This Week In Science & Technology


"recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one - not even their creators - can understand, predict, or reliably control".

You mean we don't just turn it off or bomb it like Skynet?
 

Let's get rid of the rest of Chinese software and Chinese programmed apps. From now on we will only rely on ones programmed by Russians Iranians North Koreans Indians.
 

Fox was fined for fake news. What happens when you don't even use real events or people anymore and create an interview out of thin air?

Next on David Letterman...Sammy Davis Jr.
 

"SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy test flight on April 20 blew up the company’s launch pad, hurling chunks of concrete and metal sheets thousands of feet away into sensitive habitat, spreading particulate matter including pulverized concrete for miles, and sparking a 3.5-acre fire on state park lands near the launch site."

....oops.
 

"We're biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it's as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person."

Didn't think about it that way...

"Even if everybody in the US stopped developing it, China would just get a big lead,"

...okay so no one will do anything then.
 

Trigger warning: This one could send Fwiffo Fwiffo straight into paranoid overdrive.

TL/DR: ChatGPT can read your thoughts.

I don't have $39.95 to buy the article.

It would be nice if they developed the opposite end of this technology. The decoder can read my thoughts and then have a plug into staff members' cortex so they can instantaneously understand what I really want them to f*cking do instead of repeating it in person, on e-mail, in a meeting, on the phone 7x.
 

"The researchers noted that during the study, Oskam regained the ability to walk with crutches even when the technology was turned off. They believe the implant system may have activated pathways in his brain that had gone dormant but were still anatomically intact."

Nerves can be fixed.
 

USA: 2025.
China: 2030.

"The fresh crew includes a civilian for the first time. All previous crew members have been in the People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the country’s ruling Communist Party."

“'Personally, I regret that the U.S. Congress has relevant motions banning cooperation in aerospace between the U.S. and China. I very much regret that personally,' he said."

Bad US, bad.
 

"'Advancements in AI will magnify the scale of automated decision-making that is biased, discriminatory, exclusionary or otherwise unfair while also being inscrutable and incontestable,'..............'People will be concerned by the reports that AI poses existential risks, like pandemics or nuclear wars.'"

I don't think we need AI to help us leak/ignore/mishandle bacteria and viruses. Look how we reacted as a race to coronavirus.

Given the political climate these days we are quite capable lobbing nuclear weapons at each other as just plain old humans with a button.
 
Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram, Meta says

"The tech company made the announcement on Thursday, the same day the bill received royal assent. The law will force tech giants like Meta and Google to pay news outlets for posting their journalism on their platforms."

A fight for those precious advertising dollars.

That said I never use social media to get to news articles. Google - maybe because I sometimes use the Google News search. I do know one person who keeps sending me screenshots of Instagram posts of news posts because he can't be bothered to actually go to the media company's website to read the article. Too much movement of the eyes from left to right.
 

"TikTok, for its part, has said it has a 'zero tolerance' approach to human smuggling and has dedicated "significant investment" to finding and removing such content, with offending accounts permanently banned. The two videos mentioned in this story have already been removed, only to be swiftly replaced by others with similar content."

It's all a conspiracy by the Chinese to encourage migrants to flood American borders.
 

"'I've seen to the extreme where one company redeveloped their own pipe,' he says. 'Literally just a plastic pipe to transfer water through. 'I was like, 'I think the pipe has been developed'."

R&D.

'What people don't often hear about vertical farming, though, is how an ability to care for plants, regardless of what technology you use, really matters, adds Mr Lefsrud. He says he has occasionally been called in by firms fretting over copious trays of crops that have started to die.

'You need somebody who's going to be full-time,' he has told them, explaining that farming means giving constant attention to living things - not just firing up a few gadgets and waiting for the profits to roll in argues Mr Lefsrud. 'You have to be growing them properly all the time. You can't go, 'I'm not gonna work this weekend because I want to have a party' - and all the plants die on you. Which I've seen repetitively,' he says."

You mean farming is a 7 days/week job? AI and robots can't feed mee?
 

Now all we need is a robot AI with dodgy morals and a panache for law enforcement brutality to enforce it.
 

The space agency said on Monday its huge dish in Australia's capital, Canberra, was trying to detect any stray signals from Voyager 2. It takes more than 18 hours for a signal to reach Earth from so far away.

The antenna will also bombard Voyager 2's area with the correct command, in the hope it makes contact with the probe, said Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager missions.

Otherwise, Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation multiple times each year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth. The next reset is due on 15 October, which Nasa says 'should enable communication to resume'"

That's pretty smart.
 
Meta permanently ending news availability on its platforms in Canada starting today

I guess it didn't help they were negotiating with a minister in the cabinet who recently got reshuffled. I go to the actual news media site to get my news and at best use Google News to find the one that is most "truthful". But it'll affect some of my younger friends whose idea of news is to follow their Instagram account and read the 300 character synopsis of the real article replete with hashtags.
 
Years ago, Facebook could serve as a pretty good news aggregator if you worked the algorithms right. At some point they modified those algorithms to promote more ‘personal content’. I think that’s when they lost a lot of younger people, leaving it for the boomers to post about what they ate for dinner? which body parts are aching today or what establishment provided them with bad service.
 
Years ago, Facebook could serve as a pretty good news aggregator if you worked the algorithms right. At some point they modified those algorithms to promote more ‘personal content’. I think that’s when they lost a lot of younger people, leaving it for the boomers to post about what they ate for dinner? which body parts are aching today or what establishment provided them with bad service.

Oh - people used that? I was avoiding Facebook's news highlights ever since the Hillary elections when there were reports they were designed to promote propaganda for one side or another. Was it Cambridge Analytics?

I only use Facebook now to look at the photographs of my relatives.

I use Facebook Messenger with one of my uni mates because his mobile doesn't have data to receive photographs. Otherwise it's all geriatric people who use it as a communications tool.

They bought WhatsApp and Instagram and I forget what else but they never really put it all together or deviated from the I need to sell adverts business model.
 

"Nelson said he wished Russia well with its mission, noting the two countries have a long history of cooperation when it comes to space travel.

There is a potential dark side of the moon race if the U.S. isn't the first country to land astronauts in the desired area. Nelson said he has concerns that China could try claim the territory if it gets there first.

'I don’t want China to get to the south pole first with humans and then say, 'This is ours; stay out,'"

Russia OK. China not OK.
 

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