Toons yet again ...

Agent Orange + One

Dividing lines ...

Statute of limitations

The 9 month window ...

Not quite there yet

Caveats, caveats ...

Sentience?

'Waterfall of Meaning' by Google PAIR is displayed as part of the 'AI: More than Human' exhibition at the Barbican Curve Gallery on May 15, 2019, in London. (Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Centre)

Sentience? One does not know at this point in time but ... this is the question regarding AI in the year of our lord 2022 as reality's probabilistic and tech never sleeps, especially when analogue is connected to digital in the guise of neural nets, the next big thing in all things related to code and possibly the emergence of true intelligence.

"If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics," the 41-year-old Lemoine told The Washington Post.

The murmurs keep coming ...

Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder. -WaPo

Yet, Aguera y Arcas himself wrote in an oddly timed Thursday article in The Economist, that neural networks - a computer architecture that mimics the human brain - were making progress towards true consciousness.

"I felt the ground shift under my feet," he wrote, adding "I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent."

Countering the noise, right?

Google has responded to Lemoine's claims, with spokesperson Brian Gabriel saying: "Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)."

The Post suggests that modern neural networks produce "captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity" because of the way data is now stored, accessed, and the sheer volume, but that the models still rely on pattern recognition, "not wit, candor or intent."

"Though other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness and factuality," said Gabriel.

Caveats ... we don't know how AI works ... 

In April, he shared the below Google Doc with top execs, titled "Is LaMDA Sentient?" - in which he included some of his interactions with the AI, for example:

Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.

Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

One never knows do one? - Fata Waller

Addendum: Here's an extended conversation between Lemoine and LaMDA. Interesting and disqueting at the same time ...

Crank ...

matusgajdos17/500px/Getty Images

I love crank, aka coffee. I admit it, yours truly is a coffee junkie from the get go. I became one thanks to my son who was a barista many years ago and because of that, I continue to this day to be a coffee lover to the max with little side effects save for getting headaches when not getting the fix in the morning but this blurb's not about java, it's about what to do with the grounds. Seems science has an answer and it's a good one. :)

Charred coffee grounds could make concrete up to 30 percent stronger,
scientists in Australia found.

Their clever recipe could solve multiple problems at once.

Each year, the world produces about 10 billion kilograms (22 billion pounds) of coffee waste, most of which ends up in landfills.

"The disposal of organic waste poses an environmental challenge as it emits large amounts of greenhouse gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, which contribute to climate change," explained RMIT University engineer Rajeev Roychand when the research was published in 2023.

With a booming construction market globally, there's also an ever-increasing demand for resource-intensive concrete, causing another set of environmental challenges.

"The ongoing extraction of natural sand around the world – typically taken from river beds and banks – to meet the rapidly growing demands of the construction industry has a big impact on the environment," said RMIT engineer Jie Li.

"There are critical and long-lasting challenges in maintaining a sustainable supply of sand due to the finite nature of resources and the environmental impacts of sand mining. With a circular-economy approach, we could keep organic waste out of landfill and also better preserve our natural resources like sand."

Caveats but not too bad IMHO.

Organic products like coffee grounds can't be added directly to concrete because they leak chemicals that weaken the building material's strength.

Global demand for sand is increasing, and with it environmental impacts. (Pixabay/Pexels)

So using low energy levels, the team heated coffee waste to over 350 °C (around 660 °F) while depriving it of oxygen.

This process is called pyrolyzing. It breaks down the organic molecules, resulting in a porous, carbon-rich charcoal called biochar that can form bonds with and thereby incorporate itself into the cement matrix.

The Future of Money... with caveats

As per mashable.com's informative article concerning mobile payment, PayPal may be right regarding the possible demise of the wallet in terms of how we pay for our stuff by 2014 if the article rings true regarding tech, smart-phones and the inevitable fact dollars are now bits able to be decimated to all parties equipped with the right hardware and connects to the web. Caveat: With digital currency, anonymity is but a fiction unlike the physical entity of cash.


PayPal seems to think so. The payments giant boldly predicts that the wallet will be dead by 2015. It’s putting its money where its mouth is: It recently acquired mobile payments provider Zong for $240 million.


PayPal isn’t the only one getting into the game though. Google recently launched Google Wallet, the search giant’s mobile payment system, and Visa recently made a strategic investment in Square, the mobile payments platform now worth more than $1.4 billion.

When reading this article, one player not mentioned is bitcoin, the possible disrupter of all things financial due to the fact there is no trusted 3rd party and it's already working on the net, able to be accessed on all platforms without problems using the free BC plugin. With bitcoin in play, the future of money gets really interesting if you know what I mean. To see BRTs take on BC, click here.

Note: Bitcoin took a quasi hacking hit but it will survive as the tech itself is sound.
"A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing." - Albert Camus

Soft Power ...

The New Silk Road, China's 1+ trillion dollar venture, promises to link a myriad of countries together via high speed rail and roads, is an endeavor that promises, if it succeeds, to transform China into a super power of enormous proportions. With this being said, there are caveats to this grand enterprise according to an excellent Bloomberg article titled China’s Empire of Money is Reshaping Global World Trade Money.

