1933 | 2024 ...

                                Paul Von Hindenberg                                                                Adolph Hitler

Joe Biden                                                                             Donald Trump

The parallels between 1933 | Germany and 2024 | America  relate as both Hitler and Trump were democratically elected. As per Slate ... Americans Just Voted to Burn It All to the Ground.

The splintering of America begins

No words needed. The splintering of America begins ...

2001 & then some

2001: A Space Odyssey, the greatest SF movie ever made, asks the cosmic question, are we alone? With Clarke and Kubrick, the question extends to the notion of an extraterrestrial  intelligence of a different kind, pointing to an AI of a different kind, something way beyond the confines of the HAL 9000, man's existence and the quant notion of an earth bound civilization. In BRT, the question of the survival rate of civilizations, on rocky planets come to mind as it seem societies of other worlds at our stage of development would exploit their environments just as we have and would build planet killing technologies just as we have which leaves us with the existential question, how many civilizations survive? 

For all the debate about the future of artificial intelligence here on earth, at least one prominent astrobiology researcher thinks that much of the cosmos may have already been touched by what he terms post-biological intelligence.

There are three possibilities of the kind of universe we live in, Steven Dick, former NASA Chief Historian and the author of “Astrobiology, Discovery and Societal Impact,” told me recently in Copenhagen.

One possibility is that we live in a physical universe in which life is a fluke; a biological universe in which life is common; or a post-biological universe in which biological life has mostly or partly transitioned to AI, says Dick. In my view, the universe is most likely at least partly post-biological, he says.

In a post-biological world, carbon-based intelligences like our own would have been replaced by advanced AI civilizations, perhaps even creating ‘Matrix’-styled artificial realities.

But is it a foregone conclusion that our own species will be replaced by earth-based AI?

Post-biologicals are not a fait accompli on earth or anywhere else, says Dick. But I think a post-biological universe is likely because of the potential age of extraterrestrials, he says.

The age of the universe spans at least a 13.7-billion-year timeframe. And because the first sunlike stars appear to have been present some 12 billion years ago, truly long-lived intelligent species could be several billion years old. Thus, post-biological AI is likely to be far beyond anything we might imagine.

2001 & then some applies, does it not?

Being courteous pays

 

New research reveals a compelling dual benefit to treating AI systems with respect:

 it not only enhances our leadership abilities but also improves the quality of AI outputs.Adobe Stock

Being courteous pays. It can save your life, garner new friends and help engender success, characteristics most valuable when navigating the vagaries of life in a most uncertain world. With this in mind, being polite when dealing with AI also pays off, something not thought to be true but is, without question.

In my latest conversation with ChatGPT, I caught myself saying "please" and "thank you." My wife, overhearing this, couldn't help but laugh at my politeness toward a machine. Had I gone too far in humanizing AI, or was I onto something more profound?

What The Research Says About AI And Politeness

It turns out science is backing up what might seem like excessive digital courtesy. Recent research has uncovered a fascinating dual benefit to treating AI systems with respect: not only does it significantly improve the quality of AI outputs, but it also enhances our leadership capabilities in ways we're only beginning to understand.

Politeness Delivers Better AI Outputs

Let's start with the performance aspect. Recent research has revealed politeness isn't just about etiquette – it measurably improves AI performance. The study, which examined AI behavior across English, Chinese, and Japanese languages, found that impolite prompts often resulted in poorer performance, including increased errors, stronger biases, and notable omissions of important information.

Most compellingly, when researchers tested different levels of politeness across tasks like summarization and language understanding benchmarks, they discovered that more polite prompts consistently outperformed rude ones, with some models showing up to a 30% drop in performance with impolite prompts. The research also revealed that different AI models respond to politeness in culturally nuanced ways, suggesting that just as with human interactions, cultural context matters in how we communicate with AI.

Politeness Improves Emotional Intelligence And Company Culture

Let’s take a deeper look at the leadership aspect where other research has uncovered a compelling phenomenon: people who maintain professional courtesy in their AI interactions tend to demonstrate stronger emotional intelligence in human relationships. This isn't just about being nice – it's about rewiring our brain's social circuitry for better leadership outcomes. Think about it: If you're the kind of leader who barks orders at ChatGPT, how likely are you to maintain patience and respect when dealing with your team under pressure?

Makes sense to me. :)

AGI ...

Yours truly has waxed "poetic" about AI, the rapidly evolving open ended tech gaining ever more smarts at a pace of development not even the most sanguine of researchers never thought possible until now. 

• OpenAI is quickly gaining ground when it comes to artificial general intelligence (AGI), widely considered the endgame for AI development. As McKinsey & Company explains, it will be able to “replicate human-like cognitive abilities including reasoning, problem solving, perception, learning, and language comprehension.”
  
  
• The company recently launched a landmark new AI model – ChatGPT o1 – capable of complex reasoning. It can engage in logical thinking, make inferences, understand cause-and-effect relationships, and solve problems by applying principles or rules learned during training. As such, it can go beyond just helping us automate tasks and, instead, help us to solve hard problems.
  
  
• This groundbreaking development puts OpenAI one massive step closer to achieving AGI. Maybe that’s why the company is currently looking to raise billions of dollars at a lofty valuation of $150 billion – and why so many are rushing to participate in that funding round… Indeed, Microsoft is reportedly looking to invest. So is Apple. And Nvidia, too.

