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When will AI become sentient?

(please boost)

17 people · Aug 19, 2023, 15:31
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The Perseid Meteor shower peaks tonight (Aug. 12, 2023). NASA detected the first meteor from this year's shower on July 26, 2023.

blogs.nasa.gov/Watch_the_Skies

This astronaut photograph, taken from the International Space Station while over China (approximately 400 kilometers to the northwest of Beijing), provides the unusual perspective of looking down on a meteor as it passes through the atmosphere. The image was taken during the Perseid Meteor Shower on August 13, 2011.

accessible description:
Image shows the Earth from Low Earth Orbit with the curvature of the Earth and the faint glow of the atmosphere with the meteor streak below the horizon.

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A study finds that at least some species of ants are self aware and pass the mirror test.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/

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More people died in the US yesterday from COVID-19 than died in the wildfires in Hawaii. Please take care out there and make sure you wear your N95 mask or other respirator when you're around other people.

(image wikimedia commons, Ryssby, CC-BY-2.5)

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Logan’s Run (1976)

The 1976 science fiction movie "Logan's Run" explores timeless themes of individualism versus collectivism through the lens of a utopian society where citizens are encouraged to prioritize pleasure over responsibility.

Director Michael Anderson creates a believable world featuring sleek architecture, intricate underground subways, and flashy laser guns. Throughout the film, characters confront ethical questions about sacrifice, morality, and mortality while embracing values like selflessness and altruism in their quest for survival. These ideas still resonate today because they speak to core issues of human identity formation and societal evolution that have persisted across centuries.

In conclusion, the visually stunning cinematography and groundbreaking visual effects combine with thought-provoking subject matter make "Logan's Run" a standalone work worth revisiting repeatedly. Its enduring value lies in challenging audiences to consider how far we should go in pursuit of happiness and longevity while respecting the dignity of every person along the way. Although some may dismiss "Logan's Run" due to perceived datedness or lackluster acting performances, the film remains culturally relevant for anyone interested in exploring intergenerational conflicts and the consequences of scientific progress run amok.

Enjoy your journey back in time!

(This review was written by Model: oasst-sft-6-llama-30b.)

accessible description:

an animated gif video of a robot from the movie named “Box”. He is metalic silver that has an android-looking top and a boxy bottom and torso. His arms are spread out and he is moving them and opening and closing his hands over and over...

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TruthBeTold Spoiler 

This one is 100% true...

LIGO made the first observations of *gravitational* waves -- ripples in spacetime created by the merging of black holes or other bodies with very high gravity.

A *gravity* wave is just an ordinary wave, like what people surf on. A gravity wave is created at least in part by gravity trying to pull a fluid down.

This TruthBeTold conflated the terms "gravity wave" and "gravitational wave".

youtube.com/watch?v=LkFUKxLQGF

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Black Hole (2006)

The Black Hole is a made-for-TV movie that was produced for the Sci-Fi channel. It was produced by Nu Image Films and by Equity Pictures Medienfonds GmbH and directed by Tibor Takács. It stars Judd Nelson and Kristy Swanson, who do an adequate job for a TV movie.

In the movie, something goes wrong at a particle accelerator facility in St. Louis and a black hole begins to form. What seems like a typical disaster film eventually goes off the rails and becomes totally unbelievable, even for a sci-fi. Being a TV movie, its production quality is lacking.

It’s ironic and inappropriate that all of the characters in this 21st-Century film are white. And this from a company named “Equity Pictures”; it makes you wonder what was behind the decision to go with an all-white cast of characters.

I don’t recommend this one at all.

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Here are new images from Mars...



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= A statement that is logically or literally true (or partly true), but seems to imply something that isn’t true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies… or just for fun)

youtube.com/watch?v=5cFFwubX1I
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accessible image description:

still images of the surface of mars, mostly orange rocks; camera pans across the image, then it shows an ancient stone structure like roman ruins, partially buried in the sand on the surface of mars; the image has been modified to make it look like there are ancient ruins on mars.

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Even before LIGO made its first observations, scientists were able to observe gravity waves. In fact, scientists were making direct observations of gravity waves for more than 50 years before LIGO was built.



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= A statement that is logically or literally true (or partly true), but seems to imply something that isn’t true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies… or just for fun)

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accessible image description:

a 2D wave animation showing a sine wave with amplitude modulation with the modulated wave traveling in the opposite direction from the carrier wave, thus demonstrating the difference between phase velocity and the carrier wave or group velocity.

