Lugh

Oh the ladies on "The View" already love her. She'll have no problems with them.

The View and the Real Housewives franchise are guilty TV pleasures I normally hate admitting to in public.

When I think about this issue, I sometimes think about future scenarios on a scale of 1 - 10, with 10 being 'most confidence to predict will occur' and 1 being 'least able to definitively predict'.

I give UBI a 4 on that scale. It may well occur, but there are different ways of achieving the same goal, so who knows.

One of the few facts I rank at 10, is that the day is coming when AI and robotics will be able to do most work, even the jobs uninvented, but for pennies on the hour.

The logical follow-on is that the day will also have to come, when society realizes that this is happening, understands it, and begins to prepare for its new reality. This is going to seem scary for many people; they will just see the destructive aspects of it, as the old ways of running the world crumble.

This is how I look at what this research is talking about - signs of this awakening becoming more widespread. We badly need politicians who start telling us about what the world is going to be like afterwards, and painting a hopeful vision about it.

I don't think Sabine Hossenfelder gets everything right, (she should stay away from talking about consciousness), but I love it when she goes on these eviscerating rants about some other physicists. She's right, much of the field, like economics, is dominated by people who can only say one "correct" version of things to keep their jobs.

In Europe and North America food loss adds up to around 16%

Everywhere in the world hunger and malnutrition are distribution problems, not lack of production problems.

If you are familiar with the idea of AI taking off into the realms of superintelligence, one of the steps that is supposed to accompany that is recursive self-improvement. In other words when AI can write its own code, to improve itself, and thus continuously get more and more powerful. I wonder if examples like this are the tiny first baby steps of that.

I'm surprised drone deliveries haven't taken off more yet, these guys in Germany look like they are on to a winning solution too.

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/wingcopter-drone-delivery-groceries-germany

Microsoft has cash reserves of $75 billion.

Microsoft - If you really want to convince us that nuclear power is part of the future, why can't you use some of your own money? Why does every single nuclear suggestion always rely on bailouts from taxpayers? Here's a thought, if you can't pay for it yourself - just pick the cheaper option that taxpayers don't have to pay for - you know renewables and grid storage? The stuff that everybody else, all over the world, is building near 99% of new electricity generation with.

"INBRAIN’s BCI technology was able to differentiate between healthy and cancerous brain tissue with micrometer-scale precision."

This breakthrough with the surgery is very interesting, but what is even more interesting to me is their wider goals. They wonder if it will be possible to use this approach to treat many brain disorders, including mental health conditions.

This also has the potential for a direct connection between artificial intelligence and our brains. That has long been speculated about in sci-fi. This approach has a chance of starting to make it a reality.

When I look at the potential in current advances in medicine, and the idiocracy that passes for "politics" and "debate", in some quarters, I wonder when more people are going to wise up.

Training and educating surgeons is the biggest bottleneck in the availability of their skills, and thus the amount of surgeries people can have. Here we have the potential to smash through that. Procedure by procedure, as robots master individual types of surgery, suddenly the only type of bottleneck you have is the amount of robots. A vastly easier and quicker problem to solve than increasing the supply of trained human surgeons.

For sure there is a certain amount of hype here. That said much of their thinking seems like it could be sound. But I want to see stuff like this working in practice, not just theoretically. I guess we will have to wait and see.

Dear ChatGPT - Please pretend I'm a rich, white man when you're writing my college admissions essay for me, thanks, Signed - A Poor

This engine seems to work like an ion thruster but uses metal as fuel instead of xenon gas, which is easier to refine and can be found in asteroids all over the Solar System.