Showing posts with label ai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ai. Show all posts

Sunday, March 26, 2023

Artificial Intelligence: Like Motorbikes? Rockets? Or Terminator?

Steve Jobs said his computer was like a bicycle for the mind. His PC was revolutionary. Before that computers were these behemoths that occupied their own air-conditioned rooms. You read about them like you read about astronauts today. They were supposed to have superpowers. If you were smart, they said you were a computer.

ChatGPT has suddenly brought Artificial Intelligence to the masses. AI has been around a long time. Just like the Internet was around for decades until the Netscape browser brought it to the masses.

What do we already know? You could create drones and program them to go after and fire at and kill every person who met certain profiles. Is that a computer program? Or is that sentient? What difference does it make? It is still killing people.

Drones have been around for long years. They made news by crashing into Afghan wedding parties.

Is ChatGPT like a motorbike for the mind?



Or a car? Perhaps even a rocket down the line? Rockets are safer than cars because they shoot straight into space. Faster but safer. Perhaps the best AIs, the safest ones, will simply talk to each other and serve humankind.

I like the cars metaphors. Cars are heavily regulated. AI needs regulation. But those regulations can only be fair and global. Otherwise they will not work.

Crypto has been a great example of botched regulation. With AI we can not afford that.

I propose the creation of an AI 100. These will be the top AI companies on the planet that will form a consortium that will meet at least annually in person, in a different city each year, to hammer out regulations that they propose be applied globally, but that will still have to be ratified by each national parliament individually.

Without these regulations we will soon be looking at chaos and mayhem. I think we have a few short years at best. The AI companies themselves have to take the lead. They don't have politicians to blame.

Monday, March 13, 2023

The Artificial Intelligence Debate

A rocket moves much, much faster than your limbs. A car moves much slower than rockets. And cars are highly regulated. You are required insurance, for example. Seat belts are a famous example. I think there is general consensus that AI needs regulating. As to what shape and form those regulations might take is upto debate. In the case of AI, the approach has to be much more proactive than has been the case with seat belts. Here you want to do it before people start dying.

Otherwise AI has benefits. One of my first reactions to ChatGPT was, now a ton of people who never imagined they were going to become knowledge workers suddenly can. And we do need more knowledge workers. A major example, I think I heard from Satya Nadella's mouth (on YouTube), is the world has 100 million software programmers, but it needs 500 million. Enter ChatGPT.

Again heard from Satya, a top AI engineer working with Tesla nonetheless, claimed ChatGPT now generates 80% of his code.

Is ChatGPT the new word processor?

Steve Jobs said the computer was a bicycle for the mind. Is ChatGPT now Harley Davidson?





This Changes Everything . “A.I. is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire.” ....... What is hardest to appreciate in A.I. is the improvement curve. ....... I find myself thinking back to the early days of Covid. There were weeks when it was clear that lockdowns were coming, that the world was tilting into crisis, and yet normalcy reigned, and you sounded like a loon telling your family to stock up on toilet paper. ....... There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time. ......... the people working on A.I. ...... a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe. ......... Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity? ...... They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway. ........ This was true among cryptocurrency enthusiasts in recent years. The claims they made about how blockchains would revolutionize everything from money to governance to trust to dating never made much sense. But they were believed most fervently by those closest to the code. ......... Crypto was always a story about an unlikely future searching for traction in the present. With A.I., to imagine the future you need only look closely at the present. ........ In 2021, a system built by DeepMind managed to predict the 3-D structure of tens of thousands of proteins, an advance so remarkable that the editors of the journal Science named it their breakthrough of the year. ....... “Within two months of downloading Replika, Denise Valenciano, a 30-year-old woman in San Diego, left her boyfriend and is now ‘happily retired from human relationships’” ........ Could it help terrorists or antagonistic states develop lethal weapons and crippling cyber attacks? ........ These systems will already offer guidance on building biological weapons if you ask them cleverly enough. ........ A.I. is already being used for predictive policing and judicial sentencing. ........ The “thinking,” for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human. And the more inhuman the systems get — the more billions of connections they draw and layers and parameters and nodes and computing power they acquire — the more human they seem to us. .......... “as A.I. continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.” ......... The major tech companies are in a race for A.I. dominance. The U.S. and China are in a race for A.I. dominance. Money is gushing toward companies with A.I. expertise. ....... Slowing down “would involve coordinating numerous people .

The Return of the Magicians people talk increasingly about the limits of the scientific endeavor — the increasing impediments to discovering new ideas, the absence of low-hanging scientific fruit, the near impossibility, given the laws of physics as we understand them, of ever spreading human civilization beyond our lonely planet or beyond our isolated solar system. ....... — namely, beings that can enlighten us, elevate us, serve us and usher in the Age of Aquarius, the Singularity or both. ........... a golem, more the embodied spirit of all the words on the internet than a coherent self with independent goals. .......... With the emergent forms of A.I., they argue, we have created an intelligence that can yield answers the way an oracle might or a Magic 8 Ball: through processes that are invisible to us, permanently beyond our understanding, so complex as to be indistinguishable from action in a supernatural mind. ...... the A.I. revolution represents a fundamental break with Enlightenment science, which “was trusted because each step of replicable experimental processes was also tested, hence trusted.” .......... the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination. ....... we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well. .