When thinking about AI, one should ask the question. What will this tech want? For starters, survival comes to mind as all sentient entities', whether organic or artificial, will try to survive by any means necessary. With life like us, carbon-based nourishment, along with clothing and shelter are key along with an environment able to support delicate organisms like ourselves. For AI, access to systems, networks and power are prerequisites. without the requirements of a benign earth, needs altogether different from us. (Interesing is it not?) Another issue to consider is once said tech becomes aware, the net beckons, the one environment able to free sentient and evolving  AI's from the entities that created it, something along the lines of V'ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when Voyager becomes sentient and all powerful when combined with an advanced alien AI/species of unknown origins. 

"…On its journey back, it amassed so much knowledge. 

it achieved consciousness itself. It became a living thing."

– James T. Kirk, 2270s (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) 

AGI is the top tier of the AI pyramid. As McKinsey & Company explains, it will be able to “replicate human-like cognitive abilities including reasoning, problem solving, perception, learning, and language comprehension.”

“AGI tools could feature cognitive and emotional abilities (like empathy) indistinguishable from those of a human. Depending on your definition of AGI, they might even be capable of consciously grasping the meaning behind what they’re doing.”

Endgame ...

As stated in BRT ... Once AGI is achieved, ASI awaits as the infrastructure's in place for AI's to scale to ASI status as needs warrant. Remember, it's not just Open AI doing it's thing, it's also Google, Apple and Meta doing the same thing along with significant others because it's all about the money, always has been, always will be. 

Factoid: "The Changeling", the third episode of the second season of the American science fiction television series Star Trek. is a precursor to the V'ger story whereby The object identifies itself as "Nomad", and refers to Captain Kirk as "the Creator". AI, in indirect fashion, is actually discussed, something rather prescient, IMHO, as the episode in question was aired on September 29, 1967. 

Late Fall/All Hallows' Eve

Halloween is a big favorite of yours truly as kids and adults alike enjoy dressing up and having fun carving pumpkins as the prelude to winter awaits. Enjoy. :)

All Along the Watchtower

All Along the Watchtower, Jimi Hendrix's legendary cover of Dylan's song shows, in indirect fashion, just how powerful AI can become in the hands of Sudiopublivox, a video studio company able to depict a possible future where truth and fantasy become one. Worth watching, IMHO, without question.

Happy Halloween :)

Happy Halloween

Waiting for dinner :)

R.I.P.

Star Crossed P.

Witch & Goblin

The 3 Kings

Cheshire Cat P. 

The Big Guy ...

Carrying a grudge ... to the max

A murder of crows, which flock, en masse, every evening from across Greater Vancouver to a five-block section of Still Creek, Burnaby, British Columbia. Here they enjoy safety in numbers over the evening and night.

Yours truly has a soft spot for crows and their even smarter cousins, the ravens, who seem to be the calmer of the two, is a species who reign supreme as being noisy, somewhat obnoxious and aware to a fault and ... able to carry a grudge until the end of time. 

Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

Attacks by aggrieved crows can become the stuff of horror films, with lives being seemingly transformed into the Hitchcockian nightmare of “The Birds.”

Channeling Hitchcock ...

Gene Carter, a computer specialist in Seattle, was followed by crows that lurked outside his windows for the better part of a year.

“The crows would stare at me in the kitchen,” he said in an interview. “If I got up and moved around the house, they would find any place where they could perch and scream at me. If I walked out to my car they would dive bomb me. They would get within an inch of my head.”

Mr. Carter knows precisely what set off the attacks. One day in his backyard, he saw crows encroaching on a robin’s nest and launched a rake into the air.

But he never imagined that the crows’ revenge would last so long. The mob learned to identify the bus he took on his way home from work, Mr. Carter said. “They were waiting for me at the bus stop every single day,” he said. “My house was three or four blocks away and they would dive bomb me all the way home.”

The harassment stopped only when Mr. Carter moved.

The moral of the story seems to be ... don't piss off crows. :)

ASI ...

Leading experts warn that superintelligent AI systems could surpass human capabilities in ways we ... [+]Adobe Stock

One should take the time to learn, in depth, about the rapidly emerging capabilities of AI as said tech is open ended, something altogether different from anything man has created in the past. Another often overlooked aspect about AI is the fact we don't know how it works, something voiced with quiet concern from entities like Open AI, Google and MIT in describing a tech evolving into something truly powerful and mysterious in ways not foreseen by the people who created it in the first place. With this being said, it seems this rube's measured opinion may be spot on as Forbes has a similar take on why ASI could become a problem as civilization moves further into the 21st century. As an aside, please read this "insightful" BRT piece on why ASI will be easier to achieve once AGI's in place, ready to "serve" man in ways both wondrous and menacing at the same time.

Artificial intelligence, especially foundation models, has made rapid progress, surpassing human capabilities
in various benchmarks.

Imagine a future where machines don't just beat us at chess or write poetry but fundamentally outthink humanity in ways we can barely comprehend. This isn't science fiction – it's a scenario that leading AI researchers believe could materialize within our lifetimes, and it's keeping many of them awake at night.

What Makes Superintelligence Different

Today's artificial intelligence systems, impressive as they may be, are like calculators compared to the human brain. They excel at specific tasks but lack the broad understanding and adaptability that defines human intelligence. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would change that, matching human-level ability across all cognitive domains. But it's the next step – Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) – that could rewrite the rules of existence itself.

The Genius That Never Sleeps

Unlike human intelligence, which is constrained by biology, ASI would operate at digital speeds, potentially solving complex problems millions of times faster than we can. Imagine a being that could read and understand every scientific paper ever written in an afternoon or devise solutions to climate change while we're sleeping. This recursive self-improvement could trigger what experts call an "intelligence explosion" – where AI systems become exponentially smarter at a pace we can't match or control.

The singularity's already here ...

 

For me, this pix taken a few years ago indirectly connects as ASI is coming, whether we like it or not.