Current LLM models tend to extract “best practice” responses a lot. They can statistically guess the correct responses to things, because it’s what experts cite the most. I wonder if that is what is behind this? As the authors of the research point out, the significance here is not the AI’s appearance of superior intelligence, it’s that it’s yet another example of how people may be influenced by AI.
I wonder how long it will be before we see people purposely create these so they can influence their descendants. There might be a future where people have “relationships” with a collection of long dead people.
The logical follow on from this is that EV owners should have cheaper car insurance. With far fewer moving parts they will also have much cheaper maintenance costs. Added to that EVs are cheaper to buy. China has reached the point where 50% of new car sales are EVs much quicker than anyone expected. Most people thought that was years away, but we’re already there. How soon before people start talking about a “death spiral” when it comes to gasoline cars?
Relevant Data
Per 1,000 vehicles of 3 year old cars
ICE 6.4
BEV 2.8
The ADAC even noted a growing lead for electric cars in recent years. The analysis was based on the more than 3.5 million call-outs made by ADAC breakdown services last year
Solar thermal propulsion is the idea of using solar energy to heat a propellant and using that energy for thrust. If it worked as hoped it could be very useful in LEO and beyond. Portal Space Systems, the start-up here, points out there are already plenty of use cases for it now moving satellites into different orbits. This idea has been around since the 1950s, and could even be described as low-tech (it could work with mirrors heating water), but the logistics and infrastructure to support it might not be so simple, or economically viable.
China already getting to 50%+1 for EV new car sales is way ahead of most predictions. Most people thought that was still a few years away, but it seems events are moving faster.
China is also exporting this speedy transition to other countries. Economics of scale are kicking in with EV manufacturers now, and the cars are getting cheaper and cheaper to make.
I suspect the rest of the world will be relying more and more on decentralized grids and renewables too as the decades roll on. They are cheaper and easier to deploy, but crucially more climate change resilient.
The other backstory here is China. They’ve brought down the price of solar enough to make this happen.
NASA really is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its lunar plans. Its SLS system is a disaster, but pork barrel politics means it can’t ditch it. So it lives on, zombie-like, to suck the life and money out of better options.
Meanwhile, it’s placed all its eggs in a SpaceX basket. That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Guess what? It’s happening again. A commenter on the OP article sums up what SpaceX has to do before humans can go back to the Moon.
Re-light Starship engines
Achieve stable orbit
Dock with another Starship
Transfer propellant
Use transferred propellant
Dock with Orion and/or Dragon
Design a life support system for a volume much larger than Dragon
People often catastrophize about the potential for near misses with large asteroids. In reality, far more deadly “near misses” are happening with H5N1 bird flu, and they don’t seem to be taken as seriously....
Sometimes it’s the little things that are the most revolutionary. Small drones the size of the human hand that are essentially endlessly self-powered could have countless uses. Perhaps many we can’t even see yet. Terrain exploration, security, warfare - there are many ways you would see these being used.
A lot of talk of AI tends to revolve around who is doing best in league tables and Silicon Valley chatter, meanwhile the truly significant is happening elsewhere. AI making independent breakthroughs like this has far greater long-term significance.
No part of this article involves AI making independent discoveries.
My reading of this is the opposite.
Although there were competing hypothesis, nobody knew how insect wing hinge mechanisms worked. Now they do, and the fundamental insight was provided via AI.
I think this is both a fundamental discovery, and one we can attribute to the AI, more than the humans involved.
Any time I hear claims that involve hitherto unknown laws of Physics I’m 99.99% sure I’m dealing with BS - but then again, some day someone will probably genuinely pull off such a discovery.
When people rated moral reasoning responses to issues, and were unaware some were generated by AI, they rated the AI's as better than the humans. (www.nature.com)
China has a flourishing market for deepfakes that clone the dead. The same technologies are being used by Chinese people to make replicas of themselves, their children, and famous public figures. (www.technologyreview.com)
Researchers are making progress on producing cows from just stem cells, with no eggs or sperm involved. Some people are wondering if the same tech might one day work with humans. (www.technologyreview.com)
New German research shows EVs break down at less than half the rate of combustion engine cars. (www.adac.de)
Rooftop solar is being adopted so quickly in South Africa it has eliminated the country's previous problem with blackouts from its main electricity grid.
Further Info from Wietze Post, a South African renewables provider....
A new space start-up wants to try out a long talked about space tech - solar thermal propulsion (arstechnica.com)
Swiss researchers have developed a hair-thin sheet battery that can be charged in 1 minute, and they think can be scaled up to make batteries for phones and cars. (ethz.ch)
EV cars are likely to reach over 50% of new car sales in the world's largest car market in April 2024, marking another step in the extinction of the internal combustion engine. (carnewschina.com)
Funding is announced to electrify the 50% of Africa that still lacks electrification by 2030, mainly through decentralized grids and renewable energy. (www.worldbank.org)
NASA is scaling back its Moon plans, and saying a 2026 human landing on the Moon is unfeasible. (arstechnica.com)
Should the world accelerate the development of cultured meat to save us from pandemics far worse than COVID-19? A "near miss" potential disaster with H5N1 bird flu & American milk suggests yes.
People often catastrophize about the potential for near misses with large asteroids. In reality, far more deadly “near misses” are happening with H5N1 bird flu, and they don’t seem to be taken as seriously....
German researchers have developed a solar cell film, 1/20th the thickness of human hair, that allows small commercial drones coated with it to be fully self-charging. (techxplore.com)
A California startup says they have combined CRISPR gene editing and generative AI, and want to test their tech in clinical trials. (archive.ph)
How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. (www.quantamagazine.org)
AI is starting to make independent discoveries in basic science, as shown by AI's recent discoveries in how insect wings work. (www.nature.com)
Although not peer reviewed or replicated, a NASA veteran claims their Propellantless Propulsion Drive, that physics says shouldn’t work, just produced enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity (thedebrief.org)