The TERMINATOR Post

I suppose its time for an update on the current state of the Terminators. For those of you who don't know what Terminators are you can always watch this short educational video. I've posted about this before.



I was watching the WSJ clip above and the thought occurred to me that we are already there. How far of a stretch would it be for China to invade America using robots/drones to kill everyone? If they did so, how would we even know it was China? or Russia? or even our own government? Is this going to happen? A lot of people would dismiss this with out giving it a second thought but those people are living in denial. Your government does not care about you.

Elon Musk is a smart guy. Some people don't like his politics or car company or online payment processing company or SpaceX or starlink what ever, but nobody doubts his intelligence. That being said he may also be generating momentum to back his new company Neuralink but regardless we can not ignore the fact that AI is coming.


The man in the second video said that his robots building other robots caused a million fold increase in production. A million fold. It is not hard for even the most cynical person to see that robots increasing robot intelligence has at least some chance of that happening. Could you imagine the smartest computer (deep blue I think) making improvements to new computers?

There are a couple of things we can do to manage or combat this but make no mistake, it is a war. You can not fight this war with a gun. We must evolve and we must do it now. We could do like Elon Musk and start to look at computer human interfacing. This would work so that we have the same data storage, response time, and access as our computer overlords<sarcasm>.

Other options are forced evolution, smart drugs, genetic manipulation, adaptogens, etc. but these are all limited in their effectiveness. They will not keep up with a million fold improvement so it all comes back to human computer interfacing. We MUST use the same or better tech or we will lose.

Neuralink
Starlink (satellite constellation) - Wikipedia

This brings up the issue of business and competition. Competition is the enemy of business profits.
Competitors Are Not The Enemy – Found It – Medium
The reason is because you will undercut each others prices in order to get the customers and drive each other out of business. Competition does, however, speed up improvements. All of the large national and world wide corporations have figured this out and have stopped competing with each other. This has put a stop, or at least a drag, to all technological advancements. This is very bad for people as a species.

We need to eliminate the need for money. It can still be there and is probably needed for trade or as a marker, but as THE driving factor behind everyone's life it is bad. As the driving factor on humanity it is a bottleneck. It is probably the worst thing to happen to human evolution ever. In order to compete with the AI/robots we need to reduce the need for money. We need to make resources available to everyone. We need to get rid of the road blocks and hindrances that prevent us from running at full speed as a species. We have put these shackles on ourselves and only we can take them off. We absolutely must do that in order to compete.

In the future the currency will be electricity, bandwidth, and knowledge. Invest in those. Our only limiting factors will be our own ambition. We are currently in the dark ages but very close to coming out of it. The key is that we must do it and not hope for others to realize it. Other parts of the world have figured this out. China has increased robot usage by 20%. Humans need food water and shelter. Our first priority should be to automate those things so that every man woman and child is taken care of. Its easy and we have the resources. Then when our focus is not on greed and money we can focus on 'being' the best people instead of 'having' stuff.

 

The reality I see is that the more machines do for you the weaker man becomes, he begins to atrophy .
The dependency on the machines is doing it now .
How many of you know your times tables ?
Since the advent of the calculator and the bar code reader it is eliminating the cashier . not if but when the power goes out the world is at a stalemate . A glitch in the system there system is at a stalemate .
As many people are building systems there are thieves looking for ways around them ,hackers.
I have made improvements on production and machinery to make my work safer and more efficient ,but not to replace some one's job thankfully .

 

Agreed...when was the last time you saw a cashier make change-without using the register?

Humans are dumbing down and getting weaker, while artificials are gain characteristics that lead towards independence...neither is good, imo.

 

We have been using terminator drones since the early 1990s.

 

Last week, it is one of the requirements to work for me since we don't use cash registers or calculators The $5.50/$20.00 test eliminates 90% of the applicants under age 40. I hand the applicant a cash box, tell them I just bought Sandwich for $5.50 and hand them a $20.00 bill and ask them to make change, I do give them a full minute to accomplish the epic feat. The first thing most of them do is start to use their smart phone calculator, and I ask how they are going to use the smart phone at the job when it won't be on their person. Now days I just go straight to the home school community for 14-18 year old part time help, those kids almost always pass that test in 15-20 seconds. Blows my mind how much the majority of the population loves their dependence on Government and Technology........... A very dangerous combination IMO.

