a lot more to writing than a prompt
This particular tech seems a lot more than merely providing a prompt. The users also write the story and dialogue. The AI just produces the visuals.
Palantir’s panel at a recent military conference where they joked and patted themselves on the back about the work their AI tools are doing in Gaza was like a scene with human ghouls in the darkest of horror movies.
Estimates vary as to how many of the 30,000-40,000 dead in Gaza are military combatants, but they seem to average about 20%. This seems like a terrible record of failure for an AI tool that touts its precision.
Why does the US government want to reward and endorse this tech? Why aren’t people more alarmed? By any measure, surely Palantir’s demonstrated track record is one of failure. The Israel-Hammas war is the first time the world has seen AI used in significant warfare. It’s a grim indication for the future.
I think Youtube shows what a world is like when everyone can make video content. Most is bad, but some is good, and a small amount is very good. Like any human endeavor.
A particularly aggressive form of colorectal cancer runs in my family. My grandmother, an aunt, and other relatives have all died of it in their fifties.
This is still at the clinical trial stage, but the approach could work for many other types of cancer too. Fingers crossed it’s as successful as possible, and available as a treatment very soon.
It’s still early days for this tech. Right now its maximum output is 800W, which is not a lot. OP mentions this delivering 3kWh on a typical day, about 10% of a typical US household’s consumption.
But it’s the direction of travel that is interesting here. This will get better, and cheaper. Then systems like it will be able to deliver 25% of daily consumption, then half. All with affordable systems you can install and set up yourself.
Many people have nightmares about dystopian and apocalyptic futures. I would feel safer in a world where electricity production was decentralized and could survive major disasters.
Thanks Everett. We’ll be in touch soon.
The US has imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, and the EU is considering increasing its tariffs. I’m sympathetic to the worker/industry protection argument, but many people will look at decent EVs being sold in China for $15,000 & feel they are being cheated.
The Unitree G1 base model is priced at $16,000. It doesn’t often get talked about in discussions of robots, but I think Chinese manufacturing capability is very important. They will likely be the first to make affordable humanoid robots that take off at the consumer level and sell in the millions.
Thanks Philofuel. Like I said above. We’ll get back to people in a couple of weeks or so.
Thanks threelonmusketeers. We haven’t thought about how to organize contributions yet. We’ll leave this up for a couple of weeks and sort it out when we see how many people want to help.
There are surprising edge-cases for life on Earth. Microbes that live off the energy from undersea vents for example. Tidally locked planets may have day-night border zones that are habitable. I think it’s worth spreading the net wide. We don’t know for sure what’s impossible, and we’re only starting to understand all the myriad ways other solar systems & planetary systems might function.
People have grumbled and put up with Big Tech privacy invasions before, but I wonder if this time is different. Microsoft’s plan for Windows with AI sounds deeply unappealing. The idea of an AI tracking everything you do on your computer might be a red line for many people. Microsoft promised that they wouldn’t harvest or use the data, but that promise has been broken so many times by Big Tech, that many have lost trust.
This article is an interesting look at an alternative path for a private open-source desktop OS. Interestingly, although it’s Linux-compatible, it’s not Linux, and OP says it’s superior.
I suspect lots of people will do more than grumble this time around, and the backlash against AI, data harvesting, and the loss of privacy will grow.
Caveats. It may not have an atmosphere, or if it does, it might be as bleakley unpromising as Venus’s. Still, this is exciting news. I wonder how close we are to detecting evidence of simple microbial life on an exo-planet? It feels like it’s just a matter of time, and could happen any year.
How is this at all like having your own AI…
There’s a certain logic to this. The more useful a personal AI is, the more it knows about your activities, so as to master helping you do them better. I’m not saying I like this new Microsoft feature, but the underlying logic is not exclusive to them - it will be everywhere else in the world too eventually as AI grows.
A great many people will hate this, but they’ll do it anyway. I guess its the logical conclusion of having your own personal AI.
My theory would be that some western people are very disquieted to see China take the lead in various technological fields. When I post in r/futurology on Reddit I constantly observe this in China related comments and discussion.
I’m surprised more people aren’t aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.
Here’s an illustration of it. This is the closest I’ve seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
If advanced alien civilizations exist, then searching for them via their electromagnetic radiation techno-signatures seems an obvious route.
That said, I’ve never been very convinced by the idea of Dyson spheres. Surely if you were that technologically advanced you could think of cleverer ways to generate energy than building some cyberpunk structure that was bigger than a star.
Perhaps, but the researchers say the people who developed the AI don’t know the mechanism whereby this happens.
Lots of people in the world of SEO, marketing, and copywriting are excited about the possibility of creating vast quantities of AI-generated text. They have a problem. Human waking hours are finite, and many of us may be near our upper limit for absorbing new content.
OP examines the other side of this. How new AI’s advances allow us to examine text. It seems obvious to me this will have more profound effects than the ability to generate text. Consider one aspect of this.
AI should allow us to analyze the logic in politicians’ speeches in real-time. There are over a hundred logical fallacies, and they are a standard part of political debate. So much so, if you took all the logical fallacies out of political debate - what would you have left? Soon people may have the ability to easily find out.