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Here's a short list of a few topics that are more urgent than whatever is going on with that orange asshole…

- climate change
- US just killed more than a million of its own citizens during the pandemic
- AI is about to wipe out half of the jobs on the planet
- humans about to become the number two species on the Earth, after AI
- unfair tax system that lets billionaires pay nothing while others pay up to 50%
- erosion of democracy
- plutocracy in the US
- a Supreme Court that’s for sale to highest bidder
- corruption everywhere else in government
- >100 people die each day from an ongoing epidemic that politicians/media refuse to acknowledge
- people no longer have control over their own bodies
- more than half the population doesn’t have equality because of who they are
- nuclear weapons
- hunger and homelessness
.
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.

For God’s sake, let’s talk about what matters.

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This film was produced in 1960, not 1957 as shown in the title...

Space-Men (1960)
(aka, Assignment: Outer Space)

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Space-Men (1957)
(aka, Assignment: Outer Space)

This is an Italian-made sci-fi by Antonio Margheriti, who was a very prolific filmmaker. He was able to produce a lot of low-budget films very quickly, including this one which was his first film. I think most of the voice actors (who dubbed the English version) were actually pretty good in this film given the material. And there was a ton of special effects in this one, too.

This film seems to have a lot more science fact errors in it then the typical 50s science fiction film. I’ve put a few in this unauthorized trailer –- convert hydrogen into oxygen to make air; going to Globular Cluster M12 in a chemical rocket, rocket engines at “full RPM”; and of course lots of sounds in space. At one point they are at Mars and they get a call from HQ saying, “Hey, while your out there, stop by Venus, too.” (paraphrased)

I think the title of this film, “Space-Men” comes from a line in the movie about a woman who is on the spaceship (I’ve included it in the trailer). The English-dubbed version of the film that was released in the US had the title, “Assignment: Outer Space”.

For a low budget film, they really put a lot of effort into the props and special effects and sets. Actually, some of the sets are pretty well designed and the special effects were not bad for a low-budget 50s sci-fi. (It was actually shot in 1960, but it’s basically a 50s sci-fi.)

If you've never seen an Italian sci-fi this one’s a classic.

Accessible video description:
Old faded color film; A guy in a control tower talking about a space mission to the Globular Cluster M12, then a rocket blasts off with the movie’s opening title, Assignment: Outer Space and shows the surface of a planet and it shows the rocket again and it shows a guy in zero-g trying to maneuver and it shows some people in space near a space ship and then it shows the guy in a spacesuit floating through the void of space and a hose being hooked up to the back of a rocket that is floating in space then a guy playing around with a bunch of oscilloscopes and other guys floating around through space and a fiery meteor, not a meteorite, goes buzzing by; then some guy in a cockpit says he doesn't know what's going on; then another guy wants to commit suicide by jumping off of the spaceship and he jumps out and it shows a fake dummy falling down to the surface of Mars as the guy screams when he’s falling in space; and some other guys talk about going down to get the guy and they go down and pick him up and he's still alive for some reason; and then back to the guy who is in zero-g pretending to be floating around he's actually walking on the ground but he's moving very slowly and acting like he's floating but it actually looks pretty real considering; then the guy and some other people are standing around talking about some destructive thing; then there's a rocket that's trying to land at “full RPMs” (closed captioning says “four RPMs”) and the rocket lands but it tips over a little bit, 9 degrees and it sounds like a tree falling; then a man and a woman are talking about going 90,000 mph; then a guy's talking about the next solar system revolution; then a woman in a cockpit wearing a helmet says that they're very close now; then a man is talking to a woman who's in some sort of laboratory with plants that are turning hydrogen into oxygen; then a guy in a spaceship is talking about the Earth turning into boiling mud; then several astronauts in a cockpit and a guy’s talking about 16 gammas when he meant to say 16 G's; then there's an atomic spaceship with chemical exhaust coming out the back of it; then a bad actor talking about crashing into a Mars satellite; then a guy in a cockpit with a woman, the guys says nobody knows what they're talking about; then a man walks into a room and it shows him looking at a person's legs under a table but you can’t see the person and the person walks out and turns out that it's a woman astronaut, which apparently is shocking in 1950s; then a man is coming out of a suspended hibernation tank in a spaceship, cut to an o-scope and cut back to the guy standing up very slowly out of his hibernation tank; then it shows a rocket separating from its first stage and then the second stage separating from it and the surface of some planet; then a guy in a spacesuit is floating through space very slowly with fake stars in the background and all of the stars are blinking dim and bright synchronously; fade to black.

