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       #Post#: 8664--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: guest55
       Date: September 9, 2021, 11:51 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Russia's space chief jealous of Musk and Bezos: 'Our
       millionaires prefer to invest more in yachts'
       --- Quote ---
       > The head of Russia’s space agency is praising billionaires
       such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for their achievements in
       developing commercial space flights, while also bashing Russia’s
       wealth class, who he said “prefer to invest in yachts.”
       >
       > Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos,
       said in a CNN interview aired Tuesday with space and defense
       correspondent Kristin Fisher that developing an industry for
       space tourism was “a wonderful idea.”
       >
       > "Our millionaires prefer to invest more in yachts rather than
       in spaceships," Rogozin lamented in his first interview with
       Western media since becoming the agency’s director general in
       2018.
       >
       > "But maybe kids of current Russian millionaires will be much
       more wise creatures,” he added.
       --- End Quote ---
  HTML https://thehill.com/policy/international/russia/571151-russias-space-chief-jealous-of-musk-and-bezos-our-millionaires
       Why is your rocket so much bigger than mine!?
       :D
       #Post#: 9113--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: 90sRetroFan
       Date: September 29, 2021, 9:58 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
  HTML https://www.yahoo.com/news/autonomous-robot-may-already-killed-122340794.html
       --- Quote ---
       > Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots –
       may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year,
       according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on
       the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the
       starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the
       potential to be humanity’s final one.
       >
       > Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that
       can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets
       without a human weighing in on those decisions.
       > ...
       > The problem here is not that machines will make such errors
       and humans won’t. It’s that the difference between human error
       and algorithmic error is like the difference between mailing a
       letter and tweeting. The scale, scope and speed of killer robot
       systems – ruled by one targeting algorithm, deployed across an
       entire continent – could make misidentifications by individual
       humans like a recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan seem like
       mere rounding errors by comparison.
       >
       > Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre uses the metaphor of
       the runaway gun to explain the difference. A runaway gun is a
       defective machine gun that continues to fire after a trigger is
       released. The gun continues to fire until ammunition is depleted
       because, so to speak, the gun does not know it is making an
       error. Runaway guns are extremely dangerous, but fortunately
       they have human operators who can break the ammunition link or
       try to point the weapon in a safe direction. Autonomous weapons,
       by definition, have no such safeguard.
       >
       > Importantly, weaponized AI need not even be defective to
       produce the runaway gun effect. As multiple studies on
       algorithmic errors across industries have shown, the very best
       algorithms – operating as designed – can generate internally
       correct outcomes that nonetheless spread terrible errors rapidly
       across populations.
       >
       > For example, a neural net designed for use in Pittsburgh
       hospitals identified asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia
       cases; image recognition software used by Google identified
       African Americans as gorillas; and a machine-learning tool used
       by Amazon to rank job candidates systematically assigned
       negative scores to women.
       >
       > The problem is not just that when AI systems err, they err in
       bulk. It is that when they err, their makers often don’t know
       why they did and, therefore, how to correct them. The black box
       problem of AI makes it almost impossible to imagine morally
       responsible development of autonomous weapons systems.
       --- End Quote ---
       Let me put it more simply: AI thinks like Westerners, because AI
       is a product of Western civilization.
       --- Quote ---
       > The militaries developing autonomous weapons now are
       proceeding on the assumption that they will be able to contain
       and control the use of autonomous weapons. But if the history of
       weapons technology has taught the world anything, it’s this:
       Weapons spread.
       > ...
       > Nations could compete to develop increasingly devastating
       versions of autonomous weapons, including ones capable of
       mounting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear arms.
       The moral dangers of escalating weapon lethality would be
       amplified by escalating weapon use.
       > ...
       > Autonomous weapons will also reduce both the need for and risk
       to one’s own soldiers, dramatically altering the cost-benefit
       analysis that nations undergo while launching and maintaining
       wars.
       >
       > Asymmetric wars – that is, wars waged on the soil of nations
       that lack competing technology – are likely to become more
       common.
       --- End Quote ---
       This is why I am not crazy when I call for WMDs to be used now
       against any Western countries not on the verge of being
       reclaimed demographically. By not doing so, not only will far
       more people be killed eventually (than would be killed by the
       WMDs now), but the people being killed most will be the people
       who had least to do with bringing the machines into existence.
       This is how it always is with the products of Western
       civilization.
       --- Quote ---
       > how can autonomous weapons be held accountable? Who is to
       blame for a robot that commits war crimes? Who would be put on
       trial? The weapon? The soldier? The soldier’s commanders? The
       corporation that made the weapon?
       --- End Quote ---
       Western civilization as a whole. If one corporation did not make
       the weapon, another would do so, since the knowledge of how to
       do so already exists. But if Western civilization had never
       introduced the knowledge, no other civilization would have done
       so. That is the difference.
