The Future

Our future lies on the Red Planet

In his speech to Congress last month, President Donald Trump promised to “lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond”. His claim is not serious, as Trump is far too busy wrecking the global liberal order to achieve such a splendid feat. And even if he weren’t, there’s no way we can reach Mars in the next four years. Nevertheless, it is possible that the new administration, under the eye of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, will make human travel to Mars the main goal of NASA.

The Emperor and Darth Vader may be wrong about a lot of things, but they are not wrong about this. NASA needs a purpose, one that’s worthy of the costs and risks of human spaceflight. That goal can only be sending humans to Mars. This is so because Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is, and Mars is where the future is.

If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel Worlds, Kaku combines the scientific chops of the theoretical physics professor he is with the gee-wow wonder of a sci-fi geek.

h/t XC

White, working-class, middle-aged Americans are one of the only demographics in the world that has seen its life expectancy fall. But Mike wasn’t just a statistic.

My best friend Mike died alone. That was how he lived, too. He ate alone. He slept alone. Aloneness was his natural state. At age 50, it was sepsis that officially did him in. But really, it was solitude.

Like Mike, America’s white working class is alone. Like Mike, it is being crushed by its isolation.

Since 2000, white working-class Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 have been one of the only demographics in the world that has seen its life expectancy fall. These deaths are mostly suicides. Some are officially blamed on alcoholism and addiction, but that’s just suicide in slow motion. Whatever we call them, they’re a lagging indicator of an economy in transition.

Behind on your car payments? Your car could soon be driving itself to the pound. Ford Motor Company has applied for a patent that would enable a computer to disable a vehicle or component of a vehicle over delinquent car payments and could lead to cars self-driving themselves to repossession lots.

The patent application published last month claims to seek a solution to car owners being unwilling to have their vehicles repossessed by remotely disabling the vehicle or a component of the vehicle if a delinquency notice isn’t acknowledged over a certain period of time.

Terrifying

pic.twitter.com/JWapEBNWrY

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) January 23, 2023

H/T Mauser

Welcome to the new age of academic dishonesty.

A college professor in South Carolina is sounding the alarm after catching a student using ChatGPT — a new artificial intelligence chat bot that can quickly digest and spit out written information about a vast array of subjects — to write an essay for his philosophy class.

The weeks-old technology, released by OpenAI and readily available to the public, comes as yet another blow to higher learning, already plagued by rampant cheating.

The first mostly non-human-run McDonald’s is open for business just outside Fort Worth, Texas.

At just one location so far, customers can drive to the golden arches and expect to be served a Big Mac or a Happy Meal by a food and beverage conveyor instead of an actual, real-life human being.

A spokesperson for McDonald’s told the Guardian that the test concept “is not fully automated”, emphasizing that the restaurant does employ a team comparable to that of a traditional store.

My local Shoppers Drug Mart is making it so inconvenient to use the only cashier they ever have on duty that people are walking out in frustration as they can’t or won’t transact their business with the automated tellers.

The AI chatbot threatens academics because teaching quality is now so low

The threat Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to white-collar professions seemed to escalate earlier this week as ChatGPT, a text-generating AI crafted by an Elon Musk-founded company, expanded on bot capabilities which two years ago wrote an op-ed for the Guardian. It is not just journalists under threat, however: academics recounted on Twitter how they fed exam questions into the chatbot, prompting it to produce answers that would merit decent marks, and which would be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from work submitted by a student. 

This thing is scary.

Since its launch last Wednesday, the AI language model ChatGPT has attracted more than a million users, scores of opinion pieces, and some very well-founded concerns. The chatbot may be among the most sophisticated of its kind, and was developed by OpenAI, the tech company — which was also behind the exhaustively-memed image generator DALL-E — founded in 2015 by a group including Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Holy Crap!

ChatGPT can effortlessly churn out Woke op-eds. For example, from the prompt, "Write a newspaper op-ed by an intersectional black woman about how white people try to touch her hair." pic.twitter.com/A5VV62w0N5

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) December 8, 2022

‘AI will eliminate the search engine result page’

The computer developer who created Gmail is predicting Google may have only a year or two left before ‘total disruption’ of its search engine occurs after the release of a sophisticated chatbot that uses artificial intelligence (AI).

Last week ChatGPT was released by OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015. It responds to text prompts from users and can be asked to write essays, lyrics for songs, stories, marketing pitches, scripts, complaint letters and even poetry.

The much vaunted metaverse is a virtual world of immersive experiences and transhuman avatars but, as the European Union has discovered, it can be a real life disaster.

After spending €387,000 (£332,500) on creating a virtual world to promote the EU’s “global gateway” development projects, officials hoped to introduce young people to the website with a special “gala” night of “music and fun” .

“Are you ready to party?” asked the invitation to the event on Tuesday night.

Like I said, it’s the new 3D Movie Glasses of tech.