I think an optimized robot would find it advantageous to retain the ability to extract nutrients and energy from biomatter instead of relying solely on electricity. Robot bodies might retain some organic parts for a digestive tract, or they might have digestive tracts made of soft, synthetic tissues that did the same things as human cells.
The first human-level AI we create will need supercomputer hardware that is vastly more powerful than a human brain. This would be in keeping with the pattern of the first examples of any new technology to be inefficient and barely functional. Consider steam engines. The first, commercially successful one was the Neucomen Engine, and it was huge, inelegant, and had a terrible energy efficiency of 0.5%.
However, it’s also a truism that technological efficiency improves over time. So someday, an AGI with human levels of intelligence will fit on a portable device like a laptop or something even smaller, like a smartphone, and they will be cheap. It’s hard to contemplate a place for humans like us in a world where intelligence is so ubiquitous that it can be thrown in the trash.
Millions of years of evolution have equipped the human brain with an exquisite ability to recognize human faces and their smallest details since we are social animals who must quickly “read” the people around us for the sake of survival. However, that ability only weakly carries over to other species, and many of them “all look the same” to us (think of squirrels or seagulls). Of course, those animals are able to tell each other apart and to recognize subtle indicators of emotion and intent, so there must be a way. Better AI is the obvious solution to this problem. Someday, machines will be able to recognize individual animals as well as they recognize humans, and to understand and communicate with animals much better than we can.
Thanks to satellites and huge numbers of robots, someday our maps of the Earth might be so comprehensive that even individual trees in forests will be cataloged and counted.
‘The current draft, which takes place between April and July, comes despite US attempts to forge a ceasefire in the war.
There was no let-up in the violence on Tuesday, with Ukraine saying that a Russian attack on a power facility in the southern city of Kherson had left 45,000 people without electricity.’ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36718p52eyo
Humans have proven so vulnerable to small suicide drones that Russia is now routinely sending its soldiers into battle on motorcycles and small vehicles like ATVs to give them a higher chance of outrunning the drones. Russia’s worsening shortage of armored vehicles that normally ferry their troops to the frontline has also forced this change. https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-likely-plans-motorcycles-offensives-143921500.html
Mao Zedong’s mass murders of landlords and small-time political opponents were orchestrated by countless, local tribunals where average people joined in on the denunciation and violence. Governments can commit evil, but so can your fellow average citizens. https://youtu.be/Erz59UPIm88?si=DIbrpjNGqDTcDwQR&t=294
After years of unsuccessfully pressuring Mexico to sell the northern half of its territory to the U.S., America provoked a war so it would have an excuse to conquer it by force. The war was more one-sided than expected, and peace negotiations started after a year and a half.
Because this happened in the pre-telegraph era (1847), President Polk had to send a diplomat, Nicholas Trist, to Mexico City to handle the negotiations, and the two would be cut off from each other, with letters taking weeks to travel back and forth. Before the departure, Polk gave Trist a written list of minimal demands of Mexican territories and optional extra territories, and out of necessity, he was given nearly free reign over the negotiations.
Someone at the State Department leaked a copy of the list to the press, and it appeared in two American newspapers before Trist’s boat even got to Mexico City. Additionally, on August 12, 1847, a U.S. Army Colonel died in U.S.-occupied Veracruz of natural causes. He was carrying a letter from President Polk to Trist which reiterated the list of negotiable and non-negotiable territorial demands. Mexicans stole it and passed the information on to their diplomats who were negotiating the treaty with Trist. They refused to give away any of the land that they knew Polk had told Trist was not essential to take, and it worked.
Several robots ran in a half-marathon in Beijing. I’m reminded of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge where no autonomous vehicle was able to complete the race. Look at self-driving cars now. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/ce8gz5vl2z1o
The Trump Administration’s new Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, gave a speech about the use of artificial intelligence in elementary education where she repeatedly called it “A1”, presumably because she was misreading a script that said “AI.” https://youtube.com/shorts/xsRUk0dMJu4?si=9a9-ggfhvxyT9-vX
A group of superforecasters and people with deep knowledge of AI released a heavily-researched manifesto called “AI 2027.” They predict that “artificial superintelligence” (ASI) could be created by the end of 2027. If leaders recklessly pursue further AI improvements thenceforth, machines could take over the world and destroy almost all of the human race by the end of 2030. However, responsible development could lead to the inauguration of a new era of abundance, international peace, and space exploration by the same deadline. https://ai-2027.com/
This essay highlights the flaws in predicting the rise of AGI based on recent trends in how well computers complete tasks that only humans have been able to do. For example, a computer’s ability to finish a complex coding assignment correctly 50% of the time is a weak milestone: it isn’t proof the computer can also do other kinds of tasks, as a true general intelligence would be capable of, and the 50% accuracy rate is much too poor to let it replace a human coder. Something like 99.9% accuracy would be required for that.
Simply put, the tests we’re using to measure improvements in machine intelligence are not good enough to tell us whether they’re on track to achieving “general intelligence” by any given year. https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/measuring-ai-progress
“We’ve not been testing EV batteries the right way,” said Simona Onori, senior author and an associate professor of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “To our surprise, real driving with frequent acceleration, braking that charges the batteries a bit, stopping to pop into a store, and letting the batteries rest for hours at a time, helps batteries last longer than we had thought based on industry standard lab tests.” https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/12/existing-ev-batteries-may-last-up-to-40-longer-than-expected
‘[Mantis shrimp] have up to 16 photoreceptors and can see UV, visible and polarised light. In fact, they are the only animals known to detect circularly polarised light, which is when the wave component of light rotates in a circular motion. They also can perceive depth with one eye and move each eye independently. It’s impossible to imagine what mantis shrimp see, but incredible to think about.’ https://phys.org/news/2013-09-mantis-shrimp-world-eyesbut.html
