Latest Space Missions (& Other Science Stuff)

And then comes the wars…

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We already have largely autonamous factories and warehouses. We have CAD and CAM. We’re even close to autonamous vehicles and transport systems. It wouldn’t take a lot for a sufficiently advanced AI to design, manufacture, and distribute weapons to its own specification. We need to stop thinking in terms of our own limitations.

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Manufacture? Again, we are at an interface. You can take over the programming of the control unit, but that doesn’t alter the range of motion of a machine. Even in a largely autonomous factory, the enemy AI can’t turn production of cars into production of security droids.

The much bigger risk, IMO, is still going to be disinformation. Wake up tomorrow to “Denmark cedes Greenland to the US.” A flood of ‘news’ on every level from millions of social media posts from ‘happy Greenlanders’ to a flood of eyewitness accounts of US troops taking over ‘peacekeeping’ duties that make sure all difficulties a Greenlander has ever faced are taken care of, getting kittens out of trees and helping citizens across the street. Any contrary reporting is buried under ‘fake news’ claims and counter reports. Who owns Greenland at the end of the day? What can Denmark actually do, land troops?

The point of the exercise here is that while “owning” Greenland really makes little difference because it can always just be taken by force since its value is in location and resources and is unchanged even if it gets completely depopulated in the process, most potential conquests in the current world don’t work that way. A ‘successful’ military conquest of the US gives you 300 million starving people. The value of the US is their production and their consuming capacity as a market, both of which would not exist after a military conquest. That applies to every European country, most of SE Asia, India…everywhere you might think ‘aggressor nation would want that.’

To get the benefit of ‘taking them over’ you have to create a reality where it already happened and everyone is better off for it…so they all just go to work the next day.

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I do not believe they were, and the current “state of the art models” are indeed the strongest indication that they are right. Penrose said it true: The emperor has no clothes.
The problem is, you cannot get to where you describe from the current models. They have no reflection capability. You cannot get any kind of self awareness without the capability to reflect. And all the current breakthroughs are using models that process data along a pipeline, one way. They’re statistical agregators, nothing more, nothing less. That’s certainly useful, for some things, but it’s not the killer app they’re promising it to be. This is nothing but hype. This is nothing but NMS at launch, but with governments throwing billions of investments at private companies. It’s a stockholders wet dream, but it’ll turn into a nightmare for everyone else.

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At thiss stage of the game, I wasn’t thinking in terms of takeover by an enemy AI - you pointed out the limitations of current weaponry, and the difficulties of deploying them by AI. My point was that AI will be perfectly capable of producing weaponry perfectly suited to its needs, and that, with relatively few minor tweaks, we already have the technology required to do it.

And I agree with you about the information / disinformation war. It remains to be seen whether you can fool all of the people all of the time. Lots of people have tried.

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The point that Trump is proving is that you don’t need to fool them all. Approximately half of all Americans can plainly see what he is about, but they have no traction to get through the other half. It seems that delusion generates greater commitment than truth.

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SM is gibbing…wouldn’t want you guys to miss it

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I mean, I’d have a lot to say about the state of “cyber-security” (for lack of a better term) and how “building a house on sand” is a highly charitable description for the way we do information infrastructure. We really don’t need AI to end up in a complete disaster…

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This article is for you @jedidia
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/deepseek-ai-chatbot-test-20066483.php

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Yeah, that about sums it up…

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Now here’s a headline that could easily be misunderstood. From the BBC this morning (I expect this to change sometime today, when they realise what people think they’re claiming)

The actual BBC article is here:

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Looks like it’s already changed :joy:

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It’s only marginally better, though. Certainly Lovecraft has taught us that being in the antarctic and being from space are not mutually exclusive!

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The space whales have to have something to eat. How else can they survive?

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12 miles long? I wonder what the “Run”-time on this feature length epic is :wink:

I wonder if this is where speed reading was invented and therefore the first known attempt of humans creating the active past time of Speed Running your favourite media. There must be a scoreboard on some rocks nearby… :crazy_face:

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All over Europe there are ancient monuments from the stone and bronze ages. Some of them have elaborate carvings - Ireland is particularly blessed in this regard.

Nobody now has the slightest clue what they represent, or why. The knowledge has been completely lost.

The idea that modern tribal elders can offer any insight into artworks from 11,000 years ago is just ludicrous. It has everything to do with politics, and nothing of scholarship.

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To be honest, “Significant changes” is probably just another tuesday for anybody working on Artemis.
But considering the main investor of the competition now has a large say in government funding, I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t done for. Especially since it should have been done for for a long time now by any reasonable standards.

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