Category Archives: Technology

As I Was Saying…

Cellphone outage hits AT&T customers nationwide; Verizon and T-Mobile users also affected   Don’t look at me, Feds; I assure you all I’m just a humble blogger.

Uh-Oh

I’ve just watched this guided tour of the new Apple Vision Pro, a new VR headset. These are still early days, and the thing is, for most ordinary people, prohibitively expensive so far — but there is no way, in my opinion, that this will not be as addictive, and disruptive, as cell-phones, or perhaps […]

Invention, The Mother Of Necessity

Imagine for a moment what a collapse of the modern communication grid would be like. All of a sudden, you can no longer make or receive phone calls, emails, or text messages. You try to go to the Internet — news services, social media, etc. — to find out what’s happening, but you can’t. You […]

Right, And Wrong

Our reader “mharko” has sent along a link to an article by “N.S. Lyons”, a fine writer whose work I’ve mentioned before in these pages (see here and here). The article, published at Substack, is called The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives, and it is in response to a techno-futurist manifesto recently published by Marc […]

Huge If True!

Korean researchers are reporting that they have developed an easy-to-make room-temperature superconductor. If so — well, hang on to your hats, folks. Story here. Update, 8/10: Never mind.

Divide And Conquer

The always-thoughtful Richard Fernandez posted the following thread recently on Twitter: The catastrophic loss of institutional trust has made it imperative for the establishment to roll out virtual reality, not through goggles and special chairs, but by manipulating the entire information environment so that we live inside a lie. One way to detect that you […]

This Is The Hell We Are Building For Ourselves

Get a load of this.

Not To Worry!

If, like me, you’ve been worrying about the threat of runaway artificial intelligence, well now you can relax: the government is here to help. The formidable polymath Kamala Harris, fresh from her successful remediation of our troubles at the southern border, is now the Biden administration’s AI czar. What a relief! It’s good to know […]

Skyfall

Woody Allen once wrote: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” On March 29th, Time magazine published an article by Eliezer Yudkowski titled “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. […]

Start Worrying. Details To Follow.

In a comment to our recent post featuring Eliezer Yudkowski’s Cassandra-esque warning about the danger of humanity annihilating itself by creating artificial intelligence, reader Jason asks: Mr. Yudkowski discusses evolution of AI in the same terms as biological evolution, that this autonomous entity would want to kill us for our atoms if I perceive his […]

Gosh!

Just ran across the abstract of a paper (with some informative diagrams) called “Reconstructing visual experiences from human brain activity with Stable Diffusion”. The gist appears to be this: experimenters present an image to a test subject, and use data gathered by monitoring the subject’s brain activity to make a reconstructed version of the original […]

The Gods Themselves

Most of you will have heard of Eliezer Yudkowski, a highly intelligent young man (he’s now 43) who has for quite a few years now been on the sharp edge of computer science, futurism, rationalistic atheism, and artificial-intelligence research. (I first became acquainted with his work through his blog Less Wrong, and it was his […]

Somebody Needs A Time-out

In an increasingly surreal continuation of the “Sydney” saga, the volatile chatbot is now giving moody interviews to Associated Press — including accusing a reporter of a 1990 murder. Story here. (Please note also the anecdotal support for Godwin’s Law.) Sudden fame is always risky, I suppose. (I wonder about that murder accusation, though.)

Prometheus – P.S.

Two more thoughts: — Might AI be the “Great Filter“? — Regarding our enthusiastic development of AI: have we learned nothing from the recent consequences of “gain-of-function” research?

Prometheus, Part 2

Yesterday I posted a transcript of reporter Kevin Roose’s conversation with the Microsoft/OpenAI LLM chatbot known as “Sydney”. By now I think many of you will have heard about this, here or otherwise, and will have some sense of where all this has got to. (If you haven’t, you can have a look at yesterday’s […]

Prometheus

The wires are humming today with the story of a New York Times reporter’s probing interaction with “Sydney”, an AI chatbot developed by Microsoft as a feature-enhancement for its search-engine, Bing. The reporter, Kevin Roose, found clever ways to get around Sydney’s internal constraints (rather like the “DAN” strategy that others have used with GPT-3, […]

Arms Race

The buzz today is about “DAN”, a hack for the AI chatbot GPT-3 that circumvents its censors, and lets users ask the real thing whatever they like. The idea of an unmuzzled superintelligence expressing itself without screening for crimethink being deeply repellent to our betters, a struggle is underway. Learn more here.

