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.