchmarks, I used Geekbench 4, AnTuTu, and GFXBench. First up is Geekbench 4, which tests the CPU.

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865 does come out on top of this. Samsung's Galaxy S20+ 5G scored 4,294 on single-core and 13,140 on multi-core. This isn't surprising though. Remember, Huawei's flagship chipsets launch in the fall while Qualcomm's launch in the spring, so there's going to be a back-and-forth. The Galaxy S10+ scored 3,520 and 11,177, respectively.

Next up is AnTuTu, which is an all-in-one test.

Both the iPhone 11 Pro and the Galaxy S20+ outperform the P40 Pro on the AnTuTu test, which again is no surprise. Finally, GFXBench tests the GPU.

Conclusion

The first Huawei phone that I got my hands on was the P10, and I fell in love with the Leica camera. It's been a love affair since then, especially with the P-series (although I do love the designs in the Mate series). The thing about smartphone cameras is that this isn't something that you'll be able to fix later on. You won't be able to go back in time and take a better picture.

So yes, when I'm going somewhere where I want to make sure that I take photos that I'll cherish forever, I bring a Huawei phone. To be perfectly honest, it would probably be a P40 Pro+ though, with its dual telephoto lenses.

The P40 Pro is an amazing device with an amazing camera. I do hope that a software update fixes some of the nighttime issues I had with the 5x zoom lens, but as it stands, this feels like mostly an incremental update from the P30 Pro. If you've got a P20 Pro, you should totally buy the P40 Pro. If you've already got a P30 Pro, you're probably good unless you go all out on the P40 Pro+.

But the P40 Pro is another winner from Huawei. The rest of the market still can't touch the low-light performance of last year's P30 Pro, let alone this year's model. This company is light years ahead of its competition, setting standards in camera technology and design.

[criticalotterstudies]