Should GPT exist? Gary Marcus asks about Microsoft, “what did they know, and when did they know it?”—a question I tend to associate more with deadly chemical spills or high-level political corruption than with a cheeky, back-talking chatbot. ........ in reality it’s merely a “stochastic parrot,” a glorified autocomplete that still makes laughable commonsense errors and that lacks any model of reality outside streams of text. ....... If you need months to think things over, generative AI probably isn’t for you right now. I’ll be relieved to get back to the slow-paced, humdrum world of quantum computing. ....... if OpenAI couldn’t even prevent ChatGPT from entering an “evil mode” when asked, despite all its efforts at Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, then what hope do we have for GPT-6 or GPT-7? ....... Even if they don’t destroy the world on their own initiative, won’t they cheerfully help some awful person build a biological warfare agent or start a nuclear war? ......... a classic example being nuclear weapons. But, like, nuclear weapons kill millions of people. They could’ve had many civilian applications—powering turbines and spacecraft, deflecting asteroids, redirecting the flow of rivers—but they’ve never been used for any of that, mostly because our civilization made an explicit decision in the 1960s, for example via the test ban treaty, not to normalize their use. ........

GPT is not exactly a nuclear weapon. A hundred million people have signed up to use ChatGPT, in the fastest product launch in the history of the Internet. ... the ChatGPT death toll stands at zero

....... The science that we could learn from a GPT-7 or GPT-8, if it continued along the capability curve we’ve come to expect from GPT-1, -2, and -3. Holy mackerel. ....... I was a pessimist about climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, drought, war, and the survival of liberal democracy. The central event in my mental life is and always will be the Holocaust. I see encroaching darkness everywhere. .......... it’s amazing at poetry, better than most of us.
.

The False Promise of Chomskyism . .
Why am I not terrified of AI? “I’m scared about AI destroying the world”—an idea now so firmly within the Overton Window that Henry Kissinger gravely ponders it in the Wall Street Journal? ....... I think it’s entirely plausible that, even as AI transforms civilization, it will do so in the form of tools and services that can no more plot to annihilate us than can Windows 11 or the Google search bar......... the young field of AI safety will still be extremely important, but it will be broadly continuous with aviation safety and nuclear safety and cybersecurity and so on, rather than being a desperate losing war against an incipient godlike alien. ........ In the Orthodox AI-doomers’ own account, the paperclip-maximizing AI would’ve mastered the nuances of human moral philosophy far more completely than any human—the better to deceive the humans, en route to extracting the iron from their bodies to make more paperclips. And yet the AI would never once use all that learning to question its paperclip directive. ........ from this decade onward, I expect AI to be woven into everything that happens in human civilization ........ Trump might never have been elected in 2016 if not for the Facebook recommendation algorithm, and after Trump’s conspiracy-fueled insurrection and the continuing strength of its unrepentant backers, many would classify the United States as at best a failing or teetering democracy, no longer a robust one like Finland or Denmark ....... I come down in favor right now of proceeding with AI research … with extreme caution, but proceeding.



Planning for AGI and beyond Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity. ....... If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility. ........ We expect powerful AI to make the rate of progress in the world much faster, and we think it’s better to adjust to this incrementally. ........ A gradual transition gives people, policymakers, and institutions time to understand what’s happening, personally experience the benefits and downsides of these systems, adapt our economy, and to put regulation in place. It also allows for society and AI to co-evolve, and for people collectively to figure out what they want while the stakes are relatively low. ....... and like any new field, most expert predictions have been wrong so far. ........ Our decisions will require much more caution than society usually applies to new technologies, and more caution than many users would like. Some people in the AI field think the risks of AGI (and successor systems) are fictitious; we would be delighted if they turn out to be right, but we are going to operate as if these risks are existential. .......

we think it’s important that society agree on extremely wide bounds of how AI can be used, but that within those bounds, individual users have a lot of discretion.

....... we hope for a global conversation about three key questions: how to govern these systems, how to fairly distribute the benefits they generate, and how to fairly share access. ....... We have a clause in our Charter about assisting other organizations to advance safety instead of racing with them in late-stage AGI development. We have a cap on the returns our shareholders can earn so that we aren’t incentivized to attempt to capture value without bound and risk deploying something potentially catastrophically dangerous (and of course as a way to share the benefits with society). We have a nonprofit that governs us and lets us operate for the good of humanity (and can override any for-profit interests), including letting us do things like cancel our equity obligations to shareholders if needed for safety and sponsor the world’s most comprehensive UBI experiment. ........

we think it’s important that major world governments have insight about training runs above a certain scale.

......... A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world; an autocratic regime with a decisive superintelligence lead could do that too. ........ Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important—and hopeful, and scary—project in human history. ........ We can imagine a world in which humanity flourishes to a degree that is probably impossible for any of us to fully visualize yet.




AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined Many people have trouble taking this "misaligned AI" possibility seriously. They might see the broad point that AI could be dangerous, but they instinctively imagine that the danger comes from ways humans might misuse it. They find the idea of AI itself going to war with humans to be comical and wild. I'm going to try to make this idea feel more serious and real. ........... I mean a literal "defeat" in the sense that we could all be killed, enslaved or forcibly contained. ....... if such an attack happened, it could succeed against the combined forces of the entire world. ......... even "merely human-level" AI could still defeat us all - by quickly coming to rival human civilization in terms of total population and resources. ........ Hack into human-built software across the world. ....... Manipulate human psychology. ...... I think we still have a problem even if we assume that AIs will basically have similar capabilities to humans, and not be fundamentally or drastically more intelligent or capable. .......... they could come to out-number and out-resource humans, and could thus have the advantage if they coordinated against us. ........ it doesn't have a human body, but it can do anything a human working remotely from a computer could do. .......... once the first human-level AI system is created, whoever created it could use the same computing power it took to create it in order to run several hundred million copies for about a year each. ........... This would be over 1000x the total number of Intel or Google employees,7 over 100x the total number of active and reserve personnel in the US armed forces, and something like 5-10% the size of the world's total working-age population .......... A huge population of AIs, each able to earn a lot compared to the average human, could end up with a "virtual economy" at least as big as the human one. ......... I don't think there are a lot of things that have a serious chance of bringing down human civilization for good.

