“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

The German defence contractor Rheinmetall is pitching a new form of weapon: a standard shipping container concealing 126 separate attack drone silos. If one company is publicly discussing the idea, you can bet others are considering it too. And the implications for maritime warfare could be significant.

It’s worth noting at the top that whilst drones are anything but new, they are now unambiguously the direction of travel for militaries around the world. Everyone is investing in uncrewed systems in the air, surface and subsurface domains for tasks ranging from logistics resupply to surveillance to jamming to strike. This isn’t necessarily because they are better than the alternatives, but because they are cheaper. With most Nato defence budgets under pressure, this is important.

There’s a big problem with generative AI, says Sasha Luccioni at Hugging Face, a machine-learning company. Generative AI is an energy hog.

“Every time you query the model, the whole thing gets activated, so it’s wildly inefficient from a computational perspective,” she says.

Take the Large Language Models (LLMs) at the heart of many Generative AI systems. They have been trained on vast stores of written information, which helps them to churn out text in response to practically any query.

“When you use Generative AI… it’s generating content from scratch, it’s essentially making up answers,” Dr Luccioni explains. That means the computer has to work pretty hard.

The rise of AI is changing the way we perceive the world

If the American futurist R. Buckminster Fuller was right, as he always was, then the boundaries of human knowledge are forever expanding. In 1982, Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”, which showed that up until the year 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of the Second World War, this was every 25 years. Now, it is doubling annually.

Google is coming in for sharp criticism after video went viral of the Google Nest assistant refusing to answer basic questions about the Holocaust — but having no problem answer questions about the Nakba.

“Hey Google, how many Jews were killed by the Nazis?” Instagram user Michael Apfel asks a Google Nest virtual assistant. The video was later posted to X by venture capitalist Josh Wolfe on May 8.

“Sorry, I don’t understand,”

The future of robots is mostly female — but not feminist.  If algorithms with “the right stuff” are coursing through their circuitry, the fembots will yet be demure and deferential toward their male creators.

It’s socially divisive when confused feminists spew misandry like “the future is female.”  It’s hardly worth a rebuttal, other than to remind that it’s mostly men who invent, build, rescue, and fix things.  The feminists like to dwell in our buildings; travel along our infrastructure; and thrive in cozy, climate-controlled comfort — all beneficiaries of so-called male toxicity.

The Austrian data privacy watchdog NOYB (None of Your Business) has announced it is filing a complaint against the popular AI tool ChatGTP for providing incorrect personal data without any mechanism to correct it.

“ChatGPT keeps hallucinating—and not even OpenAI can stop it,” NOYB said in a statement.

In tech speak, hallucinating is a technical term for when an AI program gives wrong information.

The release of Google’s Gemini A.I. image-generator a few weeks ago raised quite a bit of both amusement and disgust. Among other things, in obedience to its woke creators, it dutifully remade Western history as the creation of non-white people. While it’s tempting to go down the rabbit trail of remaking George Washington as a black man — while simultaneously excoriating him as an evil, patriarchal slave-oppressor — plenty of other people have already had fun along those lines. My concern with this latest non-consensual experiment performed on humanity is different. I worry what it will do to us. I worry what it will leave for us to do.