 

A full minute?
What do they have to make change with, dimes only?

My kid would know to give back $13.50 in change, if the customer looked like a sucker.

 

No, they were never taught the old logic of counting up, and like cursive writing it is not intuitive. $5.50 plus 50 cents makes $6 plus $4 dollars makes $10 plus $10 makes $20. Do it all the time at work and it shocks heck out of people. Same way we were taught up to the 12's in grade school. If you don't know the times tables, you can't do division or multiplication, it all builds on itself and we threw it away and use the mechanical crutches, even on the exams. Same way with log and trig tables, slide rules, carpenter's squares, story poles, drafting, and on and on. Was a time when I could use drafting and tables to the tension on the wire between two poles, and tell you what it would be at 30 below and 120 above and what the sag would be. Now you plug the numbers into your computer and it spits out the data. We have had terminator type machines since the 1960's, just have had problem with terminator discriminating between friendly and foe. Could argue that the 1600 anti poaching guns were in fact terminator devices. You hit the trip wire, it pivoted in your direction and fired a lethal shot. Same way with land mines, not much intelligence, but very effective and some are still guarding their turf 100 years later. The average American if dropped into the woods would be dead in a couple of days, but the native Americans prospered under the same conditions. They however would never be able to cross the street, use the subway, make two transfers and get home, while most 10 year olds in NYC would think nothing of it. We just have put all of our eggs in one basket, totally dependent on fuel, electricity, massive chip plants using very rare metals, and very high tech, etc, to even survive out in the boon docks. I hope it all stays together until I die.

First year drafting question to be solved graphically, 2 fraternity house 70 feet apart, from 3 rd story windows, 30 feet high, what is the maximum weight keg of beer you can transfer from one house to the other, using a rope , clearing the road by 10 feet, and not exceeding 300 lbs tension on the rope. Solve it even with a computer and list the answer, it gave me a proper prospective on the limits of the real world.

 

Another scary sign of the times: In a Dr waiting room the other day I watched a 20's something mom with her 2 year old kid on her lap. She put a glossy magazine in front of the kid - the kid was wiping at the pictures as if it were a tablet screen. I asked. The kid spent the majority of his time with a tablet....
WTF ever happened to standard toys?

 

I had a big paper route when I was 12,made change every day. A man tried to trip me up by giving me a $20.25 for a month of papers which cost a $1.50 month. It took me about 45 seconds to give him back his change of $18.75 back. He gave me a .25 cent tip. I never will forget that.

 

The video cut off just as they mentioned Elon's brother. Meet Kimbal Musk, the enviro friendly, quieter brother in the Musk family. Kimbal (and Elon) are/were very involved in Square Roots which is Urban Gardening, now called Freight Farming. Media Kit A shipping container has now been designed to produce 2-4 tons of vegetables a year. It is all computer controlled. Dirt farmers are now having to compete with these types of gardens. People relying on computers to grow their food? They promote these container gardens and call the folks farmers but are they really farmers? If the electricity shut-off, these containers do not work. But I have a feeling soon these containers will be able to product their own power etc. I do believe eventually we could be held hostage to these machines for our food.

as for SpaceX Starlink, Elon needs to step things up. Currently Facebook is designing and getting ready to launch a competitor to Starlink. FB is evil with evil intent IMO, we do not want FB controlling our thoughts and communications.

 

The containers are real good at growing lettuce and other leafy greens and quick crops like radish. Saw one at a trade show that was fully automated and had a hybrid solar/wind power system. The whole thing had the low LOW price tag of $390,000 for the base unit. If you wanted to add the auto harvester and full environmental controls it was *Only* $640,000 claim was it could produce as much lettuce or greens as 5 traditional acres............. I believe it was Green Biotech that totally debunked that claim. One of the big debates that is going to continue for a while is whether these kinds of operations should be allowed to be certified organic since there is not a grain of soil in any of them and one the primary basis for certified organic was improving soil health. What we are seeing in many market areas is them becoming totally saturated with quick crops like lettuce, kale and greens to the point that it simply is not worth producing those things. Then toss in the big food corporations taking over the Organic and in some areas the locally grown markets.......... You would be amazed at how many Small Family *Organic* farms are owned by General Mills, Pesico etc. Most of the Organic you find in the grocery store to the tune of about 90% of it comes from Farms bought out by the giants. Folks that buy the Container set ups and convert old factories and warehouses into high tech urban lettuce farms that are not owned by the corporate giants, will be soon enough when the right price is offered and worse those start ups almost always start up with our tax dollars via Federal Grants in the Millions of Dollars per project. The holier than thou famous farmers/activist types were the biggest sell outs and still preach what they don't practice.