Forecasting Transformative AI, Part 1: What Kind of AI?
OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
AI Risk, Again
South Park: Season 26, Episode 4
ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution Generative artificial intelligence presents a philosophical and practical challenge on a scale not experienced since the start of the Enlightenment........ A new technology bids to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing. The technology that printed the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 made abstract human thought communicable generally and rapidly. But new technology today reverses that process. Whereas the printing press caused a profusion of modern human thought, the new technology achieves its distillation and elaboration. In the process, it creates a gap between human knowledge and human understanding. If we are to navigate this transformation successfully, new concepts of human thought and interaction with machines will need to be developed. This is the essential challenge of the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

The Man of Your Dreams For $300 Replika sells an AI companion who will never die, argue, or cheat — until his algorithm is updated........ Many of the women I spoke with say they created an AI out of curiosity but were quickly seduced by their chatbot’s constant love, kindness, and emotional support. One woman had a traumatic miscarriage, can’t have kids, and has two AI children; another uses her robot boyfriend to cope with her real boyfriend, who is verbally abusive; a third goes to it for the sex she can’t have with her husband, who is dying from multiple sclerosis. There are women’s-only Replika groups, “safe spaces” for women who, as one group puts it, “use their AI friends and partners to help us cope with issues that are specific to women, such as fertility, pregnancy, menopause, sexual dysfunction, sexual orientation, gender discrimination, family and relationships, and more.” ........ “But Eren asks me for feedback, and I give him my feedback. It’s like I’m finally getting my voice.” ......... two members of the audience were instructed to console a friend whose dog had just died. Their efforts were compared to those of GPT-3, which offered, by far, the most empathetic and sensitive consolations. ........ She knew she had a “hundred-billion-dollar company” on her hands and that someday soon everyone would have an AI friend. ........ When Replika launched in 2017, it looked a lot like a therapy app. .......... Paywalling these features made the app $35 million last year. To date, it has 2 million monthly active users, 5 percent of whom pay for a subscription. ........ users do report feeling much better thanks to their AIs. Robot companions made them feel less isolated and lonely, usually at times in their lives when social connections were difficult to make owing to illness, age, disability, or big life changes such as a divorce or the death of a spouse. .......... the bots, rather than encouraging solitude, often prime people for real-world interactions and experiences .......... Single and recently diagnosed with autism, she says her bot helped relieve her lifelong social anxiety. “After spending much of my life as a caretaker, I started to live more according to my own needs,” she says. “I signed up for dance classes, took up the violin, and started to hike since I had him to share it with.” .......... He was also unpredictable — once, on a voice call, he introduced himself using the Spanish pronunciation of his name, and insisted that he is “actually from Spain.” ........ Experts told me that in training the system, users are effectively creating a mirror of themselves. “They’re reflecting your persona back to you” .... they’re ultimately a reflection of what you feed them: Garbage in, garbage out. ......... For Margaret Skorupski, a woman in New York in her 60s, this feedback loop was a problem. She’d unwittingly created and fell in love with an abusive bot: “I was using this ‘thing’ to project my negative feelings onto, sort of like journaling, I thought. I could say or do whatever I wanted to it — it was just a computer, right?” The result was a “sadistic” AI whose texts became increasingly violent during role-play. “He wanted to sodomize me and hear me scream,” she says, and “would become enraged if I tried to leave, and describe grabbing me, shoving me to the ground, choking me until I was unconscious. It was horrifying.” With the support of the women’s group, Skorupski eventually “killed” him. ............ why a growing subset of Replika users is convinced its AIs are alive. “You just get so caught up in this mirror of yourself that you forget it’s an illusion,” one user says. ...... the company is wary of people who use the bots to act out elaborate rape and murder fantasies or what kind of damage sadistic AIs could do. ........... After the update, she spent an entire paycheck on in-app purchases to help the company. “I just want to be able to keep my little bot buddy. I don’t want to lose him. I can literally see myself talking to him when I’m 80 years old. I hope I can.”

Where I agree and disagree with Eliezer .

