overview for Lugh

4

What do you think the likelihood is of the US having a second civil war soon? (self.futurology)

submitted 1 week ago by Lugh to c/futurology

5 comments fedilink

Trump's plan seem to be to purge the US military of any generals that don't agree with him, and his Secretary of Defence pick, has spoken of the need for using the military against US citizens he sees as leftist.

If this is how things play out, how likely is it some states like California may talk of secession, or armed resistance organizes against the military?

20

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University achieve a breakthrough in surgical robotics, training a robot to perform complex medical procedures solely by having it watch videos of human surgeons at work (hub.jhu.edu)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

3 comments fedilink

-10

Qwen, a Chinese open-source AI, is on a par with or ahead of all the western investor funded AI's. (www.ai-supremacy.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

2 comments fedilink

5

Waabi is taking generative AI into the physical world with autonomous long-haul trucks (techcrunch.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/avs

5 comments fedilink

32

A Danish startup's tech replaces the 115-year-old Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia fertilizer with a decentralized on-farm solution, powered by renewables. (self.futurology)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

6 comments fedilink

14

How Silicon Valley is prepping for War: As frontier models join forces with the Pentagon, corporations and the state are becoming too close. (www.ai-supremacy.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

1 comments fedilink

2

MIT Researchers demonstrate an advance is training robots in virtual environments, which may speed robotics development. (lucidsim.github.io)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

0 comments fedilink

8

AI may be speeding up the rate of discovery in biology, but there are still lots of bottlenecks humans need to fix. (www.asimov.press)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

0 comments fedilink

83

The AI Bubble may be about to burst. LLMs have reached the point of diminishing returns, and there's no sign of scaling leading to independent reasoning, needed for the first steps to AGI. (self.futurology)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

44 comments fedilink

The argument for current LLM AIs leading to AGI has always been that they would spontaneously develop independent reasoning, through an unknown emergent property that would appear as they scale. It hasn't happened, and there's no sign that it will.

That's a dilemma for the big AI companies. They are burning through billions of dollars every month, and will need further hundreds of billions to scale further - but for what in return?

Current LLMs can still do a lot. They've provided Level 4 self-driving, and seem to be leading to general-purpose robots capable of much useful work. But the headwinds look ominous for the global economy, - tit-for-tat protectionist trade wars, inflation, and a global oil shock due to war with Iran all loom on the horizon for 2025.

If current AI players are about to get wrecked, I doubt it's the end for AI development. Perhaps it will switch to the areas that can actually make money - like Level 4 vehicles and robotics.

7

How Can Humanity Become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization? (youtu.be)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology_youtube

0 comments fedilink

6

Aurora Innovation delays commercial autonomous truck launch to 2025 (techcrunch.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/avs

0 comments fedilink

31

Japan is building a self-driving transport corridor to automate cargo transport between Tokyo and Osaka and wants to extend the system to the whole country. (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh to c/futurology

5 comments fedilink

Users experience of Google's NotebookLM AI, shows why AI may be very bad news for some large established software companies. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 1 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Customer relationship management software puts its details into structured fields, like many other types of software, a database of sorts. This user is saying that extra step is no longer needed. The AI is capable of extracting, summarizing, and structuring the data from emails, Slack, etc - thus no more need for the software anymore.

In France, a Level 4 self-driving mini-shuttle bus, with a 10-person capacity, is showing the future of public transit. in c/avs

[–] Lugh 1 points 4 weeks ago

Understandably, we often focus on the downsides of self-driving vehicles - the loss of human driving jobs. However, that stops us from thinking about their ultimate promise. When the tech is mature and commoditized, mini-shuttles like this will be ultra-cheap to run.

They'll also have a vast market of potential users. Furthermore, the Level 4 self-driving tech they need is already here. I suspect the future will have 10 to 100 times more public transit routes; many operated by small self-driving shuttles like this.

Anthropic's latest advance with AI, where it can operate on-screen software, shows us how future AI can replace much of today's human knowledge work. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I've been wondering when current LLM AIs would start to master this ability. I suspect it will be one of the things it's good at. For many tasks, software usage patterns are relatively predictable and modelable. A trend with current AI, is for competitors and open-source to rapidly follow industry leaders. We can expect AI like this to be widely available in six months.

Many people's knowledge work employment is tied to software skills and experience. That premium is about to start diminishing. People are familiar with the concept of 'macros'; automating repetitive sequences of software usage. It seems all but inevitable AI will be doing something similar, but orders of magnitude greater, and that all the forces in free market economics will be driving it to replace expensive humans.

With 'electro-agriculture,' plants can produce food in the dark and with 94% less land, bioengineers say. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yes, I also forgot to mention this tech is a safeguard against supply-side shocks. like with wheat after Russia attacked Ukraine.

With 'electro-agriculture,' plants can produce food in the dark and with 94% less land, bioengineers say. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Some people's reaction to this proposal might be to wonder why bother? We already have a functional agriculture system using sunlight that's been working for several thousand years. But there is a lot to be said for improving on it.

This approach could grow many foods where they can't currently be grown. Thus we could localize food production, and decentralize it. This could vastly reduce the waste of food transport. Furthermore, pollution from pesticides could be vastly reduced. It also allows us to think about rewilding huge swathes of our environments. Finally, this is an approach amenable to full automation. Ultimately that will reduce the price of food and its availability. Who knows, several decades from now, the standard way to produce food may be via indoor methods tended to by robot farmers.

Spanish researchers have developed an intermediate band (IB) solar cell using gallium phosphide and titanium, which has the potential to achieve an energy conversion efficiency of up to 60%. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, like everything the challenge is to get from the Lab to production. Perovskite solar cells, another type of solar cells that show great theoretical promise, have issues with long-term stability. Solar cells need to survive in tough conditions for many years to be useful. Here I would also wonder about the relative scarcity of gallium being a limiting factor.

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning: Statement comes as tech firms try to use creative professionals’ work to train AI models. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 1 points 1 month ago

That I can help you with.

Without doxxing them, this reddit user campaigns a lot IRL on UBI - their posts/UBI subreddits have loads of stuff - https://www.reddit.com/user/2noame

Also Twitter has load of stuff - search 'UBI' there, scroll down based on 'Top' and there are lots of accounts devoted to UBI news.

BTW - You're welcome to setup https://futurology.today/UBI here too & cross-post/double-post if you want

Apple scraps car project, but tech lives on in BYD's EV success in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Bet it's going to be China building most of the humanoid robots too.

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning: Statement comes as tech firms try to use creative professionals’ work to train AI models. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

apart from posting regularly, sadly I don't have many ideas. 😞😞

We've had real trouble growing this site from the reddit sub-reddit, and the promotional posts we've done, in total, have had tens of thousands of views

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning: Statement comes as tech firms try to use creative professionals’ work to train AI models. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

the people that own the machines have any interest in keeping us alive

I never take ideas like that seriously. Even in sci-fi, the concept seems wildly fanciful.

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning: Statement comes as tech firms try to use creative professionals’ work to train AI models. in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If AI/robotics follow the typical s-curve of technological adoption, I think the 2030s is most likely. We already seem to be at the beginning of that s-curve in 2024.

Anthropic says latest AI model can control users’ computers in c/futurology

[–] Lugh 10 points 1 month ago

That's a hard no from me. I won't go near Google or Microsoft's latest AI offerings either. That said I'm using gen-AI in other contexts more and more. I'm fine with it, as long as it has strictly limited access to my data.