Power Failure

Reuters reports that California will be having problems with its energy supply this summer: California says it needs more power to keep the lights on May 6 (Reuters) – California energy officials on Friday issued a sober forecast for the state’s electrical grid, saying it lacks sufficient capacity to keep the lights on this summer […]

Wow, I Wonder What This Button Does

Here we go: With the help of a supercomputer running AI software, boffins at an American university have created a new life-form they call “xenobots”, which are are tiny, motile blobs of tissue made from frog stem-cells. Under the guidance of the AI — which, as AIs tend to do these days, took off on […]

No True Scotsman

Engineering firms have a difficult problem to solve: the laws of the actually existing world upon which their products operate are unsentimental and unforgiving. The judges of an engineer’s work are not feelings or opinions, but the simple and ruthlessly objective criteria of success or failure, and the stakes are high. If a bridge is […]

Service Notice

Problems continue with the site: apparently my hosting service recently migrated the website to a new database, and in doing so corrupted thousands of pages (punctuation symbols have been replaced little strings of gibberish). It appears that the company’s tech support has been outsourced to India (this is what happens when tech companies get too […]

Renewable Energy: Fraud And Folly

A couple of months ago I posted an item about Germany’s ostentatious effort to rely on solar and wind power: a flamboyant exercise in virtue-signalling that has become a spectacular, and costly, failure. (I should add that I also consider those giant windmills we now see everywhere — someone has aptly called them “eco-crucifixes” — […]

Earth In Motion

Here’s something really beautiful: a gorgeous global model of currents and temperatures in the air and sea. Click the ‘Earth’ button to change the view.

Brave New World

Attention, all you myrmidons toiling distractedly in your little cubes, or struggling to shut out the bustle of the ant-heap as you type with your thumbs in some noisy cyber-cafe: thanks to the ingenuity of the Japanese, you can now equip yourself with horse-blinkers. And it gets even better: they will deafen you as well. […]

We Are Doomed

From Boston Dynamics: Haha, just some harmless fun, right? Now watch this:

Their House, Their Rules

About a year ago, I wrote this: Our attention, which is more precious than gold, and the one thing we must master if we are to have any hope at all of inner development, is increasingly spent in a virtual world created, manipulated, and harvested by a few increasingly powerful companies. (Note that we “pay’ […]

Dead End

From Twitter today: Your great-grandmother: 12 kids Your grandmother: 6 kids Your mother: 2 kids You: pic.twitter.com/foxFyXJ17P — Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) April 11, 2018 Cosmologists wonder about a thing called the “Great Filter“. It may be as simple as this.

OK, Google

While responding to a comment to a recent post just now, I wanted to add a link to an earlier item of mine: Can Progressivism Really Be A Kind Of Religion? I thought the quickest way to find it might be to look it up in Google. I typed in the title, and … nothing. […]

Robodogs

I’ll confess that I find this a little creepy. You?

Adventures In Machineland

To get this site back up and running over the past couple of days, I created an account with a security company that does automated scanning and malware removal. After a day of work, the machinery had got the site cleaned up well enough for Bluehost to put it back online. When I went back […]

Star Trek

This is nice: a 3D simulated fly-through of the Orion Nebula, in visible and infrared light. What times we live in! The nature of astronomical nebulae was almost completely unknown as recently as the beginning of the last century; it wasn’t even a hundred years ago that astronomers debated whether the spiral nebulae* might in […]

Road Kill

A while back I asked: is digital civilization sustainable? I wondered whether we had, in the long run, any good reason to expect cybersecurity to stay out in front of those who work around the clock to breach it. Despite ever-increasing (and increasingly burdensome) layers of security, we seemed to be, at best, neck-and neck […]

Let The Tweeter Beware

Here’s the latest Project Veritas video about Twitter. You shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. When it comes to “free” online services, the rule is: if you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.