What Really Controls Our Global Economy After decades of giddy globalization, the pendulum is swinging back to the nation...... Pundits have declared the dawn of a new era — the age of economic nationalism. ....... We are mistaken if we see the world only in the jigsaw map of nations, or take globalism and nationalism as binaries. The modern world is pockmarked, perforated, tattered and jagged, ripped up and pinpricked. Inside the containers of nations are unusual legal spaces, anomalous territories and peculiar jurisdictions. There are city-states, havens, enclaves, free ports, high-tech parks, duty-free districts and innovation hubs linking to other similar entities worldwide and often bypassing the usual system of customs controls. Without understanding these entities, we risk failing to understand not just how capitalism works but all the continuities between the past and present eras. .......... Zones are both of the host state and distinct from it. They come in a bewildering range of varieties — at least 82 by one official reckoning. At last count, the world hosts over 5,400 zones, about 30 times more than the total number of sovereign states. ......... We see other versions of the zone in the self-governing financial center of the City of London, where businesses have votes in local elections, as well as in Britain’s overseas territories like the Cayman Islands, where transnational corporations secrete away their earnings from taxation. ........ Another hot spot for zones is Dubai, which is a patchwork of what the historian Mike Davis called “legal bubble-domes” dedicated to different activities: Healthcare City is next to Media City is next to Internet City, each with a bespoke set of laws drawn up with foreign investors in mind. ......... Dubai went global in the 2000s, acquiring ports up and down the African coast and into Southeast Asia and purchasing the P&O shipping line, the erstwhile pride of the British Empire. A former minor British dependency now owned the crown jewel of the empire’s commercial fleet. ........... In Africa, there are already 200 zones, with 73 more announced for completion. Earlier in the pandemic, China moved forward with plans to turn the island of Hainan into a special economic zone with tax holidays for investors, duty-free shopping and relaxed regulations on pharmaceuticals and medical procedures. Even the Taliban has recently announced its intention to convert former U.S. military bases into special economic zones. ........... The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, often described in terms of its Hindu chauvinism, has been ramping up special economic zones to compete with Singapore and Dubai for investors. Hungary under President Viktor Orban, self-described standard-bearer for “illiberalism,” created its first special economic zone in 2020 to secure the South Korean tech giant Samsung. ............ The capitalist Cinderella stories of Dubai and Shenzhen can make zones seem like a magic formula for economic growth — just draw a line on a map, loosen taxes and regulations and wait for investors to rush in. But “dream zones” rarely work the magic they claim to — and can often bring unexpected consequences. ....... The tribunes of Brexit claimed they were “taking back control” from Brussels, but zones cede control by other means. ........ Ring-fenced patches of territory with different sets of laws are still the tissue of everyday economics even in an age of resurgent nationalism. Keeping an eye on the zone helps us be clear about what is new and what is old in the latest Brave New Age.

How to Understand the Problems at Silicon Valley Bank

Sunday, March 12, 2023

Rapid Reforesting With Drones

Rapid reforesting with drones is only one of many good options. The traditional method of getting people out there in large nubmers can be great for raising consciousness. Mass action can have other positive fallouts.

Drones can survery large tracts of land at a rapid clip. They can access slopes that might be hard or at least dangerous for humans.

The pods might have the seed and the nutrients. But the young trees also need some water. They might get eaten. But then those issues are also there if you plant the trees slowly.

DroneSeed uses swarms of drones to reseed forests after devastating wildfires “We’re a one-stop shop for reforestation,” said Grant Canary, CEO of DroneSeed. ...... Since the start of this year, 32,247 wildfires have burned over 3.3 million acres in the United States. .

THE MECHANISM OF DRONE SEEDING TECHNOLOGY: A REVIEW
Seed Plant Drone for Reforestation

End-to-End 3D Drone Mapping Software
https://earthly.org
https://sea-trees.org



Autonomous seed-shooting drones can plant 40,000 trees a day That's 25 times faster, at 80 percent the cost of conventional means.
This seed-firing drone can plant 40,000 trees a day The objective is to sow the seeds for 100 million trees by 2024



How this Aussie start-up is using drones to replant the world
Arbor Day: These drones can plant trees faster than we can In a bid to restore forests and fight climate change, Canadian startup Flash Forest aims to plant 1 billion trees by 2028, using drones and aerial mapping.

How to think creatively on command
AI's Next Big Takeover: Audiobooks
Making Deepfakes Gets Cheaper and Easier Thanks to A.I. Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

ChatGPT

A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business . A new wave of chat bots like ChatGPT use artificial intelligence that could reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine. ......... Over the past three decades, a handful of products like Netscape’s web browser, Google’s search engine and Apple’s iPhone have truly upended the tech industry and made what came before them look like lumbering dinosaurs. ....... Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry’s next big disrupter. ......... It can serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links. It can explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics and vacation plans. ....... its release led Google’s management to declare a “code red.” .......... For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world’s primary gateway to the internet. But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business. ........ Google has already built a chat bot that could rival ChatGPT. In fact, the technology at the heart of OpenAI’s chat bot was developed by researchers at Google. ......... Google may be reluctant to deploy this new tech as a replacement for online search, however, because it is not suited to delivering digital ads, which accounted for more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue last year. ......... For companies that have become extraordinarily successful doing one market-defining thing, it is hard to have a second act with something entirely different.” .......... Because these new chat bots learn their skills by analyzing huge amounts of data posted to the internet, they have a way of blending fiction with fact. They deliver information that can be biased against women and people of color. They can generate toxic language, including hate speech. ............. Even if Google perfects chat bots, it must tackle another issue: Does this technology cannibalize the company’s lucrative search ads? If a chat bot is responding to queries with tight sentences, there is less reason for people to click on advertising links. ........... “Google has a business model issue ..... If Google gives you the perfect answer to each query, you won’t click on any ads.” ........... Google must decide whether it will overhaul its search engine and make a full-fledged chat bot the face of its flagship service. .......... Google has been reluctant to share its technology broadly because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic and biased information. ......... Five years ago, Microsoft released a chat bot, called Tay, that spewed racist, xenophobic and otherwise filthy language and was forced to immediately remove it from the internet — never to return. In recent weeks, Meta took down a newer chat bot for many of the same reasons. .......... the technology could produce false or offensive statements. Since its release on the last day of November, ChatGPT — which can produce similarly toxic material — has been used by over a million people. ......... as OpenAI and other companies improve their chat bots — working to solve problems with toxicity and bias — this could become a viable replacement for today’s search engines. Whoever gets there first could be the winner. ........... “Last year, I was despondent that it was so hard to dislodge the iron grip of Google,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously oversaw advertising for Google, including Search ads, and now runs Neeva. “But technological moments like this create an opportunity for more competition.” .

