Lugh

The human intestine is 6 meters long. It can be useful to locate problems with millimeter precision as this approach claims to do.

Edible robots and robotic food — edible systems that perceive, process, and act upon stimulation — could open a new range of opportunities in health care, environmental management, and the promotion of healthier eating habits. For example, they could enable precise drug delivery and in vivo health monitoring, deliver autonomously targeted nutrition in emergencies, reduce waste in farming, facilitate wild animal vaccination

I think this is one of those ideas, that when you first hear about it you scratch your head thinking what on earth could that be useful for?, but then the more you think about it, actually these researchers have a point.

It would be silly to have large edible robots but what if the future is filled with trillions of tiny insect-sized robots? There are already drones being built this size. From that perspective, this makes more sense. For a start they are biodegradable. It gives them all sorts of uses in monitoring health and delivering medicine to animals. Suddenly you can have a whole layer of monitoring tiny robots in the environment and not have to worry about pollution when they come to the end of their useful life span. Not to mention this is a targeted way of delivering food to vulnerable species that may be affected by climate change emergencies.

I have zero confidence in the promises of any of the big tech companies when it comes to privacy and AI.

I have a feeling it will be China who gets there first with mass-produced robots. They have the manufacturing base for it, nowhere else on the planet does near as much.

What concerns me is that a lot of these efforts seem to be political in nature and are tied to mitigating the inevitable decline in the fossil fuel industry. More often it makes more sense to speed up the use of renewables and dropping the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use still hasn't peaked. That is mainly driven by China, who are still building new coal and gas electricity plants. However the peak year of fossil fuel use is very near, there is some speculation it may even be this year for oil use. From then on it will be in steady decline, so of course that industry is going to do everything they can to delay.

This is interesting as it runs counter to what many people think about current AI. Its performance seems directly linked to the quality of the training data it has. Here the opposite is happening; it has poor training data and still outperforms humans. It's not surprising the humans would do badly in this situation too; it's hard to keep up to date on things that you may only encounter once or twice in your entire career. It's interesting to extrapolate from this observation as it applies to many other fields.

One of the authors of the paper goes into more detail on Twitter.

Four months is a long time in 2020's AI development. OpenAI debuted Sora in February this year but hasn't publicly released it. Now a Chinese company called Kuaishou has got ahead of them with a model it calls Kling. Kuaishou is TikTok's biggest competitor in China and has a video-sharing app used by 200 million people. Presumably, that is where all its training data came from. Unlike OpenAI, Kling is available to some of the public.

This tech still doesn't look ready to level the TV and movie industry. It does 5-second clips, but who wants a 90-minute movie made up of nothing but 5-second clips?

This technology is still very much at the proof of concept stage. What's fascinating is that they did not expect the neuron tissue to be healed in the way it was, and don't even understand how the stem cell robots did so.

That is a problem though. How do you develop the potential for something, when you don't really know what it may be able to do, or how it may be able to do it?

Not sure I consider this futurology,

Yeah, its borderline. But I posted it as the the excuse/reasoning centers around AI. Microsoft's plan for 'Recall' are a huge invasion of privacy and stem from use of AI too. It's the topic of AI & privacy that merits discussion.

Although I wouldn't want the final decision to rest with AI, it makes a lot of sense that this is used for preparatory and research work leading to decisions.

I gave you a shout out in the main sidebar as an extra thank you.

Lots of people in the world of SEO, marketing, and copywriting are excited about the possibility of creating vast quantities of AI-generated text. They have a problem. Human waking hours are finite, and many of us may be near our upper limit for absorbing new content.

OP examines the other side of this. How new AI's advances allow us to examine text. It seems obvious to me this will have more profound effects than the ability to generate text. Consider one aspect of this.

AI should allow us to analyze the logic in politicians' speeches in real-time. There are over a hundred logical fallacies, and they are a standard part of political debate. So much so, if you took all the logical fallacies out of political debate - what would you have left? Soon people may have the ability to easily find out.