LIfe.
I need a break from life.
Just let me hide in a cabin in the mountains with coffee and WIFI and a laptop for writing.
That’s it.
Easy question. Easy answer.
February 7, 2024
SLIM pickings! Back to work…
January 31, 2024
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
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…)
AI and the future of warfare (as predicted)
September 23, 2023
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.
Bringer of Light first draft completed (finally!)
September 10, 2023
Way back in 2015, my good friend Rami Z Cohen came to me with an idea for a story. He had written two or three scenes about a group of asteroid hunters who stumbled upon something bizarre. The idea of mining asteroids was news at the time (and still is, although probably too expensive right now and not a worthwhile investment until we actually get some people in space who need metals without relying on NASA/ESA/JAXA/ISRO/etc).
I was more interested in philosophical aspects of finding that we are all (as the late great Carl Sagan loved to put it) “star stuff” (he meant carbon being created by supernovas, but we also know that asteroids are the way we got amino acids to rain down on ancient Earth).
So Rami and I began to email ideas back and forth for a few weeks, then we started to flesh out his characters and plot. I wrote a synopsis and outline and we hashed out the background.
Continue Reading“Female” robots and other bias
September 6, 2023
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…
10 things I know to be absolutely certain
July 17, 2023
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
1. I know it to be certain that the wording of this prompt is a bit odd. Is this meant to mean “know to be true”?
2. I know it to be absolutely certain that there are many things about which I am far from certain.
3. I also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things I know to be certain will annoy at least one person who reads this.
4. I also also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things to know to be certain will amuse at least one person.
5. One of these things I know to be absolutely certain may even irritate and amuse the same person (👈 maybe even this one right here).
6. I even know it to be absolutely certain that writing a list of ten things that are absolutely certain takes a considerably longer time than I had initially anticipated.
7. Just to be sure I irritate someone, it is absolutely certain that the world is a warmer place than it was when I was a kid 40 years ago.
8. The fact that June 2023 was the hottest month on record is absolutely certain.
9. I know it to be absolutely certain, however, that we have only been keeping records on temperatures worldwide since the late 1880s, and records were measured using different instruments
10. But the most important thing to be absolutely certain that I know is that Sony says they have the technology to make humanoid robots but can’t figure out what to use them for. I have an idea or two about that…
The future looks like…
July 11, 2023
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…
The 2022 Year of Space Exploration
January 2, 2023
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!
ChatGPT: Is this really the “death of the essay”?
December 17, 2022
I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)
The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.
By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.
As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.
So far, I have asked the program to:
- Write a haiku about winter without using the word “winter”
- Write a limerick about an Irish baseball player
- Write a dialogue between God and Nietzsche (I just had to…)
- Imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant would say to each other (see above) but using US ’50 slang
- Have Thomas Aquinas and John Locke argue about the existence of God (that one was fun)
- Write a 300 word cause-effect essay about climate change
- Write a 300 word compare and contrast essay about the US and Japan
- Write a 1000 word short science fiction story based on Mars
- Write a 1500 word short science fiction about robots in the style of Philip K Dick
OK, and the verdict is:
Continue Reading
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