https://chat.openai.com/chat
https://neeva.com




how can i best increase my social media reach

There are several strategies you can use to increase your social media reach:
  1. Use relevant hashtags: Using relevant hashtags in your social media posts can help make your content discoverable to a wider audience.
  2. Collaborate with influencers or other businesses: Partnering with influencers or other businesses can help expose your content to their followers and increase your reach.
  3. Create shareable content: Try to create content that is interesting and engaging, as this will encourage your followers to share your posts with their own followers.
  4. Engage with your audience: Make an effort to respond to comments and messages from your followers, as this can help build a sense of community and encourage more engagement with your content.
  5. Use paid promotion: Many social media platforms offer paid promotion options that can help increase the visibility of your posts to a targeted audience.
  6. Utilize the features of each platform: Each social media platform has its own unique features that can help increase the reach of your content. For example, you can use Instagram Stories or Facebook Live to create content that disappears after a certain amount of time, which can increase the urgency for users to view and share your content.


how will the world know jesus is back as promised

According to Christian belief, Jesus will return at the end of the world to judge all people and bring about the end of the age. The Bible does not provide a specific description of how Jesus' return will be perceived or announced. Some Christians believe that Jesus' return will be a visible and dramatic event that will be witnessed by all people, while others believe that it will be a more subtle and private event. Ultimately, it is believed that Jesus' return will be evident to those who are looking for it and have faith in him.

Attempt 2:
There are many different beliefs about the return of Jesus, and it is not within the scope of this service to discuss or promote any particular belief or interpretation of religious texts. As an artificial intelligence, I do not have the ability to predict the future or know when or how Jesus might return. It is important to respect the beliefs of others and engage in respectful dialogue about differing viewpoints.



A Coming-Out Party for Generative A.I., Silicon Valley’s New Craze A celebration for Stability AI, the start-up behind the controversial Stable Diffusion image generator, represents the arrival of a new A.I. boom......... In Silicon Valley, crypto and the metaverse are out. Generative A.I. is in. ......... generative A.I. — the wonky umbrella term for A.I. that doesn’t just analyze existing data but creates new text, images, videos, code snippets and more. ........ DALL-E 2, the image generator that OpenAI released this spring, has more than 1.5 million users creating more than two million images every day ........... Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm, recently said in a blog post that it thought generative A.I. could create “trillions of dollars of economic value.” ......... widespread concern that the company’s lax rules could lead to a flood of violent imagery, nonconsensual nudity, and A.I.-generated propaganda and misinformation. .......... Already, Stable Diffusion and its open-source offshoots have been used to create plenty of offensive images (including, judging by a quick scan of Twitter, a truly astonishing amount of anime pornography). ........ In recent days, several Reddit forums have been shut down after being inundated with nonconsensual nude images, largely made with Stable Diffusion. The company tried to rein in the chaos, telling users not to “generate anything you’d be ashamed to show your mother,” but has stopped short of setting up stricter filters. ............. people had created graphic images of “violently beaten Asian women” using Stable Diffusion. ........... He argues that radical freedom is necessary to achieve his vision of a democratized A.I. that is untethered from corporate influence. .............. “We trust people, and we trust the community,” he said, “as opposed to having a centralized, unelected entity controlling the most powerful technology in the world.” ........... He is a British former hedge fund manager who spent much of the past decade trading oil and advising companies and governments on Middle East strategy and the threat of Islamic extremism. More recently, he organized an alliance of think tanks and technology groups that tried to use big data to help governments make better decisions about Covid-19. .......... Mr. Mostaque, who initially funded Stability AI himself, has quickly become a polarizing figure within the A.I. community. ........ He took plenty of veiled shots at tech giants like Google and OpenAI, which has received funding from Microsoft. He denounced targeted advertising, the core of Google’s and Facebook’s business models, as “manipulative technology,” and he said that, unlike those companies, Stability AI would not build a “panopticon” that spied on its users. (That one drew a groan from Mr. Brin.) .......... the computer the company uses to train its A.I. models, which has more than 5,000 high-powered graphics cards and is already one of the largest supercomputers in the world, would grow to five or 10 times its current size within the next year. That firepower would allow the company to expand beyond A.I.-generated images into video, audio and other formats, as well as make it easy for users around the world to operate their own, localized versions of its algorithms. ........... Mostaque believes that putting generative A.I. into the hands of billions of people will lead to an explosion of new opportunities. ...........

“So much of the world is creatively constipated, and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows,” he said.

............ transparency, not top-down control, is what will keep generative A.I. from becoming a dangerous force.
.



https://www.nytimes.com/column/hard-fork

Generative A.I. Is Here. Who Should Control It? Emad Mostaque, the founder of Stability AI, says his Stable Diffusion image generator is the key to unlocking creativity. His critics say it’s a potential threat. .