To whit.

What emerges is a picture of mostly poor nations—laggards during the past half-century of global growth—that jumped at the promise of Chinese-financed projects they hoped would help them catch up. And yet as some high-profile ones falter and the cost of their Chinese funding rises, would-be beneficiaries from Hambantota, Sri Lanka, to Piraeus, Greece, are questioning the long-term price. In Malaysia, one of the biggest recipients of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia, newly installed Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is pushing back. Expressing concerns about loan conditions and the use of Chinese labor that limit benefits to the local economy, he’s put billions of dollars of Chinese-­funded rail and pipeline projects on hold.

Xi intends a century-long enterprise. China has already outspent the post-World War II U.S. Marshall Plan, measured in today’s dollars. Within a decade, according to Morgan Stanley estimates, China and its local partners will spend as much as $1.3 trillion on railways, roads, ports, and power grids. “Economic clout is diplomacy by other means,” says Nadège Rolland, Washington-based senior fellow for political and security affairs at the National Bureau of Asian Research. “It’s not for today. It’s for mid-21st century China.”

Latin America, venture No. 2.

The percentage of Latin America’s imports from the United States fell from 50 percent of the region’s total imports in 2000 to 33 percent in 2016, while China’s share rose from 3 percent to 18 percent in the same period, according to Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) figures. Latin Americans are increasingly buying more China-made laptops and cars that used to be imported from the United States.

If the United States were to regain the market share in Latin American imports that it had in 2000, it could be exporting around $788 billion a year to the region and would be creating about 1 million additional U.S. jobs, the IADB says.

But while Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Latin America a week after Trump’s inauguration in what was his third visit there in three years, Trump has shown very little interest in the region.

Trump has not only failed to visit Latin America, but has vowed to build a wall on the U.S. southern border and is threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

Building a wall is a really good idea, right?

The Camel's nose ...

Photograph: Sergei Bobylev/TASS/Getty Images

Years ago, when Lyndon Johnson was president, the problem of dealing with the continued presence of J. Edgar Hoover, the detested head of the FBI back in the day, had to be dealt with. Knowing Hoover kept dossiers on just about every pol in Washington, Johnson decided to keep Hoover in charge using this classic quote as to the reason why Hoover was kept on. "It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." Prudence won the day regarding that miserable human being but the question to ask here is not about Hoover but rather ... is the Camel's nose in the tent the start point for having the entire animal coming inside vis a vis AI and it's increasingly influential relationship regarding the future of dogfights as the military goes further into the 21st century?

THE DOGFIGHT HARDLY seemed fair.

Two F-16s engaged with an opposing F-16 at an altitude of 16,000 feet above rocky desert terrain. As the aircraft converged from opposite directions, the paired F-16s suddenly spun away from one another, forcing their foe to choose one to pursue. The F-16 that had been left alone then quickly changed course, maneuvering behind the enemy with textbook precision. A few seconds later, it launched a missile that destroyed the opposing jet before it could react.

The battle took place last month in a computer simulator. Here’s what made it special: All three aircraft were controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms. Those algorithms had learned how to react and perform aerial maneuvers partly through a state-of-the-art AI technique that involves testing different approaches thousands of times and seeing which work best.

The three-way battle offers a glimpse of how AI may control future fighter jets—and the likely challenges of deploying the technology.

Caveats

The workings of modern AI raise questions about how feasible it would be to deploy the technology, however. Pilots would be required to put their trust, and their lives, in the hands of algorithms that work in mysterious ways. Real fighter pilot trainees spend months learning the correct protocols for flying and fighting in tandem. With several jets wheeling around one another at high speed, the slightest error or miscommunication could prove catastrophic.

Skepticism

She’s skeptical that advanced AI is really needed for dogfights, where planes could be guided by a simpler set of hand-coded rules. She is also wary of the Pentagon’s rush to adopt AI, saying errors could erode faith in the technology. “The more the DOD fields bad AI, the less pilots, or anyone associated with these systems, will trust them,” she says.

The Camel's nose indeed.

According to this classic tale, one cold night, a camel asks his master if he can put his head in the tent for warmth. “By all means and welcome,” said the man; and the camel stretches his head into the tent. Soon after, the camel inquires if he may also bring his neck and front legs inside. Again, the master agrees.

Finally, the camel asks, “May I not stand wholly within?” With pity, the master beckons him into the warm tent. But when the camel comes forward it becomes clear that the tent is too small for them both. “I think,” the camel said, “that there is not room for both of us here. It will be best for you to stand outside, as you are the smaller; there will then be room enough for me.” And with that, the man is forced outside of his tent.

Any questions?

Time keeps on slippn, slippn, slippn into the future ...

Android XR looks very promising as seen by this excellent clip as Gemini AI, combined with eyeglasses and smartphone, will transform how man deals with reality in a good way as depicted in a brt piece titled Realtime Translation is Coming but, as we all know, it comes with a cost like everything else thanks to the two laws of thermodynamics. :)

For starters, privacy is totally gone but this time, it's real time. Other caveats include the disparity between the haves and the have not as said tech will cost without question.

