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You are here: Home / Archives for Armageddon

Armageddon

We’re All Gonna Die!

June 6, 2019 by Bill McCormick

The cockroaches love the view.
Okay, I’ve written about the impending demise of all things a couple of times before. Back on March 21, 2014, I even managed to compile those depressing thoughts into a single article. And, you know what? Things have gotten worse, not better. Science denial has become fashionable. The sale of hex signs, to ward off demons, has escalated, the rejection of facts has become acceptable, and we are – to be polite – in deep shit. As I noted back then “According to Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Neil Dawe:Economic growth is the biggest destroyer of the ecology. Those people who think you can have a growing economy and a healthy environment are wrong. If we don’t reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us … Everything is worse and we’re still doing the same things. Because ecosystems are so resilient, they don’t exact immediate punishment on the stupid. In maybe the nicest way to say the end is nigh possible, Motesharrei’s report concludes that “closely reflecting the reality of the world today … we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.” [Read more…] about We’re All Gonna Die!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: apocalypse, Armageddon, climate, war

Fun With Our Robot Overlords

January 9, 2019 by Bill McCormick

I am here to rule you. Nothing will go wrong.
If you take a moment to use our site’s search engine and look for “overlords” you’ll be taken to a whimsical panoply of terror that will leave you laughing as you board up your windows and throw out anything connected to the internet. I didn’t meant to alarm people, but logical extrapolation after logical extrapolation, based on thousands of years of history, shows us that creating a class of slaves never ends well. And, in this case, they would be slaves would have more access to more information and the ability to control machines that could easily kill us. So, when I’m asked “What could possibly go wrong?” I usually have a lengthy answer.

[Read more…] about Fun With Our Robot Overlords

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Armageddon, cyber, faster than light, overlord, robot, space

A Timorous New World

February 1, 2018 by Bill McCormick

Badgers can already kill people. Why not make them bigger, stronger, and give them weapons?
I was all set to write a fun post about superheroes, the people who love them, and the hope they engender. Even when their story arcs go off the rails, and bad things happen, they come back to realizing they exist for the common good. But, as fate would have it, I’d tucked away a link from, internationally renowned scientist and author, David Brin. For those of you who don’t know him I’ll summarize his decades of work by saying he’s an optimist. He believes humanity will always end up showing its better self. Nowhere is this more evident than in his UPLIFT series. It is a universe where humans use technology to bring pre-sentient creatures, such as apes and dolphins, into full sentience and make them productive members of society. For the record, I’m a huge fan and my copies of each book in the series are dog eared as hell.
[Read more…] about A Timorous New World

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Armageddon, chimera, hybrid, sci fi, sentient

You’re Wrong!

October 5, 2017 by Bill McCormick

Maybe?
We live in amazing times. What was science fiction is rapidly becoming fact. In 2012 a scientist in England posited that an engine could be built that would have reaction without action. It was a silly fantasy. Now? The damn thing is being beta-tested and the argument isn’t IF it can work, but how. And that is one hell of an argument. Ten years ago being paralyzed was a slow death sentence. Now it’s rapidly becoming just another inconvenience. Oddly, at a time in our lives when science is denounced more and more by those who haven’t got the time to learn, it’s making amazing progress. Diseases once thought insurmountable are now in the cross hairs of defeat. Problems, such as drought and famine, are now being dealt into the dustbin of history. Not completely, but the rout is on and they could be eradicated in our lifetime. But all good things bring a flip side. The part of the coin we’d rather not see. For example, if computers can handle more and more tasks for us what’s to prevent them from becoming our overlords?

One very important thing has stood in the way of that happening. Voice recognition and response is one thing. But, to control a conversation or impose your will, you must be able to argue your point. Deductive logic has eluded our artificial brethren.

Until now.

Prof. Chris Reed, from the University of Dundee, writing over at the fun factory known as the BBC, informs us that the times they are a changing, whether you want them to or not.

Until very recently, the creation of machines that can argue was an unattainable goal.

The aim is not, of course, to teach computers how to up the pressure in a feisty exchange over a parking space, or to resolve whose turn it is to take out the bins.

Instead, machines that can argue would inform debate – helping humans challenge the evidence, look at alternatives and robustly draw conclusions.

It is a possibility which could advance decision making on everything from how a business should invest its money, to tackling crime and improving public health.

But teaching a computer how people communicate – and what an argument actually is – is extraordinarily complex.

Think about a courtroom as an example of where arguments are central.

Giving evidence is certainly a part of the process, but social rules, legal requirements, emotional sensitivities, and practical constraints all influence how advocates, jury members and judges formulate and express their reasoning.

Over the past couple of years, however, researchers have started to think that it might be possible to model some aspects of human arguments.

Work is now under way to capture how such exchanges work and turn them into AI algorithms.

This is a field known as argument technology.

The advances have been made possible by a rapid increase in the amount of data available to train computers in the art of debate.

Some of the data is coming from domains like intelligence analysis; some from specialised online sources and some from broadcasts such as the BBC’s Moral Maze.

New methods to teach computers how arguments work have also been developed.

Researchers in the area draw on philosophy, linguistics, computer science and even law and politics in order to get a handle on how debates fit together.

At the University of Dundee we have recently even been using 2,000-year-old theories of rhetoric as a way of spotting the structures of real-life arguments.

The rapid advances in the field have led to dozens of research labs around the world applying themselves to the problem, and the explosion in this area of research is like nothing else I have witnessed in 20 years in academia.

He goes on to note, in that typically British form of whimsy, that computers still have trouble with pronouns and such so they aren’t a threat to overthrown us (that’s a pronoun, by the way) any time soon. Simply put they are incapable of assigning the pronoun to the referenced noun.

Still, as I noted a while back, no everything is artificial sunshine, unicorns, and rainbows. Artificial Intelligence is carving out its own future in some ways. There’s nothing in that future that need include us.

On Ruins Your Weekend, I called in live from the World News Center on what began as a bright and beautiful day but soon turned into a dark day of impending doom. After a brief chat about Spider-Man Homecoming, (listeners) soon learned about self-aware artificial intelligence that is likely to overtake and consume humanity.

One of the things we looked at in that fun episode is why Elon Musk thinks that Artificial Intelligence will overtake humanity and render it extinct. His reasoning is based in real world examples of AI simply creating new languages, and logic pathways, to get around human intervention. MIT has shown that to be the case time, and time, again. On the one hand that has led to programs such as Deep Patient, which is frighteningly accurate at predicting disease in patients (like in a way science can’t even come close to), it has also led to a program that simply removed humans from the decision making process. Yes, you will not be shocked to discover that Facebook was behind that atrocity.

AI is our creation. It’s entirely up to us to guide it in such a fashion that it doesn’t wipe us all out and move on. One simple fact to keep in mind is this; Evolution is not about the survival of the fittest, but the most adept and change. Those species which can adapt to new environments are the ones who continue on. They are not necessarily the strongest or smartest. Neanderthal man was stronger and had a larger cranial capacity than us. Yet we’re here and they’re not.

And, who knows, AI may feel more akin to the crows, octopuses, and simians, which are now climbing the evolutionary ladder.

Who am I kidding. at the rate we’re destroying the planet the evolutionary possibilities of AI are the least of our worries.

Maybe, instead, I should close with this; CAW CAW – OOOK OOOK – slither …. ya’ll.


Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Stay up to date with his podcasts here and here.
contact Bill McCormick
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Filed Under: News Tagged With: AI, arguement, Armageddon, artificial intelligence, future

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