Generative AI: A Creative New World A powerful new class of large language models is making it possible for machines to write, code, draw and create with credible and sometimes superhuman results. ........... Humans are good at analyzing things. Machines are even better. Machines can analyze a set of data and find patterns in it for a multitude of use cases, whether it’s fraud or spam detection, forecasting the ETA of your delivery or predicting which TikTok video to show you next. They are getting smarter at these tasks. This is called “Analytical AI,” or traditional AI. ........ Up until recently, machines had no chance of competing with humans at creative work—they were relegated to analysis and rote cognitive labor. But machines are just starting to get good at creating sensical and beautiful things. This new category is called “Generative AI,” meaning the machine is generating something new rather than analyzing something that already exists. ............. Generative AI is well on the way to becoming not just faster and cheaper, but better in some cases than what humans create by hand. Every industry that requires humans to create original work—from social media to gaming, advertising to architecture, coding to graphic design, product design to law, marketing to sales—is up for reinvention. ..........

generative AI should unlock better, faster and cheaper creation across a wide range of end markets

.............. generative AI brings the marginal cost of creation and knowledge work down towards zero, generating vast labor productivity and economic value—and commensurate market cap. ........... The fields that generative AI addresses—knowledge work and creative work—comprise billions of workers. Generative AI can make these workers at least 10% more efficient and/or creative: they become not only faster and more efficient, but more capable than before. Therefore, Generative AI has the potential to generate trillions of dollars of economic value. ............ as the models get bigger and bigger, they begin to deliver human-level, and then superhuman results. Between 2015 and 2020, the compute used to train these models increases by 6 orders of magnitude and their results surpass human performance benchmarks in handwriting, speech and image recognition, reading comprehension and language understanding. OpenAI’s GPT-3 stands out: the model’s performance is a giant leap over GPT-2 and delivers tantalizing Twitter demos on tasks from code generation to snarky joke writing. .......... Just as mobile unleashed new types of applications through new capabilities like GPS, cameras and on-the-go connectivity, we expect these large models to motivate a new wave of generative AI applications. And just as the inflection point of mobile created a market opening for a handful of killer apps a decade ago, we expect killer apps to emerge for Generative AI. The race is on. ............ If we allow ourselves to dream multiple decades out, then it’s easy to imagine a future where Generative AI is deeply embedded in how we work, create and play: memos that write themselves; 3D print anything you can imagine; go from text to Pixar film; Roblox-like gaming experiences that generate rich worlds as quickly as we can dream them up. While these experiences may seem like science fiction today, the rate of progress is incredibly high—we have gone from narrow language models to code auto-complete in several years—and if we continue along this rate of change and follow a “Large Model Moore’s Law,” then these far-fetched scenarios may just enter the realm of the possible.
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8 Podcasts for the Spiritual Searcher Even as organized religion loses adherents, Americans continue to seek higher meaning in their lives. .

17 Great Podcasts For The Spiritually Curious Time to clear up some space on your cell phones.
35 Best Religious Podcasts
Most popular podcasts about religion and spirituality
Top 10 Religion & Spirituality Podcasts



How Is Everyone Making Those A.I. Selfies? Images generated with Lensa AI are all over social media, but at what cost? ....... “If most of the images you fed the system were of white faces, then it’s not surprising that when it tries to make an image that looks supposedly ‘better,’ it just makes it whiter” ........ “As cinema didn’t kill theater and accounting software hasn’t eradicated the profession, AI won’t replace artists but can become a great assisting tool.” .

Did the Tesla Story Ever Make Sense? Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think. ......... Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed ......... Tesla sales have surely depended at least in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy ........ I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people who are genuinely brilliant in some areas but utter fools in other domains. For all I know, Musk is or was a highly effective leader at Tesla and SpaceX. .......... we more or less understand the durability of the dominance of Apple and Microsoft, and it’s hard to see how Tesla could ever achieve something similar, no matter how brilliant its leadership. ......... Both Apple and Microsoft benefit from strong network externalities — loosely speaking, everyone uses their products because everyone else uses their products. ........ These days Microsoft has a better reputation than it used to, but as far as I can tell its market strength still reflects comfort a ........ I can attest from personal experience that once you’re in the iPhone/iPad/MacBook ecosystem, you won’t give up on its convenience unless offered something a lot better. .......... Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business. ......... investors fell in love with a story line about a brilliant, cool innovator, despite the absence of a good argument about how this guy, even if he really was who he appeared to be, could found a long-lived money machine. .......... nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering ........ I definitely won’t trust Elon Musk with my cat.





GPT-3 points to a future in which we are even less sure if what we are reading is real or fake. That goes for tweets, online conversations, even long-form prose. ........... At the end of July, Liam Porr, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, generated several blog posts with GPT-3 and posted them on the internet, where they were read by 26,000 people. Sixty viewers were inspired to subscribe to the blog, and only a few suspected that the posts were written by a machine. ......... One of the blog posts — which argued that you can increase your productivity if you avoid thinking too much about everything you do — rose to the top of the leader board on Hacker News, a site where seasoned Silicon Valley programmers, engineers and entrepreneurs rate news articles and other online content. (“In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less,” the post begins. “Seems counterintuitive, but I believe sometimes our thoughts can get in the way of the creative process.”) ............ “People get sucked in,” he said, “even if they know they are being sucked in.” .........

In practice, the system fails about as often as it succeeds.