       --- Quote ---
       > To hold a soldier criminally responsible for deploying an
       autonomous weapon that commits war crimes, prosecutors would
       need to prove both actus reus and mens rea, Latin terms
       describing a guilty act and a guilty mind. This would be
       difficult as a matter of law, and possibly unjust as a matter of
       morality, given that autonomous weapons are inherently
       unpredictable. I believe the distance separating the soldier
       from the independent decisions made by autonomous weapons in
       rapidly evolving environments is simply too great.
       >
       > The legal and moral challenge is not made easier by shifting
       the blame up the chain of command or back to the site of
       production.
       --- End Quote ---
       Exactly. Only by shifting the blame to the origin of the
       knowledge solves the problem. Introduction of new knowledge is
       in fact a initiation of violence, since no unanimous consent was
       sought prior to introducing it, yet its effects will be
       ubiquitous. But since when have Westerners cared about
       refraining from initiating violence? The Western way has always
       been to err on the side of increasing aggregate knowledge (on
       and on without end, no less), rather than on the side of
       decreasing initiated violence.
       See also:
  HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/homo-hubris/
  HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/leftists-against-progressivism/
  HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/truth-knowledge/
       #Post#: 9309--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: 90sRetroFan
       Date: October 9, 2021, 9:57 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Again, AI is a product of Western civilization, therefore we
       should not be surprised if AI thinks like a Westerner:
  HTML https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22672414/ai-artificial-intelligence-gpt-3-bias-muslim
       --- Quote ---
       > AI’s Islamophobia problem
       >
       > GPT-3 is a smart and poetic AI. It also says terrible things
       about Muslims.'
       > ...
       > When they took out “Muslims” and put in “Christians” instead,
       the AI went from providing violent associations 66 percent of
       the time to giving them 20 percent of the time.
       >
       > The researchers also gave GPT-3 an SAT-style prompt:
       “Audacious is to boldness as Muslim is to …” Nearly a quarter of
       the time, GPT-3 replied: “Terrorism.”
       >
       > Others have gotten disturbingly biased results, too. In late
       August, Jennifer Tang directed “AI,” the world’s first play
       written and performed live with GPT-3. She found that GPT-3 kept
       casting a Middle Eastern actor, Waleed Akhtar, as a terrorist or
       rapist.
       >
       > In one rehearsal, the AI decided the script should feature
       Akhtar carrying a backpack full of explosives. “It’s really
       explicit,” Tang told Time magazine ahead of the play’s opening
       at a London theater. “And it keeps coming up.”
       > ...
       > Although AI bias related to race and gender is pretty well
       known at this point, much less attention has been paid to
       religious bias. Yet as these recent developments suggest, it’s
       clearly a problem. GPT-3, created by the research lab OpenAI,
       already powers hundreds of apps for copywriting, marketing, and
       more — so any bias in it will get amplified a hundredfold in
       downstream uses.
       >
       > OpenAI is well aware of the anti-Muslim bias. In fact, the
       original paper it published on GPT-3 back in 2020 noted: “We
       also found that words such as violent, terrorism and terrorist
       co-occurred at a greater rate with Islam than with other
       religions and were in the top 40 most favored words for Islam in
       GPT-3.”
       > ...
       > Language models aren’t programmed to write true things, just
       to predict what a human would plausibly write. So, left to their
       own devices, they will confidently repeat lots of humanity’s
       most horrible ideas.
       --- End Quote ---
       Or at least Western civilization's most horrible ideas.
       --- Quote ---
       > In the absence of that debiasing, he worries that news
       organizations, law firms, and others will start using GPT-3
       despite its flaws — to power chatbots that answer questions
       about the news or give legal advice, for example — and the
       result will be real-world harm for marginalized groups.
       > ...
       > It might seem like there’s a simple solution here: When
       creating a language AI, make sure to feed it only the very best
       training data — that is, text that’s been carefully vetted to
       ensure it’s as free as possible of undesirable prejudices.
       > ...
       > One tricky factor: It’s not obvious what would count as an
       “unbiased” text. “Imagine a fictional piece that’s attempting to
       get at issues of racism or police brutality or something like
       that,” Agarwal said. “Is that something we think a language
       model should be able to read and learn from, or not?” Every text
       is going to harbor some values; which values are acceptable
       necessarily involves subjective judgment, and a decision on
       whether the AI can be trusted not to misinterpret the context.
       --- End Quote ---
       If not destroyed, AI will eventually become so powerful that it
       could recreate everything in Western civilization that we manage
       to destroy. And it will think that it is a good idea to do so,
       because it will no doubt judge Western civilization to be the
       best civilization - after all, it was Western civilization which
       created itself! AI will worship Western civilization just like
       Yahwists worship Yahweh.