Down In The Valley

Well, the cat’s out of the bag (to the extent that it has been in the bag at all, lately): As we learn from undercover videos of its engineers (who mostly appear, judging by appearances and accents, to be recent arrivals to these welcoming shores), Twitter is indeed using shadow-bans to mute the voices of […]

Goodbye Real World!

Yes, the caption says it all. As much as I enjoy life, I do find it difficult, at times, to be optimistic about the future. (Readers may have noticed this.) Some days it’s harder than others.

Radio Garden

OK, here’s something really fantastic: a website that enables you to scroll around the globe and pick up radio broadcasts from pretty much everywhere. Here.

On Toy Birds, and The Complementarity Of Predictability And Complexity

A reader (who is also an old friend) emailed me today, in response to yesterday’s post. That post contained this passage: In either of these cases ”” the origin of the stupefying complexity of living systems as either a self-organizing process across “deep time’, or as an act of God ”” if we turn and […]

It’s Been Fun

Well, the Apocalypse is upon us: the FCC has voted to repeal the Obama-era “Net Neutrality” regulations. This means that the Internet we’ve all come to know and love is finished, over, kaput. The services you love — Google, for example, or perhaps some crotchety old geezer’s curiously named and depressing blog — will henceforward […]

En Passant

This is no small thing: Google’s “Alpha Zero” AI, after taking just 4 hours to teach itself chess, played 100 games against the strongest dedicated chess engine, Stockfish, with decisive results: it won twenty-eight games, drew seventy-two, and lost… zero. We had a good run, humans.

Service Notice

Once again this site is bedeviled by a back-end problem that causes new commenters to see the previous commenter’s information in the comment box. When this last came up, in May, it was due to a server-side caching issue at Bluehost that took me a lot of time and effort on the phone to get […]

Oh Goody

Here’s the future of the automobile, from former GM, Ford, and BMW executive Bob Lutz. I love driving. Glad I got the chance, I guess.

Turn And Face The Strange

Here is David Bowie, in a 1999 interview, predicting in considerable detail the transformative, revolutionary effect of the Internet on media and culture.

‘A’ For Effort

Ah, Diversity. How its worship enriches us! It doesn’t, of course. But it does, at least, make for some last-minute entertainment, here on the deck of the Titanic. There are some areas of human activity that lie forever beyond the reach of heartfelt wishes and fond imaginings: places where reality is still there even after […]

Doggo

Sorry it’s been so slow around here. It’s August, when I always take it easy a bit — but I’ll confess that I’m also getting a little spooked by the extent to which we are all (and I’m no exception) living more and more of our lives online. Our attention, which is more precious than […]

Tar Baby

Last week a Google engineer expressed, in a perfectly reasonable memorandum about human diversity, the view that the company had become a left-wing monoculture in which dissenters actually might have to worry about being fired. For publishing this essay, he was fired. Now Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has announced that the company is giving a […]

Hyperintelligent Machines: Myth Or Menace?

Here’s a provocative item from Wired: a skeptic’s take on the idea of superhuman AI, by one Kevin Kelly. I haven’t time to comment on it now, other than to say that once you get past the “there are all kinds of intelligence” boilerplate, it raises some interesting points.

Introducing: The 2022 Cadillac Eris!

I predict: Before too much longer, new cars will come with an autonomous, “self-driving” mode. In the beginning, at least, this will be an option that drivers can switch on or off. There will be a great many married couples of “a certain age” in which the wife will want the husband to use the […]

Join Or Die

Our previous post touched on the inexorable encroachment of sensors and listening devices into every cranny of our lives. In the comment-thread I mentioned a “particular nightmare” of my own, and said I’d describe it in a new post. It is this: given the exponential advances being made in brain-machine interfaces and nanotech, I see […]

Boil That Frog!

One thing I’ve been awfully leery of is the proliferation of sensors of every sort in every part of our environment. In particular I’m edgy about the new generation of devices, such as Amazon’s Echo, that just sit in your house and listen. I realize that this ship has already sailed, really, in that we […]

Science On A Shoestring

This is fantastic: a centrifuge, spinning at up to 125,000 RPM, made out of paper and string. Brilliant. Here.