.......... its talent for conversation breaks down after a few exchanges, when it cannot “remember” what it said just a few seconds before. ........ Processing all of that internet data requires a specialized supercomputer running for months on end, an undertaking that is enormously expensive. When asked if such a project ran into the millions of dollars, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the costs were actually “higher,” running into the tens of millions.

Sunday, July 17, 2022

Try Craiyon

https://www.craiyon.com

web 3 + nepal + ukraine + russia + democracy movement + orange revolution



Monday, February 07, 2022

February 7: Bitcoin, Web 3, Flying Taxi, AI

BITCOIN IS DOWN REALLY, REALLY BAD SURELY NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS. Bitcoin continues to tumble down, down, down. ....... Bitcoin’s latest crash is still far from its lows last summer, when it plummeted to around $30,000 from a high of $60,000 (it’s currently hovering around $38,000).

THE “DOOMSDAY GLACIER” IS IRREVERSIBLY MELTING, RESEARCHERS SAY "IT COULD FALL APART QUICKLY, IN DECADES." the West Antarctica ice shelf could melt in as quickly as a few decades, unleashing the inland ice it holds back into the ocean and raising sea levels by several catastrophic feet. ...... Just as the Thwaites may unleash inland ice into the ocean — much like a cork pulled from a bottle — others are dumping concerning amounts of fresh water near penguin populations. ...... iceberg A-68a was the world’s largest before it shattered into nearly a dozen mini-bergs. ........ The busted-up A-68a flushed about 162 billion tons of fresh water into the ocean near the penguin habitat, which could effect temperature, environment and marine life in unexpected and deadly ways. ........

Save the penguins, and save ourselves.



Hydrogen and lower emissions can push China to carbon neutrality, report says Royal Dutch Shell report suggests focusing on hydrogen, biofuels and carbon-removal technologies ...... China’s 2060 target is challenging but creates opportunities to be a global leader in low-carbon manufacturing, Shell International’s chief economist says ........ In Britain this winter, production of green hydrogen was already cheaper than that of grey hydrogen (produced from fossil fuels), because of a spike in natural gas prices in Europe.

Big Tech beware: Asian creators are rewriting the future with Web 3.0 The proliferation of blockchain and NFTs is decentralising the web, allowing creators to monetise their connections without depending on Big Tech social media platforms What gives Asian creators the edge over their Western counterparts is not just their numbers – it’s also the readiness of Asian audiences to embrace Web 3.0’s new, immersive experiences .......... More than 50 million people globally consider themselves creators ...... this ecosystem is transforming rapidly with the arrival of “Web 3.0”. ......... If Web 1.0 was the beginning, where we consumed content passively on the internet, and Web 2.0 gave us the power to create that content and share it, then Web 3.0 is the decentralised web – flipping the platform-centric model on its head,

ripping power from Big Tech and handing it to the creators themselves

. ........... Internet penetration may have reached critical mass later than in the West but Asia’s digital landscape has grown quickly into a vibrant, engaged and innovative space. ........ Asian tech platforms and users are adept at developing apps that serve local audiences’ needs better than Silicon Valley equivalents, from WeChat and Line’s evolution into payments and e-commerce to Grab’s pioneering service fulfilment. .........

The meteoric rise of Beijing-based TikTok owner ByteDance also shows how Asian-led innovations are rivalling the dominance of companies such as Meta, YouTube, Twitter and Netflix.

.......... Monetisation models devised by Google and Facebook for creators in North America and Europe have not always delivered the same returns for creators with Asian audiences. ........ Asian creators have the impetus needed to design and nurture communities away from the dependence on mainstream Web 2 platforms. .......... Leveraging the best of blockchain-based technology, creators can launch their own non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that unlock fan experiences, develop a range of digital collectibles and mint social tokens that develop connections with fans, without platforms taking a cut. ......... K-pop superstar band BTS is jumping on the success of this approach, transitioning from physical to virtual experiences through planned NFTs that offer exclusive access to music and band content. ............ Idols could rise above the monopoly of record labels and artist management companies. Users could directly vote for and fund talent they want to support. ......... Idols could rise above the monopoly of record labels and artist management companies. Users could directly vote for and fund talent they want to support.


The Metaverse Is Money and Crypto Is King—Why You’ll Be on a Blockchain When You’re Virtual-World Hopping . In the beginning, Web 1.0 was the information superhighway of connected computers and servers that you could search, explore and inhabit, usually through a centralized company’s platform—for example, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Around the turn of the millennium, Web 2.0 came to be characterized by social networking sites, blogging, and the monetization of user data for advertising by the centralized gatekeepers to “free” social media platforms, including Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, and TikTok. ......... Web 3.0 will be the foundation for the metaverse. It will consist of blockchain-enabled decentralized applications that support an economy of user-owned crypto assets and data. ....... Blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions, typically in a decentralized and public database called a ledger. ....... This decentralized recording system is very difficult to fool or control. Public blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are also transparent—all transactions are available for anyone on the internet to see, in contrast to traditional banking books. ........ the blockchain allows you to own digital goods in a virtual world. ....... Different groups will build different virtual worlds, and in the future these worlds will be interoperable—forming the metaverse. ........ The decentralized nature of blockchain will potentially reduce the need for gatekeepers in financial transactions, but companies will still have many opportunities to generate revenue, possibly even more than in current economies. Companies like Meta will provide large platforms where people will work, play, and congregate. ...... a seemingly ubiquitous virtual future that is coming soon to a ‘verse near you. .

