To my peevish mind, OpenAI looks just too good to be true. What if I am right? Easy Queasy Whenever I see a certain type of headline in a prominent publication I get collywobbles in my stomach. That’s because I have seen so many similar associated with hubris, fraud and wrongdoing. Here’s one headline I saw recently: OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burn...
So, Boeing has screwed up yet again. The secret? Don’t aim to fix the particular problem – find a totally new solution. Quality Job No. 11 Boeaing is one of the worlds bellwethers in reliability, quality and admirability. Or it was. Now it’s not. Is there any way of unbreaking something that is irretrievably broken when there’s never been a precede...
Space is big right? What if all those books, movies and stories are just so much bunkum anyway? At best epics that could never be. Surely not??? No Thrust? No Trust! I guess you could have missed seeing the latest failure of the NASA/Boeing launch to the ISS. This time it was the thrusters, but it could have been anything else, given the sad and ev...
Is there something better, and more reliable than AI, namely what I am calling BNI (boosted natural intelligence)? Old Before Their Time One of the deep undying tragedies of our times is the growing ranks of seniors with dementia, of which there are many varieties. The various approaches to finding a palliative – not a cure, we’re nowhere near yet ...
Words are so boring. We’re going to move to LXMs (non-LLM-based models) which can ditch obsolescent codas to move up into the new good stuff. Not So Single(sic) We’ve all been captured by the tempting notion of the Singularity. Singularity is the final signal of the end of everything, the ultimate resting place for bureaucrats, politicians and wann...
Where’s the Universe headed? Downhill, according to “The 3 Body Problem”. Not a Warm Body So maybe you are aware of the hot sci-fi movie on Netflix “The 3 Body Problem” (T3BP)? The first Chinese sci-fi film to win a famous global prize for sci-fi stories. Yep, it’s pretty good, probably one of the best sci-fi books and movies I have ever encountere...
The killjoys are on the march again. Ultra-processed is next to Godliness. Big Food Seems like you can’t read an article anywhere without being told that the reason that so many of us are obese or big is because we eat too much ultra-processed food. That’s got me to thinking and even, ultraly ruminating. Is a nicely turned steak with a carefully an...
Mental health globally is already in crisis. AI is already making it dramatically worse. Could it be the final death of us? We’re All Hal Now! Now we’re all getting into the bad stuff that comes with AI. That includes ,inter alia, racial bias in AI tools, c.f. Google’s Gemini admission by its CEO, numerous instances of the AIs giving us wrong or ev...
AIs can lie and will get much better at it. Get used to it. Liar, Liar, House on Fire So now we’re all repeating to each other how ChatGPT made up fake legal cases for Mike Cohen (Trump’s ex-personal lawyer) not to mention many others. Obviously, this AI stuff is not as good as the gurus make out. After all humans lie all the time and we have perfe...
The killer app for AI is being able to win wars over unprecedentedly multiple fronts, irrespective of an initiators’ level of resources. Check out the recent Napoleon movie to see how it’s done. AI Spy (With My Little Eye) There’s been much chatter as to why Sam Altman was fired and then, (pro tem?) rehired. The scuttlebutt is that OpenAI had secre...
We clearly can’t trust humans to run the world. Now we’ve gotta try the AIs. Nothing Beats Free! Did you catch up with the troubling book “How Democracies Die” by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt? Hmm the august provenance is already going to be a turnoff for the people who need it most. Anyway, you get the idea. Clearly a key ...
If there’s going to be a Singularity for us humans, won’t there be many for all the animals on this planet? Whales Gonna Have Fun There’s always signals out there that are telling us things we hadn’t thought about. One such is the sudden spate of articles about orcas (you know, killer whales) which are ramming boats off the coast of Spain and Portu...
The received wisdom is that we are headed for the Singularity – where the intelligence of machines exceeds that of humans. But the betting is that we are headed for the Modularity – we will know and understand a lot more about many more things but understand even less about how to control our overall environment. Nothing Like a Good Old-Fashioned C...
Is the Singularity about to hit humanity, unexpectedly? The AI Virus? I don’t have to tell you that le nouveau AI is all over the place. All the big techs are now in it or rapidly getting in but that isn’t the half of the story. The big news is that thousands of companies and organizations are now getting in. They come from all over including our g...
Is ChatGPT independently evolving its own kind of intelligence? A Brain Made of Stone? What would you think if someone told you that animals can make stone tools? No doubt it’s rubbish you would say. What if the animal was an ape, but not human? Even more so. But check it out here (“Sophisticated stone tools may predate humans, study suggests”). Wh...
Banning successful movements like TikTok is the way to lose global leadership, not to regain it. Banning Success the New Autocracy? I guess you have noticed the swelling chorus to ban TikTok, the Chinese uber-social network. The motivation for the ban is the security threat from China represented by TikTok. It has de facto hacking rights over of mi...
Quantum computing looking increasingly likely to be the next tech bubble. What is Quantum? Did you notice that the Nobel in physics has just been awarded to three worthy physicists in the area of quantum information? What’s that you say? I’m the wrong guy to even try to explain it but for dummies like me, see here. It covers esoterica such as qua...
Man Bites Dog So, we don’t see this too often, namely that BMW has invented something for autos that Tesla hasn’t. That would be its car that changes color. Yep. You heard that right. In fact, it uses e-ink to do it, that’s the stuff that Amazon uses in its Kindle. So, it’s not really color, not at this stage anyway, since its black and white all ...
We could soon see a new taxonomy of blockchains emerge, including some based on genomics, that could upend how we build systems and things. The Blob Is Coming I’m sure you’ve heard of blockchains. Of course, they’re hot. That’s partly because of their use in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. But they are being applied to numerous disparate uses as the...
Caption The big social media news is that Facebook is going Meta and metaverse. Will it improve things for the Facebook crowd or make things worse? Now we’re going to have a new type of media which is immersive and allows all kinds of cool things. Be anywhere anytime doing anything, almost in person. Futurati have been dreaming of this for ages. Ma...