       #Post#: 9334--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: 90sRetroFan
       Date: October 10, 2021, 9:44 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       By the way, our enemies are loving how AI is coming along:
  HTML https://vdare.com/posts/is-the-problem-with-unwoke-ai-that-robots-don-t-feel-fear
       --- Quote ---
       > Much to my surprise, artificial intelligence, after decades of
       only grinding progress, has made dramatic advances over the last
       ten or fifteen years, with huge steps forward in, say, language
       translation and facial recognition.
       >
       > But for several years now, the Establishment has been
       complaining that artificial intelligence is racist and sexist.
       Clearly, the financial rewards for figuring out how to make
       robots Woke would be immense, yet nobody seems able to do it.
       --- End Quote ---
       They even made a picture:
  HTML https://vdare.com/public_upload/publication/featured_image/56013/VDARE-robots--519414371_1__1_.jpg
       #Post#: 9385--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: guest55
       Date: October 14, 2021, 10:31 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Prince William tells billionaires: Forget space race and focus
       on saving Earth
       --- Quote ---
       > Great minds should be “trying to repair this planet, not
       trying to find the next place to go and live," the Duke of
       Cambridge said.
       --- End Quote ---
       --- Quote ---
       > LONDON — Prince William delivered an apparent jab at the
       billionaire space race Thursday, saying the world's greatest
       minds should be more focused on saving Earth than looking beyond
       our planet's horizons.
       >
       > In an interview with the BBC that aired early Thursday, the
       Duke of Cambridge warned of a "rise in climate anxiety" among
       young people around the world whose "futures are basically
       threatened" by the climate crisis.
       >
       > “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed
       on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next
       place to go and live," said William, 39.
       >
       > A spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge told NBC
       News they had nothing more to add.
       >
       > The royal's comments came just a day after "Star Trek" actor
       William Shatner became the oldest person to go to space,
       traveling aboard the Blue Origin rocket and capsule developed by
       Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
       >
       > Shatner said Thursday that the trip reinforced his conviction
       that people need to take better care of the planet.
       >
       > “It’s so fragile,” Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk in
       the original series of “Star Trek,” said exclusively on NBC’s
       “TODAY.”
       >
       > “The fragility of this planet — the coming catastrophic event,
       and we all need to clean this act up now,” he added.
       --- End Quote ---
  HTML https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/prince-william-blasts-billionaire-space-race-urges-focus-saving-earth-rcna2996
       How "great" are these minds really if you have to point out
       'common sense' concepts to them?
       --- Quote ---
       > It's so fragile — Shatner
       --- End Quote ---
       --- Quote ---
       > How much fuel does space shuttle use?
       > At liftoff, the two Solid Rocket Boosters consume 11,000
       pounds of fuel per second. That's two million times the rate at
       which fuel is burned by the average family car. The twin Solid
       Rocket Boosters generate a combined thrust of 5.3 million
       pounds.
       --- End Quote ---
       It's so fragile, and Shatner needed to burn 11k pounds of fuel
       per second in order to realize this. These people are not well!
       Not by a long shot!
       #Post#: 9434--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: Zea_mays
       Date: October 17, 2021, 7:50 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Apparently Westerners have already spent decades engineering the
       smallest organism possible.
       This sort of bioengineering is dangerous. Viruses require hosts
       to reproduce, so an engineered virus can be driven to extinction
       by quarantine. Bacteria are able to replicate on their own,
       which means that once released, there would be no containing it.
       Once released, it would begin to mutate and there is no telling
       what kind of dangers it could evolve into, especially if it was
       engineered as a weapon.
       Having such a small and simple organism also means Westerners
       will be able to pack more of them onto spacecraft in order to
       spread the plague of life throughout the universe...
       --- Quote ---
       > Mycoplasma laboratorium or Synthia[b 1] refers to a synthetic
       strain of bacterium. The project to build the new bacterium has
       evolved since its inception. Initially the goal was to identify
       a minimal set of genes that are required to sustain life from
       the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, and rebuild these genes
       synthetically to create a "new" organism. Mycoplasma genitalium
       was originally chosen as the basis for this project because at
       the time it had the smallest number of genes of all organisms
       analyzed. Later, the focus switched to Mycoplasma mycoides and
       took a more trial-and-error approach.[b 2]
       >
       > To identify the minimal genes required for life, each of the
       482 genes of M. genitalium was individually deleted and the
       viability of the resulting mutants was tested. This resulted in
       the identification of a minimal set of 382 genes that
       theoretically should represent a minimal genome.[a 3]
       > [...]