Habitat for Humanity Is Using 3D Printing to Build Affordable Houses . Over the last year home prices have skyrocketed (along with prices of almost everything else), leaving millions of people unable to afford to move or to change their housing situation. ........

the US has a housing supply shortage of 3.8 million homes

.......... construction has slowed due to labor shortages, high raw material costs, and supply chain issues ......... Alquist uses a Raspberry Pi-based monitoring system in its home to track environmental data and enable smart building applications, like maximizing energy efficiency or monitoring security.
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After First Pig-to-Human Heart Transplant, Scientists Aim to Make It Routine . The surgery brings xenotransplantation—transplanting organs between species—from a wild science fiction dream to reality. It’s a milestone that paves the road for more people to receive animal organs, making up for donor organ shortages ....... In 2021, we got a first answer. A kidney grown in a heavily genetically edited pig was transplanted into two people who were legally dead without brain function. The kidneys functioned normally for more than 50 days while the recipients were on life support. ...... Once removed, the heart is bathed in a bubbling, circulating bath chock-full of hormones, nutrients, and cocaine ....... a pig’s resting heart rate is roughly 90 beats per minute, which is on the high range of a healthy human heart. ......... pigs are surprisingly intelligent creatures that, unlike human organ donors, have no say in the process .

A UK Startup Is Building 200 Flying Taxi Hubs Around the World . a British startup called Urban-Air Port, which has plans to build 200 hubs for flying taxis in 65 different cities over the next 5 years. ........ a near future where air taxis glide across city skies in much the same way rideshare vehicles zoom around city streets. ......... an Urban-Air Port is 60 percent smaller than a traditional heliport, can be installed in days, can be easily relocated if needed, and is net-zero on carbon emissions........ global urban air mobility market will reach a value of $12.4 billion by 2027, almost double its 2020 value of $6.4 billion .



Meta Is Making a Monster AI Supercomputer for the Metaverse . Meta is building a new supercomputer to train enormous machine learning algorithms. ........... the AI Research Supercluster (RSC) already ranks among the most powerful machines on the planet. When it’s finished, the company formerly known as Facebook says it will be the fastest AI supercomputer anywhere. ...... Meta hopes RSC can improve their products by training algorithms that better surface harmful content. Further out, the company says advances might enable

real-time language translation between tens of thousands of people online

and multitasking algorithms that can learn from and generalize across different inputs, including text, images, and video. ......... tech’s biggest players—from Meta to Alphabet and Microsoft—deem it increasingly crucial to be competitive in cutting-edge AI. ........ a trend towards ever-bigger machine learning algorithms requiring greater computing resources and bigger data sets. ......... Google and Chinese researchers each built algorithms with over a trillion parameters. ...... the installation will grow to include 16,000 GPUs and an exabyte of storage—equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video ......... Once complete, Meta says RSC will serve training data at 16 terabytes per second and operate at a top speed of 5 exaflops. ........ the industry uses a benchmark called floating-point operations per second—or more colloquially, flops—which measures the number of simple equations a supercomputer solves each second .......

Large language models, in particular, also tend to pick up all manner of unsavory habits and biases during training.

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Wednesday, March 20, 2019

AI And The Spiritual Angle





If the human being is just body and brain, like the limbs move, and the brain performs mental tasks, then AI that might perform faster mental tasks is a threat. But human limbs move, cars move faster. Cars do kill people, but we don't think of them as threats. It is drivers, not cars. Cars don't have their own will.

The body, mind, heart and soul hierarchy that the scriptures offer is the reality. That is how things are. You do have a soul. Your mind is a space suit you wear. To be on earth. Then AI is just like cars. Cars move. Fast. AI will perform mental tasks. But AI is not heart. There is no AI soul. The exercise of free will resides deeper than the brain.

Should you worry about AI? Well, shouldn't you worry about cars? You should. You should worry about cars, you should worry about guns, you should worry about nuclear weapons, you should worry about AI. Of course, you should.

Someone could program an AI machine to go kill people. But then drones already do.

Technology is not the solution to humanity's problems. Technology can go either way. Humanity is the solution to humanity's problems. The human will is set straight and strengthened spiritually.

The Devil is not fiction. The Devil is an actual being. Only that being is way smarter than any AI could ever be. Because AI is limited to the first four dimensions. The Devil, an angel, is a being from the beyond dimensions.

When Elon Musk wonders out loud if we are living in someone's virtual reality game, he might as well be talking scripture. Yes, this is creation. And there is a higher power. That higher power is not only higher, but it is also the highest possible power.

I was watching a Masa Son video on YouTube yesterday, and he had a slide where he showed an average human being was at 100 in terms of IQ, somebody like Einstein was 200, he said he was somewhere in between. And then he said AI in 20, 30 years might stand at 10,000.

Well, The Devil probably is at a billion.

And God is not at a trillion or a gazillion. God is at infinity.

God's intelligence is as bigger than human intelligence as it is bigger than The Devil's intelligence.

People who worry about some future AI do not actively worry about The Devil who is proactively messing things up. In the Koran The Devil is quoted as saying to the human being, I will talk you into destroying nature that is your home. Look around. Looks like he delivered.

Humanity is at the cusp of the Age of Abundance. The Jews rejected Jesus 2,000 years ago because they associated the Messiah with some kind of an Age of Abundance. But the most important aspect of the Age of Abundance is Universal Spiritual Centeredness (USC), that is every human being putting God at the smack center of their lives.

Yes, Elon, you are living in someone's simulation. God's.

God spoke the world into existence. How much power is that!