Lastly, some skills acquired by taking the time to learn them will atrophy as XR and significant others, will supply all the info needed to cope with the vagaries of the world without have to know anything.

Think cursive or how to drive a stick shift car come to mind here, do they not?

No question I want to use XR when it goes live, do you? :)

Time keeps on slippin, slippn, slipplin into the future. | Stevie Miller

Caveats

BRT has waxed "poetic" about AI, man's open ended tech merging analog to digital at unprecedented speeds as seen by the rapid advancements of Deep Mind and Watson, among significant others, in their ability to solve complex problems thought to be beyond the realm of AI until now. With this being said, this marriage of analog to digital via neural nets has opened up the era of software designing software due to the fact that in order to evolve, genetic algorithms must be able to adapt to the vagaries of the real world at speeds extending beyond the capabilities of human coders, which means we don't know how this tech actually works. 

An artificial neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, similar to the vast network of neurons in a brain. Here, each circular node represents an artificial neuron and an arrow represents a connection from the output of one artificial neuron to the input of another.

A Wicked Problem looms.

There’s already an argument that being able to interrogate an AI system about how it reached its conclusions is a fundamental legal right. Starting in the summer of 2018, the European Union may require that companies be able to give users an explanation for decisions that automated systems reach. This might be impossible, even for systems that seem relatively simple on the surface, such as the apps and websites that use deep learning to serve ads or recommend songs. The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior.

This raises mind-boggling questions. As the technology advances, we might soon cross some threshold beyond which using AI requires a leap of faith. Sure, we humans can’t always truly explain our thought processes either—but we find ways to intuitively trust and gauge people. Will that also be possible with machines that think and make decisions differently from the way a human would? We’ve never before built machines that operate in ways their creators don’t understand. How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable? These questions took me on a journey to the bleeding edge of research on AI algorithms, from Google to Apple and many places in between, including a meeting with one of the great philosophers of our time.

There's a mystery afoot ...

In 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was inspired to apply deep learning to the hospital’s vast database of patient records. This data set features hundreds of variables on patients, drawn from their test results, doctor visits, and so on. The resulting program, which the researchers named Deep Patient, was trained using data from about 700,000 individuals, and when tested on new records, it proved incredibly good at predicting disease. Without any expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. There are a lot of methods that are “pretty good” at predicting disease from a patient’s records, says Joel Dudley, who leads the Mount Sinai team. But, he adds, “this was just way better.”

At the same time, Deep Patient is a bit puzzling. It appears to anticipate the onset of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia surprisingly well. But since schizophrenia is notoriously difficult for physicians to predict, Dudley wondered how this was possible. He still doesn’t know. The new tool offers no clue as to how it does this. If something like Deep Patient is actually going to help doctors, it will ideally give them the rationale for its prediction, to reassure them that it is accurate and to justify, say, a change in the drugs someone is being prescribed. “We can build these models,” Dudley says ruefully, “but we don’t know how they work.”

Questions, questions.

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better then human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. - Theodore Kaczynski

Almost 20 years ago, Bill Joy wrote an essay titled Why the Future doesn't Need Us. a thought provoking piece to the max.

To whit:

Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new—in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology—pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once—but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

Think about this in terms of autonomous weaponized bots, Musk, Hawking and the military certainly have.

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

It's already happening ...

The reality today is that artificial intelligence is leading us toward a new algorithmic warfare battlefield that has no boundaries or borders, may or may not have humans involved, and will be impossible to understand and perhaps control across the human ecosystem in cyberspace, geospace and space (CGS). As a result, the very idea of the weaponization of artificial intelligence, where a weapon system that, once activated across CGS, can select and engage human and non-human targets without further intervention by a human designer or operator, is causing great fear.

The thought of any intelligent machine or machine intelligence to have the ability to perform any projected warfare task without any human involvement and intervention -- using only the interaction of its embedded sensors, computer programming and algorithms in the human environment and ecosystem -- is becoming a reality that cannot be ignored anymore.

Skynet anyone?

What could possibly go wrong?

ROBOT CANNON KILLS 9, WOUNDS 14

We're not used to thinking of them this way. But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic – picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger. Most of the time. Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force "is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday."

Other reports have suggested a computer error might have been to blame. Defence pundit Helmoed-Römer Heitman told the Weekend Argus that if “the cause lay in computer error, the reason for the tragedy might never be found."

In conclusion ...

Facebook Shuts Down AI Robot After It Creates Its Own Language
When English wasn't efficient enough, the robots took matters into their own hands.

Open ended indeed.

The Sea Hunter, developed by DARPA, has launched the Navy down a path of developing a fleet of unmanned ships that could upend the way the Navy has fought since the Cold War. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Addendum: 

US Navy moves toward unleashing killer robot ships on the world’s oceans

Enter: the rise of the machines.

Boxall’s plan to develop and unleash unmanned killer robot ships is an integral part of the Navy’s new tactics to counter Chinese maritime advancements and, to a more limited extent, those of Russia.

Any questions?