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SLIM pickings! Back to work…

January 31, 2024
MThomas

The craft is at a very awkward angle. A picture, captured by the small baseball-sized robot called Sora-Q – which was ejected from Slim moments before touchdown – showed the lander face-down on the lunar surface.

That left its solar panels facing away from the sunlight and unable to generate power. The decision was taken to put the lander into sleep mode – and conserve what power remained – less than three hours after it landed.

That tactic appears to have worked. A change in the direction of the sunlight has now “awoken” the craft.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68131105

As previously reported, JAXA did achieve its goal of a “precision landing” — as some put it, a “pinpoint” touchdown within 100 meters of the intended target — within 55 meters, although if all had gone as planned, it would have been within 10 meters.

That’s far, far closer than previous Moon landings.

Too bad SLIM is essentially standing on its nose. But at least this is a beginning. Japan has now become the fifth country (US, USSR, China, India) to successfully “soft land” an object on the Moon.

And the robots it brought with it are pretty amazing. And tiny.

Japan lands on the Moon — for just a few hours

January 20, 2024
MThomas

A Japanese robot has successfully touched down on the Moon but problems with its solar power system mean the mission may live for just a few hours.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) put itself gently on the lunar surface near an equatorial crater.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68035314

Or SLIM, if you want to actually write acronyms properly (snark).

Also, it’s JAXA, not Jaxa. And NASA and ESA, not Nasa and Esa. But I digress.

Anyways, kudos but too bad yet another space mission failed. At this point I’m wondering how on Earth NASA managed to land people on the Moon so successfully in the 1960s and 1970s without killing half of them in the process. We can barely manage to get a tiny robot rover the size of a marble to land (see the link above for the picture of the “hopper” and “shape shifting” ball…curious about the “shape shifting” bit…)

When AI becomes actual AI…

October 26, 2023
MThomas

We compared current scientific theories of what makes humans conscious to compile a list of “indicator properties” that could then be applied to AI systems.

We don’t think systems that possess the indicator properties are definitely conscious, but the more indicators, the more seriously we should take claims of AI consciousness.
https://theconversation.com/why-chatgpt-isnt-conscious-but-future-ai-systems-might-be-212860

Last year, an engineer for Google who was working on what was then called “LaMDA” (later released as “Bard”) claimed that the software had achieved consciousness. He claimed it was like a small child and he could “talk” with it.

He was fired.

Bard, ChatGPT, Baidu, and so forth are advanced chatbots built on what’s called “Large Language Models” (LLM) and can generate text in an instant.

But the programs are not AI, strictly speaking. They have no sentience.

AI and the future of warfare (as predicted)

September 23, 2023
MThomas

Both Russian and Ukrainian forces are integrating traditional weapons with AI, satellite imaging and communications, as well as smart and loitering munitions, according to a May report from the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-partisan U.S. panel of experts. The battlefield is now a patchwork of deep trenches and bunkers where troops have been “forced to go underground or huddle in cellars to survive,” the report said.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/human-machine-teams-driven-by-ai-are-about-reshape-warfare-2023-09-08/

I found it interesting that many people online were commenting about Iain M Bank’s take on AI (for an in-depth analysis of his Culture series check this out on Blood Knife) and how he “predicted” all this.

Uh. You know, I’m not sure whether Banks wrote much about integrating traditional weapons with AI (since I haven’t read his series). But I do know that PK Dick wrote a short story called “Second Variety” about trench warfare and AI robots making more versions of themselves and taking over the world.

He wrote it in 1953.

(You can read it at Project Gutenberg.)

That is waaay before the Culture series.

Sigh. Read the classics, guys.

“Female” robots and other bias

September 6, 2023
MThomas

When we give AI a humanoid form, we typically choose the robot to have feminine characteristics. Are we playing on stereotypes?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230804-is-there-a-sinister-side-to-the-rise-of-female-robots

Isn’t it blindingly obvious?

All artificial intelligence, all robots and Chatbots and everything else electronically-programmed by a human being, will inevitably have human bias.

Even women prefer women’s voices to men’s when it comes to customer service.

On the other hand, women are also historically relegated to work with lower pay, lower status, kept out of positions of power — subject to the “male gaze.”

Now, we have AI that can be treated as sex objects. Even “married.”

So it is all “sinister,” as BBC asks?

Creepy, maybe. Sad, perhaps. Entirely predictable, definitely.

As we continue to lead more and more isolated individual lives, cut off from human contact and left unable to socialize, the rise of the “AI companion” seems inevitable…

The future looks like…

July 11, 2023
MThomas

What are you most excited about for the future?

I look forward to seeing whether the future looks more like WALL-E…

…or Star Trek…

…or maybe some combination thereof…

“Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. METEORITE!”

March 7, 2023
MThomas

The mysterious object’s lovely silver metallic hue stands out like a sore thumb in the surrounding, rust-colored landscape, a sulfate-bearing region of the Red Planet’s Mount Sharp.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/mars-rover-metallic-meteorite?fbclid=IwAR03ztaeMMhJWITitMIwXRsF_pfsE7_p2LUS-hGinBAHzrnW0LfZ5gPxU1o

Yes, they’re actually calling the meteorite fragment “Cacao.” Sigh.

Too bad Curiosity can’t take any samples. Perseverance can, but it’s too far away.

Curiosity has stumbled across several other such rocks previously, like “the Beast” and “Lebanon.” Sadly, none can be dated.

But the fact that there are so many of these impacted on the surface of Mars shows additional risks that any human mission might face…

The real danger of unregulated AI

February 27, 2023
MThomas

“I’m less frightened by a Sydney that’s playing into my desire to cosplay a sci-fi story than a Bing that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most money.

“Nor is it just advertising worth worrying about. What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,” Gary Marcus, the A.I. researcher and critic, told me. “I think that’s already been a problem for society over the last, let’s say, decade. And I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/microsoft-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence.html

The 2022 Year of Space Exploration

January 2, 2023
MThomas

Lots and lots and lots of space stories occurred in 2022.

From DART to Landsat, Sagittarius A* black hole to CAPSTONE, the Korean Pathfinder to SpaceX, and to the ISS, Moon, and Mars, here’s a summary of major space exploration projects last year.

Looking forward to 2023 and beyond!

What does a dust devil on Mars sound like?

December 21, 2022
MThomas

It was “definitely luck” that the dust devil appeared when it did, said the study’s lead author, who estimates there was just a 1-in-200 chance of capturing the audio.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/mars-rover-captures-first-sound-dust-devil-red-planet-rcna61642

Perseverance has been on Mars for almost two years now, and already recorded wind on Mars for the first time in February 2021.

This dust devil was recorded in late September 2021 (wonder why only now it’s being revealed?). The dust devil was “average size,” which is described as about 400 feet / 122 meters tall and 80 feet / 24 meters wide, traveling at 16 feet / 5 meters per second (≈ 11 mph / 18 mph).

UPDATE. NBC incorrectly reported in the above linked article that the dust devil was recorded by Perseverance. It was actually recorded by InSight, which has just fallen silent after four years of operation. Sigh. I should get science news directly from the source and not from unreliable “news” sites.

Click on the link below to hear the dust devil

https://jirafeau.isae-supaero.fr/f.php?h=2JWSkdJR&p=1

There are a lot of dust devils on Mars. A whole lot. Any settlement would have to be extremely prepared to deal with dust all the time, everywhere. If it ever got into equipment that regulated, say, breathable air inside habitats…

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