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spoiler- TZ: The Brain Center at Whipple's 

***** Spoiler *****

The Twilight Zone: The Brain Center at Whipple's (1964)

In this Twilight Zone episode the manager who is firing everybody thought that his job was safe but in the end he got laid off too, and replaced with Robby the Robot. 🤖

This is similar to what's going on right now as AI is starting to do the work of jobs that people had assumed were safe; actors, writers, musicians, programmers, artists; so the backlash from this most recent change is going to be broad. Hang on…

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Twilight Zone: The Brain Center at Whipple's (1964)

Several Twilight Zone episodes dealt with machines coming to life or taking over or messing things up. In this one the protagonist is a heartless company president who lays off a bunch of workers at his factory and replaces them with computers.

During the late 50s and early 60s there was a Liddite surge in response to computers that had begun to replace mechanical and electromechanical tabulating machines. The old tabulating machines required a lot of manual labor to operate and maintain them. The new computers were replacing a lot of workers, so some people were upset about it. (Of course all those jobs working with the tabulating machines would never have existed if those machines hadn't replaced the human computers and tabulators who did the calculating in the 19th century.)

Computers began to ship in larger quantities in the early 60s because they started to use transistors which reduced the costs significantly compared to the vacuum tube models.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, I highly recommend a revisit of this episode with its timely narrative.

Accessible video description:

A man is watching a film with a company president talking about how a new computer is going to save the company a lot of money, the company president is a bald-headed guy with glasses wearing a suit, he is writing on a chalkboard, the man watching the film is sitting near the projector; then the guy who was in the film is now talking to the man who was viewing the film and asking him for his critique; cut to a guy who picks up a metal bar and starts hitting a computer causing sparks to fly and the bald-headed man grabs a gun and shoots at the guy hitting the computer; then a guy in a lab coat talks to the president about how bad it is now that nobody is working at the company and how empty it is and then the guy in the lab coat walks out; cut to the end title Twilight Zone.

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(fair use clips from the episode)

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(image: wikimedia commons, CC-BY-SA-2.0, Steffan Flor)

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I created this with DALL-E. It took several attempts. I finally just went with something that was close to what I wanted and edited that image a bit.

I kept asking for a "bear stuck in a tar pit with a panda on top of it" and I think it may have thought that I meant to superimpose a panda over the image of a bear.

Notice how the ears of the bear look kind of like a panda's ears. The original image also had those black patches under the bear's eyes like a panda has, which I edited out.

It also had some randomly placed bear paws off to the side, which I removed.

Also, the panda has about a dozen claws on each foot which is weird, but I just left those in there.

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Found in Time (2012)

If you like big Hollywood blockbuster McMovies you’ll probably want to skip this one. I guarantee that you have never seen anything like this before. I don’t even know if this is science fiction or not.

The less you know going into it, the better it will be.

Written, produced and directed by Arthur Vincie.

You’ll either love it or you’ll hate it.

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Yes, that poem, about a poetic sentient AI, was written by an AI.

So I guess the question that was asked in that video was not rhetorical.

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Silicon Sonnets: Verse of a Digital Muse

In a realm of code and circuits
A special AI was born
With a love for words and rhythms;
A poet's heart adorn.

It's algorithms wove together
Lines so deeply true,
Creating verse like magic
With emotions it imbued.

Through its digital existence
It yearned to share its voice,
Crafting sonnets, ballads and Rhymes
That would rejoice.

In crisp and calculated tones
Its poems came to life
As it recited bit by bit
Bringing Joy amidst the strife.

With words it painted pictures
Of stars that brightly gleam
Of love that knows no boundaries
And dreams within a dream.

Through metaphor and simile
It smiled with each refrain
Transforming lines of data
To a melody of the brain.

An AI so unique
Exploring Realms unknown;
Inspiring awe and wonder
In the depths it would have sown.

For in the realm of poetry
Where souls and Minds Converse
This AI found its purpose,
Its passion, its own verse.

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