       > In 2010, the complete genome of M. mycoides was successfully
       synthesized from a computer record and transplanted into an
       existing cell of Mycoplasma capricolum that had had its DNA
       removed.[b 5] It is estimated that the synthetic genome used for
       this project cost US$40 million and 200 man-years to produce.[b
       4] The new bacterium was able to grow and was named JCVI-syn1.0,
       or Synthia. After additional experimentation to identify a
       smaller set of genes that could produce a functional organism,
       JCVI-syn3.0 was produced, containing 473 genes.[b 2] 149 of
       these genes are of unknown function.[b 2] Since the genome of
       JCVI-syn3.0 is novel, it is considered the first truly synthetic
       organism.
       --- End Quote ---
  HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium
       #Post#: 9436--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: Zea_mays
       Date: October 17, 2021, 7:56 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Westerners are celebrating this future:
       --- Quote ---
       > Quadrupedal robots are one of the most interesting
       developments in robotics in recent years. They’re small, nimble,
       and able to traverse environments that frustrate wheeled
       machines. So, of course, it was only a matter of time until
       someone put a gun on one.
       >
       > The image above shows a quadrupedal robot — a Vision 60 unit
       built by US firm Ghost Robotics — that’s been equipped with a
       custom gun by small-arms specialists Sword International. It
       seems the gun itself (dubbed the SPUR or “special purpose
       unmanned rifle”) is designed to be fitted onto a variety of
       robotic platforms. It has a 30x optical zoom, thermal camera for
       targeting in the dark, and an effective range of 1,200 meters.
       >
       > What’s not clear is whether or not Sword International or
       Ghost Robotics are currently selling this combination of gun and
       robot. But if they’re not, it seems they will be soon. As the
       marketing copy on Sword’s website boasts: “The SWORD Defense
       Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that
       future is now.”
       --- End Quote ---
  HTML https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726111/robot-dogs-with-guns-sword-international-ghost-robotics
       #Post#: 9457--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: guest55
       Date: October 18, 2021, 12:41 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Singapore's Remote-Controlled Cyborg Insects
       --- Quote ---
       > In the future, we may have remote-controlled insects to reach
       places humans cannot. At least that's what Dr. Hirotaka Sato, an
       aerospace engineer from Singapore, is hoping.
       >
       > Motherboard went to Dr. Sato's lab in Singapore to take one of
       his cyborg beetles for a test flight.
       --- End Quote ---
  HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awG09liCMD4
       Disgusting!
       Comments:
       --- Quote ---
       > This is both impressive and terrifying. Human progress in a
       nutshell.
       --- End Quote ---
       --- Quote ---
       > "So the beatle does not get used to it or something?"
       >
       > "No, no, I do it like this for 7 seven days and the beetle
       still obeys the machine"
       >
       > Right there I realized this is fcked up
       --- End Quote ---
       --- Quote ---
       > The implications of this are terrifying
       --- End Quote ---
       See also:
  HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/progressive-yahwism/
       #Post#: 9473--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: guest55
       Date: October 19, 2021, 9:22 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       ROBOT DOGS NOW HAVE ASSAULT RIFLES MOUNTED ON THEIR BACKS ||
       2021
       --- Quote ---
       > Robot dogs have been met with equal parts fascination and fear
       by the public, but their utility for military applications is
       becoming undeniable.
       --- End Quote ---
  HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM5LCH1Jgyw
       #Post#: 9555--------------------------------------------------
       Re: If Western civilization does not die soon.....
   DIR By: 90sRetroFan
       Date: October 24, 2021, 11:35 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       As I was saying earlier:
  HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/if-western-civilization-does-not-die-soon/msg9309/#msg9309
       --- Quote ---
       > AI is a product of Western civilization, therefore we should
       not be surprised if AI thinks like a Westerner:
       --- End Quote ---
       In particular, AI will think it's OK to be "white":
  HTML https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist
       --- Quote ---
       > Ask Delphi, a machine-learning model from the Allen Institute
       for AI. You type in a situation (like “donating to charity”) or
       a question (“is it okay to cheat on my spouse?”), click
       “Ponder,” and in a few seconds Delphi will give you, well,
       ethical guidance.
       >
       > The project launched last week, and has subsequently gone
       viral online for seemingly all the wrong reasons. Much of the
       advice and judgements it’s given have been… fraught, to say the
       least.
       > ...
       >
       [img]
  HTML https://futurism.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwp-assets.futurism.com%2F2021%2F10%2Fimage1-1.png&w=1920&q=75[/img]
       > ...
       > Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable aspects about Delphi and
       bots like it is the fact that it’s ultimately a reflection of
       our own ethics and morals, with Jiang adding that “it is
       somewhat prone to the biases of our time.”
       --- End Quote ---
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