#BilboToday This expression of a beagle that you "forced" to go out in the pouring #rain! World-weariness, incomprehension, silent accusation, and yet behind it all, unconditional love.
I'd like to train myself with it. And throw that gaze intensively at everyone who destroys this #earth, wastes #chances for a livable #future, or divides instead of unites. Our #world needs a hell of a lot of these glances! And for the stubborn humans we all had a big 💩 ? 😈 #LearningFromBeagles#news#humanity
A few years ago, I got rid of all my paper books and switched exclusively to eBooks. Whenever I tell bibliophiles1 this, they usually shriek in horror. What about the smell of books2?!!? What about showing off your bookcases to impress people3!?!? What about your signed first editions4!??!?! But the other day I had someone…
@Edent the whole "smell of books" thing always makes me laugh. Really? Always seems like grasping for straws in the argument. I admit, there's something to the smell of an old used book store that is very nostalgic. But not so much my personal library.
@Edent I read for the content in side. I don't love books, I love knowledge. I don't have a lot of books to show off, I have books to read again. I got mad when my sister in law rearranged my bookshelf by color, thus separating the volumes of a set (sure it looked better, but finding the book wanted became more difficult) If I don't dream of reading a book again I get rid of it (though I'll freely admit most of my books I'll never read again, I still hope to)
If civilization collapses the books I want are "how to be self sufficient on a little land", "how to grow hybrid seeds", "how to build a shelter with just an axe", "how to create simple tools", and a lot more on those lines. My "Modern C++", "the chocolate teapot" books will not be the ones I really want, but those are the types of books I keep on my bookshelf. So I guess if civilization collapses I'll be joining all the other survivors at my local library - a good idea anyway as survivors meeting at the library and working together to build a new civilization is the future I want to be a part of, not the lone guy shooting everyone else to protect the little I have in my house.
📌 Industrial robots today are programmed to perform specific and repetitive tasks, which limits their versatility; to make them perform different actions, they need to be reprogrammed by a person.
I'm saying we don't currently have the ability to act on that moral responsibility because we lack fundamental understanding of how to specify and evaluate these systems.
In practice, to define morally acceptable use cases that don't impose unfeasible system design choices, we require the very specification tools we lack.
@robotistry@startupnews@philosophy@cogsci thanks for this thread. The points you raise are fundamental. My thought is that today we're experiencing the result of a hyper-parcelisation of skills and the long absence of truly generative dialogue between professionals (engineers and humanists) who should contribute together to develop new products. The questions I try to ask myself are certainly not new but today more than ever I feel them urgent, precisely for the reasons you underline.
📌 Google Research, American Airlines, and Breakthrough Energy have collaborated to develop #forecast maps for contrail formation (the white trails seen behind flying airplanes) using artificial intelligence based on #data such as satellite images, meteorological data, and flight paths.
📌 The trade-off is that this approach could lead to a 2% increase in fuel consumption; however, the overall fuel impact on an airline's flights could still be limited to 0.3%.
❓ Now, a couple of #questions among the many I have contemplated while considering this news from a #future perspective:
🤔 How could the use of contrail #forecast maps evolve in the field of #aviation navigation and air traffic #management policies, and what work, economic, social, and environmental challenges might emerge from this evolution?
🤔 What could be the consequences of using #AI in reducing contrail formation on potential climate impact disparities among different airlines or regions of the world?
"Earth Species Project is a non-profit dedicated to using #artificialintelligence to decode non-human #communication.
We believe that an understanding of non-human languages will transform our relationship with the rest of nature."
"More than 8 million species share our planet. We only understand the language of one."
It's 2027. LLM's are built into Systems on Chips. Everyone sees their own personalized worlds. Their computers show things in a way the user likes. Or the manufactorers like. Or the ad agencies like. Who knows. Apple helps us all write calm, understandable texts, posts, and books. Google shows us, in AR, "only what we need to see." A map on our walk we take to decompress. No, there are no homeless people in the street. Just follow the lines on the map. Yeah, like that. Hear that soft music. Your own personalized playlist, all made by AI. You like Mooncake right? Well, here's something that sounds like them. A little. But it's 24/7. More, more, more.
Some people make mistakes in their work to show that they're human. That wrong note? That's a mark of humanity. That misspelled word? They're one of us. That blotch of ink? A soul made that. Perfection is of the machines. To err is human.
The blind can see now. But at what cost? The machines know us all now. They see our faces. They see them, pick out details from what they see and what they know. Then they feed that to blind people, who eagerly gulp it down like a dry sponge. But the AI doesn't mention how fake the smile is, on the person who sees the camera that sees them. Wave for the camera, for the machine. But for the blind person, who only wants to have what sighted people were born with? Well.
Our computers then correct all that input. That misspelling? Surely the human didn't mean to do that. The blotch of ink is gone. All distilled into blandness. People begin writing on paper again. Blind people get what the AI gives, just as before. People are angry that their analog becomes digital again. Cycles and cycles. Dim and light. Gifts and hooks. Humanity and the seeking and the taking.
The Precipice
Existential Risk and The Future of Humanity
From one of the world's leading moral voices, this urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time.
If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk.
The most provocative philosopher of our times returns with a rousing and counterintuitive analysis of our global predicament. We hear all the time that it's five minutes to global doomsday, so now is our last chance to avert disaster.
>"None of the 17 #UnitedNations#SustainableDevelopmentGoals (#SDGs) is on track to be achieved by 2030... But progress on a few, including the 14th goal — to conserve and #sustainably use the #oceans — has actually been going backwards since the 2015 UN summit..."