Lugh

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[–] Lugh@futurology.today 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is the UK contemplating tariffs on Chinese EVs?, if not that will be one of the few advantages of Brexit, as the EU has just agreed to mandate them.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 2 points 1 month ago

I'm using it more and more and find it very useful. I do a lot of writing for work, AI voice transcription and AI grammar checks are invaluable, not to mention having an AI voice read my writing back as a form of copy editing.

Also great for visual stuff, and for providing sound for videos.

However the hallucination problem is a real roadblock. I would never want to trust the current models of AI with an important decision.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Most western countries have at least half of their economies ruled by free market principles - civil servants ,the military, healthcare in most countries, etc, etc being non-market parts the economy.

The logic of AI and robotics that can do most jobs for pennies on the hour, is that the free market part of the economy will just devour itself from within. It needs humans with incomes to survive, yet by its own internal logic it will destroy those incomes.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 30 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Oh the ladies on "The View" already love her. She'll have no problems with them.

The View and the Real Housewives franchise are guilty TV pleasures I normally hate admitting to in public.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 4 points 1 month ago

When I think about this issue, I sometimes think about future scenarios on a scale of 1 - 10, with 10 being 'most confidence to predict will occur' and 1 being 'least able to definitively predict'.

I give UBI a 4 on that scale. It may well occur, but there are different ways of achieving the same goal, so who knows.

One of the few facts I rank at 10, is that the day is coming when AI and robotics will be able to do most work, even the jobs uninvented, but for pennies on the hour.

The logical follow-on is that the day will also have to come, when society realizes that this is happening, understands it, and begins to prepare for its new reality. This is going to seem scary for many people; they will just see the destructive aspects of it, as the old ways of running the world crumble.

This is how I look at what this research is talking about - signs of this awakening becoming more widespread. We badly need politicians who start telling us about what the world is going to be like afterwards, and painting a hopeful vision about it.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In Europe and North America food loss adds up to around 16%

Everywhere in the world hunger and malnutrition are distribution problems, not lack of production problems.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 4 points 1 month ago

If you are familiar with the idea of AI taking off into the realms of superintelligence, one of the steps that is supposed to accompany that is recursive self-improvement. In other words when AI can write its own code, to improve itself, and thus continuously get more and more powerful. I wonder if examples like this are the tiny first baby steps of that.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm surprised drone deliveries haven't taken off more yet, these guys in Germany look like they are on to a winning solution too.

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/wingcopter-drone-delivery-groceries-germany

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 83 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Microsoft has cash reserves of $75 billion.

Microsoft - If you really want to convince us that nuclear power is part of the future, why can't you use some of your own money? Why does every single nuclear suggestion always rely on bailouts from taxpayers? Here's a thought, if you can't pay for it yourself - just pick the cheaper option that taxpayers don't have to pay for - you know renewables and grid storage? The stuff that everybody else, all over the world, is building near 99% of new electricity generation with.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 5 points 1 month ago

"INBRAIN’s BCI technology was able to differentiate between healthy and cancerous brain tissue with micrometer-scale precision."

This breakthrough with the surgery is very interesting, but what is even more interesting to me is their wider goals. They wonder if it will be possible to use this approach to treat many brain disorders, including mental health conditions.

This also has the potential for a direct connection between artificial intelligence and our brains. That has long been speculated about in sci-fi. This approach has a chance of starting to make it a reality.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 2 points 1 month ago

When I look at the potential in current advances in medicine, and the idiocracy that passes for "politics" and "debate", in some quarters, I wonder when more people are going to wise up.

Training and educating surgeons is the biggest bottleneck in the availability of their skills, and thus the amount of surgeries people can have. Here we have the potential to smash through that. Procedure by procedure, as robots master individual types of surgery, suddenly the only type of bottleneck you have is the amount of robots. A vastly easier and quicker problem to solve than increasing the supply of trained human surgeons.

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