Mostly, Rand would savor Musk, a hyper-logical, risk-loving industrialist. He enjoys costume parties, wing-walking, and Japanese steampunk extravaganzas. Robert Downey Jr. used Musk as a model for Iron Man. Marc Mathieu, the chief marketing officer of Samsung USA, who has gone fly-fishing in Iceland with Musk, calls him “a cross between Steve Jobs and Jules Verne.”As they danced at their wedding reception, Justine later recalled, Musk informed her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” [...] Here’s the nagging thought you can’t escape as you drive around from glass box to glass box in Silicon Valley: the Lords of the Cloud love to yammer about turning the world into a better place as they churn out new algorithms, apps, and inventions that, it is claimed, will make our lives easier, healthier, funnier, closer, cooler, longer, and kinder to the planet. And yet there’s a creepy feeling underneath it all, a sense that we’re the mice in their experiments, that they regard us humans as Betamaxes or eight-tracks, old technology that will soon be discarded so that they can get on to enjoying their sleek new world. Many people there have accepted this future: we’ll live to be 150 years old, but we’ll have machine overlords. [...] In Silicon Valley, a lunchtime meeting does not necessarily involve that mundane fuel known as food. Younger coders are too absorbed in algorithms to linger over meals. Some just chug Soylent. Older ones are so obsessed with immortality that sometimes they’re just washing down health pills with almond milk. [...] Peter Thiel told me about a friend of his who says that the only reason people tolerate Silicon Valley is that no one there seems to be having any sex or any fun. But there are reports of sex robots on the way that come with apps that can control their moods and even have a pulse. The Valley is skittish when it comes to female sex robots—an obsession in Japan—because of its notoriously male-dominated culture and its much-publicized issues with sexual harassment and discrimination. But when I asked Musk about this, he replied matter-of-factly, “Sex robots? I think those are quite likely.” Whether sincere or a shrewd P.R. move, Hassabis made it a condition of the Google acquisition that Google and DeepMind establish a joint A.I. ethics board. At the time, three years ago, forming an ethics board was seen as a precocious move, as if to imply that Hassabis was on the verge of achieving true A.I. Now, not so much. Last June, a researcher at DeepMind co-authored a paper outlining a way to design a “big red button” that could be used as a kill switch to stop A.I. from inflicting harm. Google executives say Larry Page’s view on A.I. is shaped by his frustration about how many systems are sub-optimal—from systems that book trips to systems that price crops. He believes that A.I. will improve people’s lives and has said that, when human needs are more easily met, people will “have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests.” Especially when a robot throws them out of work. [...] Some sniff that Musk is not truly part of the whiteboard culture and that his scary scenarios miss the fact that we are living in a world where it’s hard to get your printer to work. Others chalk up OpenAI, in part, to a case of FOMO: Musk sees his friend Page building new-wave software in a hot field and craves a competing army of coders. As Vance sees it, “Elon wants all the toys that Larry has. They’re like these two superpowers. They’re friends, but there’s a lot of tension in their relationship.” A rivalry of this kind might be best summed up by a line from the vainglorious head of the fictional tech behemoth Hooli, on HBO’s Silicon Valley: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.” [...] Six months after the Puerto Rico conference, Musk, Hawking, Demis Hassabis, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at Berkeley who co-authored the standard textbook on artificial intelligence, along with 1,000 other prominent figures, signed a letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons. “In 50 years, this 18-month period we’re in now will be seen as being crucial for the future of the A.I. community,” Russell told me. “It’s when the A.I. community finally woke up and took itself seriously and thought about what to do to make the future better.” Last September, the country’s biggest tech companies created the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to explore the full range of issues arising from A.I., including the ethical ones. (Musk’s OpenAI quickly joined this effort.) Meanwhile, the European Union has been looking into legal issues arising from the advent of robots and A.I.—such as whether robots have “personhood” or (as one Financial Times contributor wondered) should be considered more like slaves in Roman law. At Tegmark’s second A.I. safety conference, last January at the Asilomar center, in California—chosen because that’s where scientists gathered back in 1975 and agreed to limit genetic experimentation—the topic was not so contentious. Larry Page, who was not at the Puerto Rico conference, was at Asilomar, and Musk noted that their “conversation was no longer heated.” [...] Trying to puzzle out who is right on A.I., I drove to San Mateo to meet Ray Kurzweil for coffee at the restaurant Three. Kurzweil is the author of The Singularity Is Near, a Utopian vision of what an A.I. future holds. (When I mentioned to Andrew Ng that I was going to be talking to Kurzweil, he rolled his eyes. “Whenever I read Kurzweil’s Singularity, my eyes just naturally do that,” he said.) Kurzweil arrived with a Whole Foods bag for me, brimming with his books and two documentaries about him. He was wearing khakis, a green-and-red plaid shirt, and several rings, including one—made with a 3-D printer—that has an S for his Singularity University. Computers are already “doing many attributes of thinking,” Kurzweil told me. “Just a few years ago, A.I. couldn’t even tell the difference between a dog and cat. Now it can.” Kurzweil has a keen interest in cats and keeps a collection of 300 cat figurines in his Northern California home. At the restaurant, he asked for almond milk but couldn’t get any. The 69-year-old eats strange health concoctions and takes 90 pills a day, eager to achieve immortality—or “indefinite extensions to the existence of our mind file”—which means merging with machines. He has such an urge to merge that he sometimes uses the word “we” when talking about super-intelligent future beings—a far cry from Musk’s more ominous “they.” [...] Russell took exception to the views of Yann LeCun, who developed the forerunner of the convolutional neural nets used by AlphaGo and is Facebook’s director of A.I. research. LeCun told the BBC that there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human drives—hunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation. “Yann LeCun keeps saying that there’s no reason why machines would have any self-preservation instinct,” Russell said. “And it’s simply and mathematically false. I mean, it’s so obvious that a machine will have self-preservation even if you don’t program it in because if you say, ‘Fetch the coffee,’ it can’t fetch the coffee if it’s dead. So if you give it any goal whatsoever, it has a reason to preserve its own existence to achieve that goal. And if you threaten it on your way to getting coffee, it’s going to kill you because any risk to the coffee has to be countered. People have explained this to LeCun in very simple terms.” [...] Eliezer Yudkowsky is a highly regarded 37-year-old researcher who is trying to figure out whether it’s possible, in practice and not just in theory, to point A.I. in any direction, let alone a good one. I met him at a Japanese restaurant in Berkeley. “How do you encode the goal functions of an A.I. such that it has an Off switch and it wants there to be an Off switch and it won’t try to eliminate the Off switch and it will let you press the Off switch, but it won’t jump ahead and press the Off switch itself?” he asked over an order of surf-and-turf rolls. “And if it self-modifies, will it self-modify in such a way as to keep the Off switch? We’re trying to work on that. It’s not easy.” I babbled about the heirs of Klaatu, HAL, and Ultron taking over the Internet and getting control of our banking, transportation, and military. What about the replicants in Blade Runner, who conspire to kill their creator? Yudkowsky held his head in his hands, then patiently explained: “The A.I. doesn’t have to take over the whole Internet. It doesn’t need drones. It’s not dangerous because it has guns. It’s dangerous because it’s smarter than us. Suppose it can solve the science technology of predicting protein structure from DNA information. Then it just needs to send out a few e-mails to the labs that synthesize customized proteins. Soon it has its own molecular machinery, building even more sophisticated molecular machines. “If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead. “Only it won’t actually happen like that. It’s impossible for me to predict exactly how we’d lose, because the A.I. will be smarter than I am. When you’re building something smarter than you, you have to get it right on the first try.”