Lugh

People have grumbled and put up with Big Tech privacy invasions before, but I wonder if this time is different. Microsoft's plan for Windows with AI sounds deeply unappealing. The idea of an AI tracking everything you do on your computer might be a red line for many people. Microsoft promised that they wouldn't harvest or use the data, but that promise has been broken so many times by Big Tech, that many have lost trust.

This article is an interesting look at an alternative path for a private open-source desktop OS. Interestingly, although it's Linux-compatible, it's not Linux, and OP says it's superior.

I suspect lots of people will do more than grumble this time around, and the backlash against AI, data harvesting, and the loss of privacy will grow.

Caveats. It may not have an atmosphere, or if it does, it might be as bleakley unpromising as Venus's. Still, this is exciting news. I wonder how close we are to detecting evidence of simple microbial life on an exo-planet? It feels like it's just a matter of time, and could happen any year.

How is this at all like having your own AI…

There's a certain logic to this. The more useful a personal AI is, the more it knows about your activities, so as to master helping you do them better. I'm not saying I like this new Microsoft feature, but the underlying logic is not exclusive to them - it will be everywhere else in the world too eventually as AI grows.

A great many people will hate this, but they'll do it anyway. I guess its the logical conclusion of having your own personal AI.

My theory would be that some western people are very disquieted to see China take the lead in various technological fields. When I post in r/futurology on Reddit I constantly observe this in China related comments and discussion.

I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.

Here's an illustration of it. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.

If advanced alien civilizations exist, then searching for them via their electromagnetic radiation techno-signatures seems an obvious route.

That said, I've never been very convinced by the idea of Dyson spheres. Surely if you were that technologically advanced you could think of cleverer ways to generate energy than building some cyberpunk structure that was bigger than a star.

There's a strong push-back against AI regulation within some quarters. Predictably, the issue seems to have split along polarized political lines. With right-wing leaning people not favoring regulation. They see themselves as 'Accelerationist' and those with concerns about AI as 'Doomers'.

Meanwhile the unaddressed problems mount. AI can already deceive us, even when we design it not to do so, and we don't why.

I'm interested to see how this develops. If this is a base model other companies can freely acquire with no license costs or restrictions, then it might quickly expand the range of humanoid robots available.

I'm expecting China to take the lead in manufacturing "cheap" humanoid robots, and exporting them. There are demos of humanoid robots training themselves to do simple household tasks. How soon before you can buy a Humanoid Robot Maid in the shops?

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.