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Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Chinese AI Video Generators Unleash a Flood of New Nonconsensual PornEnglish131·6 months agoHow are we supposed to police this? A vast global Orwellian monitoring system seems even worse.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Pentagon to give AI agents a role in planning, operationsEnglish2·6 months agoIndeed, Israel, for one, already uses Made-in-America AI models in war.
Indiscriminately murdering dozens of children a day has been a real advertisement of how brilliant these are.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Chinese breakthrough engine seeks to reduce flight times to half an hourEnglish5·6 months agoI’m guessing if you were going to be able to travel at Mach 16, an entirely new type of airplane architecture, built with new types of material is going to be needed.
Lugh@futurology.todayOPMto Futurology@futurology.today•The lacklustre performance of ChatGPT 4.5 provides further evidence that the era of steady pretraining scaling is over. This has many implications for AI governance.English1·6 months agoYes, I think that is what the problem is here. Some people used to have the idea that more scaling would be enough for reasoning to appear, but that hasn’t happened.
Lugh@futurology.todayOPMto Futurology@futurology.today•Alibaba's Wan2.1, an open-source suite of powerful video generation models that outperform SOTA open-source & closed models such as Sora on key benchmarks — while generating videos at 2.5x the speed.English6·6 months agoMore bad news for investors pouring hundreds of billions into AI companies like OpenAI, and wishing and hoping for moats.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Singapore's biggest bank DBS to cut 4,000 roles as it embraces AIEnglish1·6 months agoGlobal banks will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as artificial intelligence encroaches on tasks currently carried out by human workers, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
I wonder when all this will become a major issue for voters in developed countries?
Lugh@futurology.todayOPMto Futurology@futurology.today•The CEA’s WEST tokamak in France maintained plasma for 22 minutes, setting a new world record and surpassing previous benchmarks by 25%.English1·6 months ago30% of global electricity was from renewables in 2024. It’s already cheaper than most other sources, and keeps getting cheaper.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Chance of 'city-killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 smashing into Earth rises yet again to 3.1%, NASA reportsEnglish9·6 months agoI’ve always wondered, if decades in the future, a terrorist attack might occur by somebody nudging an asteroid towards Earth. I’m not the only person thinking this, it was a major plot point in the TV show ‘The Expanse’.
Lugh@futurology.todayOPMto Futurology@futurology.today•The CEA’s WEST tokamak in France maintained plasma for 22 minutes, setting a new world record and surpassing previous benchmarks by 25%.English2·6 months agoI wonder if fusion powers true usefulness will be when humans are in space? Because you are correct in saying renewables will probably be enough to supply all our needs and more by the 2030s.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Brain implant that could boost mood by using ultrasound to be trialed in Britain.English3·6 months agoWe are used to the idea of drugs being recreationally misused, I wonder will that ever happen to tech like this?
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? Study ups odds we're not alone.English3·6 months agoThat behavior among “advanced” species has always been forward as one solution to the Fermi Paradox.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•A California-based company is transforming stored heat into electricity. Heat2Power (H2P) leverages thermophotovoltaic (TPV) technology through a modular panel.English1·6 months agoI am no expert in any of this, but why do you think it couldn’t work at scale? This company says their tech has advantages in cheapness and efficiency over existing solutions. What is it about what they are doing that will not scale?
Lugh@futurology.todayOPMto Futurology@futurology.today•A Libertarian Island Dream in Honduras Is Now an $11 Billion Nightmare - Prospera touts itself as the world’s most ambitious experiment in self-governance. Critics say its founders have lost their wayEnglish11·6 months agoThe ‘Dark Enlightenment’ is a popular concept among some of America’s technology elite, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It thinks democracy is a failure, and should be replaced by right-wing authoritarianism, preferably led by a dictator or monarch. For obvious reasons, it’s enjoying an ascendancy.
A key idea in Dark Enlightenment thinking is the establishment of hundreds or even thousands of city-state enclaves, the equal of sovereign nations, that could then outnumber the old countries and predominate in a new world order of governance.
Prospera in Honduras is one of the first attempts at making this dream/nightmare (pick according to your political persuasion) come true. Now that the people behind Dark Enlightenment thinking have their hands on the levers of power in the US, it won’t be surprising if there are expanded attempts to set up new libertarian city-states around the world.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Japanese researchers have made a major breakthrough in biohybrid robotics by developing a robotic hand powered by lab-grown muscle tissue.English1·6 months agoReminds me of Westworld too.
Lugh@futurology.todayOPMto Futurology@futurology.today•OpenAI's efforts at pure scaling have hit a wall.English5·6 months agoThere’s an incredible amount of groupthink in American tech. As OpenAI has been anointed the unicorn that will conquer tech, and like Microsoft & Google before it, come to be worth trillions - it must succeed.
So the narrative goes anyway.
Except every step of the way it isn’t happening. Yet again, OpenAI has failed to live up to expectations, and worse, Open-Source AI does everything it does, but for free.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Meta unveils AI models that convert brain activity into text with unmatched accuracyEnglish2·6 months agoThey specifically mention the medical uses in the article, though I am far from trusting any of the big tech companies.
Lugh@futurology.todayOPMto Futurology@futurology.today•The embarrassing failure of the Paris AI Summit - Experts are sounding the alarm — but governments simply won’t listen.English8·6 months agoI am glad the EU is at least trying to do something. The American government looks like it has been thoroughly captured by Big Tech, nothing that will be done in the next four years to rein them in.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•Meta unveils AI models that convert brain activity into text with unmatched accuracyEnglish2·6 months agoI know they are doing this for good, I can’t help feeling a little horrified. I am sure there are some very bad uses for this in future autocracies and police states.
Lugh@futurology.todayMto Futurology@futurology.today•AI is transforming the search for new materials that can help create the technologies of the futureEnglish1·6 months agoThere is so much to worry about with AI, that we often lose sight of the benefits. It’s entirely understandable. American Big Tech’s increasing embrace of Orwellian Authoritarianism is adding to the AI nightmare fuel.
But there is good news too, and this is a demonstration of it.
I wonder is AI developments can speed up this process of going from lab to (hopefully) a therapeutic treatment that is available.