I take issue with the assertion that there was a period where all people could agree on a world view. Most of the 20th century was defined by sharp disagreement between world views and all of their constituent parts. Perhaps if you limit the scope to all citizens of a nation then the statement would be more truthful but there are large disagreements there as well.
I sincerely hope we never release these into the wild either accidentally or on purpose. It’s great to have microorganisms that can do work for you but they should be incapable of surviving outside a very controlled environment. We should only tackle a problem like plastic pollution with this by using a contained filter system where we feed the contaminated soil and water in and then take out the cleaned product and thoroughly sterilize it before returning it to the environment. Good God imagine how much worse it would be if the pollutant you had to deal with was alive and capable of self replication and evolving defences to your mitigation efforts!
Mobile phones and VR are different non competing markets. AR might eventually compete with phones once you can wear an AR device all day everywhere you go. AR and VR should be treated as distinct; a good VR headset is bad for most AR usecases and vice versa. Maybe at some distant time there will be hardware capable of doing both really well but not for many years. VR fits into daily life as a social experience and will be obvious once eye, face and full body tracking are included with the headset. Even before that if someone solves the network problems with concurrent users and delivers an experience that handles audio well enough to work with multiple people having conversations within earshot of each other. AR is really just putting screens and overlays everywhere, conversational interfaces will have more and better impact than that.
You don’t need soil, you need fertilizer and water. We farm outside now because it’s cheap. If you move to a temporarily inhospitable place then farming outside is no longer cheap so it is better to do it inside or in outdoor hydroponic or aeroponic systems if the weather is nice enough.
I’d argue that there is no default model. The model you have is just whatever you’ve spent time interacting with. If yours is mostly social then that perhaps plays a big role in your life. I would say mine is more heavily spatial and oriented around things and their interactions.
Supporting evidence for this are feral children who could never learn to integrate into society. They didn’t have built in models of social interaction.
90 percent of everything is crap but I’ve seen plenty of creative people make compelling films with digital tools. This technology puts that capability within each of people who aren’t also 3D modellers or graphic artists so we’re bound to get more output, good and bad. Same deal with when film cameras became cheap and widely available or digital cameras or iPhones.
I don’t see why freedom of speech would be impacted by this. Existing laws around copyright and libel will need to be applied and litigated on a case by case basis but they should cover the malicious uses. Anything that falls outside of that is just noise and we have plenty of noise already.
Even if we wind up at a point where no one trusts photos or videos is that really a disaster? Blindly trusting a photo or video that someone else, especially some anonymous account, gives you is a terrible way to shape your perception of the world. Ensuring that less people default to trusting random videos may even be good for society. It would force you to think about where the video came from, if it’s corroborated by other reports from various sources and if you’re able to verify the events through other channels available to you. You have to do the same work when evaluating any other claim after all.
We will see the first feature length AI generated movie this year. If you think I’m crazy then consider that even way back at the dawn of cinema the average shot length was 12 seconds and today it is only 2.5 seconds.
There are a few important techniques to be refined such as keeping consistent subjects between generations but I could see many inconsistencies being made up for by applying existing methods such as separating the layers based on depth allowing more static images to be used or creating simple 3D models with textures where more depth is needed. With enough effort and skill someone could probably do it with existing technologies.
I’m willing to bet that there are projects at every chip company looking into how to drive down these costs. The first step is to put the architecture of the model and the backprop into silicon. The weights are the only variables so if you can reduce those to cheap and fast modules that can be mass produced you could come up with something cheaper than a GPU. If the profitability of running and training this specific model is high enough than its worth the investment of time and money to set up the production line.
Life won’t be around long on a single planet, the frequency with which large scale and mass extinctions occur is quite shocking once you spend some time looking at the data. Not to mention the rapidity with which human civilizations collapse and thanks to our global reach we’re all one big codependent civilization now. The clock is ticking and it’s later than you think.
Building the drydocks capable of submerging the rail cars and positioning the ship above them and then hauling the ship out would be the bigger challenge. Dealing with any slope with that much weight is tricky.
