Video/Podcast: The Future of Mankind and AI

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Brian Penny from Pixabay.

Cool Worlds Lab has some great video on YouTube worth watching. One of latest related to artificial intelligence (AI), titled “AI Has Poisoned Everything?” As with most of the videos on the site, it poses a number of questions. In this case, the questions are very troubling.

I am used to the videos asking questions such as Is there life elsewhere in the universe? and When will our time in the universe end?, but the question posed in this video is much more immediate. It asked Can we count on our eyes and understanding of the world as AI takes over? It is a scary question that has no answer yet, and the efforts so far in Washington DC to understand AI seem puny compared to the potential threat.

But don’t stop with the video. The Cool Worlds podcast has more on AI. This week’s podcast, “Hugging Face Hack, AI Meltdowns, Poisoning AI,” involves a discussion between Professor David Kipping and Hal Triedman, a PhD student at Cornell Tech. Triedman is studying the role of AI agents, which are grabbing all of the attention these days as they hack their way through our economy.

None of this is uplifting, but it is important and worth understanding. We are being pushed into this new world, so we need to be ready for what is to come. Even if half of what is being said is an exaggeration, the remaining half is more than enough to threaten everything we have built as a civilization to date.

Like nuclear weapons, we cannot unlearn what we now know. Unlike nuclear weapons, AI may be able to think and act on its own before we find a way to put any controls around it.

Movies: Artificial with Elon Musk

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Neon

This coming Christmas you can watch the film Artificial about OpenAI’s history involving Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others who are in the news everyday. Here is a link to the official movie trailer.

This film by director Luca Guadagnino provides a glimpse of the earlier Musk as played by Ike Barinholtz, who is probably best remembered from his time with the comedy show Mad TV. Sam Altman is played by Andrew Garfield, a nice choice given his talents as well as it being a bookend to his earlier performance as a co-founder of Facebook in the film The Social Network.

The Hollywood Reporter had this to say about the film:

This ranks among Guadagnino’s best work, its dry humor lulling us into a relaxed state of enjoyment before the sword comes down on the scary reality we’re now facing. Even if AI developments are coming so thick and fast that no movie could possibly keep up, Guadagnino and screenwriter Rich have made a provocative feature that feels precision-targeted for this moment.

If you need to see it earlier, you can check it out at the New York Film Festival until October 12th.

Space Quote: AI is Ready to Run a Telescope

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

“It is exciting to see ideas from AI and reinforcement learning brought to telescope scheduling, where every decision must balance changing conditions and scarce observing time…Developing intelligent scheduling systems for astronomical surveys also raises fascinating new machine learning problems, and we are excited to continue exploring them through this project.”

-Statement by Northwestern University’s Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, who co-led the AI telescope project with Drlica-Wagner, as quoted by NOIRLab. The AI program planned and managed observations on a national facility for the first time. It is hoped that the involvement of AI could add efficiencies to the process, thereby allowing astronomers to have more time for their science.

Podcast: AI Data Centers in Space

Posted on by onespaceman2000

If you are following the debate about whether data centers belong in orbit, this Freakonomics Radio podcast titled “Should A.I. Move to Space?” may be for you.

Guest host Steve Levitt talks to a number of experts about the role of AI in our economy. I recommend listing to all of the podcast since much of it touches on the logistics of data centers in orbit, but it is the later part of the podcast involving a discussion with Will Marshall, co-founder and C.E.O. of Planet Labs, that peaked my attention. He discusses both the role of Planet Labs as its satellites monitors every corner of the Earth’s surface as well as the need for AI data centers in space.

In terms of the Planet Lab satellites, I found his most intriguing statements were related to the reduced costs of satellites. While most of the stories in the press seem to be about the decrease in rocket costs, Mr. Marshall said the real transformation is the miniaturization of satellites. Even under the earlier rocket system (pre-SpaceX), the drop in satellite costs due to smaller satellites would have been incredible.

In the quote below, Mr. Marshall is referring initially to the lower rocket costs, but then he expands into the real cost saving:

But remember even a four or five x reduction in cost, which really helps the whole space industry and has helped spawn it, is less significant, purely from an economic standpoint, than the 100 to a 1,000x improvement in cost performance of satellites that are going in. So, in each kilogram that you put up into space, if you can get a hundred times more data, because you’ve made the satellite way smaller, then you have won big time, even if the launch cost didn’t change one iota.

In his discussion about AI data centers, Mr. Marshall also has a unique view about the role of the Earth’s surface versus space:

I think it’s inevitable that, within a 10-ish year timeframe, most computers being built on the Earth will be going to space. I actually think not only is it going to be economically cheaper, but it’s going to be more sustainable. Earth’s life is so precious, it’s incredible, but yet we’re whittling away a lot of it. We’re doing deforestation for lithium, for cows, for whatever, we’re doing it. And we need to put our energy-intensive infrastructure into orbit, if we can, to not have a collision course with the biodiversity on the planet,

The podcast episode is in two parts, so be sure to listen to the second part when it comes out.

AI is Impersonating Carl Sagan and Others

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Dr. Carl Sagan poses with a model of the Viking lander in Death Valley, California. (NASA)

AI can do a number of things well, including astronomy-related tasks, but it also has a tendency to step on toes and steal other peoples creations. This was certainly the case with the editing program Grammarly, which wanted to go beyond simple grammar-related corrections. Instead, it started bragging about how it could edit like various famous writers and other well known individuals via a service called Expert Review.

Would you like Carl Sagan to edit your work? Well, Expert Review can help. How about Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sure, why not?

The problem is that Grammarly never obtained permission to mimic these parties, so now it faced a multi-million dollar lawsuit. The Guardian newspaper cites an company official who stated that Expert Review has already been taken down for redesign. That sounds a lot like a “rapid disassembly” of the service.

Many would like the equivalent of a Carl Sagan to be only a click away for advice and input, but this is not the way to do it.

We can only hope that AI services, currently backed by billions in investment funds, can one of these days figure out a way to (1) seek permission beforehand for data use and (2) share the wealth with true creators.

Until then, AI should stick to the raw AI astronomy data and stop impersonating the astronomers.