Well you heard it here first folks, that’s a wrap. Once you finish your portion of tearing up the roads and knocking down the houses please proceed to the nearest thanatorium and enjoy the last show. Better to go now with dignity than to just wait out the inevitable here.
The way things are going on Earth even just the prospect of free land and the freedom to live and prosper how you want is going to be enough. It was plenty for the people who came before us to cross the freezing cold ocean on a months long voyage crammed into a tiny ship. It unfortunately took a lot of them dying in order to figure out how to survive in the new world so hopefully we’ll be faster learners and better prepared. I don’t believe we need futuristic technology, we know how to build pressure hulls, we have mining equipment, we have aeroponics and a mass of other necessary techniques. Yes we’ll need resupply as all colonies did in the past until they built up their own manufacturing base. It would not be fun or nice in the way that sitting at home in a soft chair playing video games and eating pizza is but it would win you a legacy and a life to be proud of by securing a place for your descendants and advancing humanity.
Nobody is launching anything that is going to take 50,000 years to get there. If you do then your descendants would be the last to arrive. What propulsion technology are you assuming? The fastest we know of and can build would be nuclear pulse propulsion and it doesn’t take 50k years to get to any nearby star with that.
Nah you just need a bunch o rocks. Bombard Mars for 50 years with every chunk of rock and ice you can strap a couple engines and fuel tanks to, aka a used Starship second stage, and it’ll be plenty warm and wet.
> Lastly, sterile environments on Earth will be wayyy easier and cheaper an equivalent facilities in orbit
Not when you’re competing with belters growing truck sized GMO bananas in massive inflatable aeroponic spheres with 24 hours of lensed daylight and a robotic workforce that only needs tiny motors and propellors to move around. Not to mention the savings on freeze drying and sterilizing the crops before transit, they aren’t selling the water back at those prices!
The answer is right there in front of everyone. I’m surprised hardly anyone sees it when it has shown up in popular fiction before.
In order to colonize space in our solar system we have to master living in space and building space habitats. If you live on a habitat full time then what do you care if it’s travelling around a star or towards another star or not even trying to go to a star and just moving from one interstellar object to another? If the habitat is big enough to contain two hundred million people then it is effectively the size of the world that most humans lived in for a large chunk of recorded history. The idea may seem strange to us but our current lives are very strange compared to the lives of those who lived when there were only two hundred million people alive on the planet.
We’re not running out of fruit, we’re just so fat and lazy from eating all the fruit we’ve already picked that we haven’t even bothered to go after the rest.
We are talking about generation ships so one lifetime isn’t a limit. Second, they said no unmodified life would make it. Third, I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out the Copernican principal when it comes to rocky planets in the Goldilocks zone, you’re just making the same mistake that those who said any planets were a rare event and they were very wrong. Small planets are hard to spot and most of the ones we’ve found have short orbital periods around small stars. Using transits for detection is also very limiting because the orbital plane has to align perfectly with ours. Hell, there was just a story about the JWT finding a bunch of Jupiter sized planets in interstellar space that nobody predicted so it’s looking like planets are everywhere more abundant than we thought.
This is getting more confusing. Just because you can think in words doesn’t mean you enumerate everything in words. I think of myself as someone with an inner voice that I use often but not everything that happens in my mind is subvocalized. A lot of it is imagining or recalling images or movements, there’s spatial awareness when thinking about positioning things and manipulating objects, there are non verbal recollections like music or recalling a sound something made and there are thoughts that are more like pure concepts or feelings. Maybe there is some misunderstanding about how the inner voice is used or maybe I’m wrong and there are people who exclusively think in words?
Networking isn’t my thing but could this be used to create a VPN in order to federate a bunch of servers? I’m thinking something like Tilde servers that would benefit from running on their own subnet along with other trusted servers so they could provide services similar to the way they worked on the early net e.g. email, news, finger, etc?
Might be a stupid question and I could be way off base but worth asking.