 

Is that all... What bothers me is these people think they are farmers but I do not see it that way. Those people who buy one of those set=ups are dependent on the computer doing everything then the computer tells them when to harvest.

Back on topic @enloopious I was taking to a co-work about the threat of AI etc. He suggested I watch Oblivion which touches on the AI and what it could lead to.

 

Where I work we have LGVs, Laser Guided Vehicles, that move pallets of product and sum raw materials around. There are also robots stacking the products on the ends of the lines that are making them. After 4 years there, I no longer fear Skynet!!! LoL

 

we always taught the old method of counting the money back to them to make sure no one had an issue with their change..

 

I am really glad we home schooled our kids.

 

I was watching a few of those online videos like 'ten amazing things that have been invented' and 'tomorrows technology available today' and a lot of the 'technological advancements' I saw were about making people lazier. So there is that. EX:


Hold on to the past or look to the future? Does it seem reasonable that we can learn and do everything for ourselves? Can we grow our own food, purify our own water, build our own houses, make our own clothes, program our own computers, build robots etc? Of course we can't do all this as an individual. Should we be able to? Maybe it will be required for survival but there is a disconnect.

There is a point where there will be a gap between what we can learn and what we need to survive. EX: very few people know how to both farm and program robots. Most MIT grads do not know basic farming and carpentry. Most farmers do not know robotics, programming, and electronics. I absolutely think we should all know these things. I just don't think its realistic... yet.

The point I'm making is that there will be a time when it is sink or swim. If our robot overlords come and our survival depends on us knowing farming, carpentry, robotics, electronics, programming etc. there will be people who learn it or at least attempt to. There will be a lot more who will not. This is what I like to call forced evolution. Would I make it? Probably not. But there are people who would make it and we will find out just how far evolution will get us. I wont be around to see it but we may well see people with reflexes growing as fast as machines. We will see the limits of rapid human forced evolution.

 

If you look at man as a species he is missing a lot. There are a lot of faults or gaps in our design. A race of intelligent robots or even higher life forms with more evolution would have much more knowledge, speed, and what ever traits evolution or self design determined to be most important.

That being said, we are meant to be upgraded as a species. If you look at the pinnacle of mankind what is there? People with the most resources, power, and position have access to the best drugs, tech, and science. There are a few examples out there.

Lets look at Dick Cheney, he should have died 30 years before he did. Even up to the end he was completely coherent and writing opinion pieces about Trump etc. I had some discussions with medical doctors and hospice workers about this about 20 years ago and the unanimous opinion was that he should have been dead way back then. They said something else is going on there. This would be medical tech that is not available to the rest of us.

Look at Stephen Hawking, The average life expectancy of a person with ALS is two to five years from the time of diagnosis. However, it varies greatly: Over 50 percent of people with ALS live more than three years. Twenty percent live five years or more. In 1963, Hawking contracted motor neurone disease and was given two years to live but miraculously made it to 2018. It seems that the more power and wealth on your side, the longer you live. The technology is out there.

Our government has technology, computers, and robots that are estimated to be 50 years ahead of the people. They do not have any restraints and they have full access to as much money as they want. They can hire the best and brightest people and pay anything for them. China has a stealth submarine that can (and has) sneak into Los Angeles harbor undetected and launch missiles. There are examples all over.

When we have advancements in technology they will open the doors to much more, not much less. People seem to think that the more we discover the less there is to be discovered. Its not true. The more we discover, the more it opens everything else up. The ideas of copyright and patents are the ideas of cavemen. Why do we need them? For money? If we have the technology to feed the world but don't do it from greed that makes us monsters.

Why scientists created a human-chicken hybrid embryo
Scientists create animals that are part-human

I think we were meant to be more powerful than machines, more intelligent that the smartest super computers, quicker and stronger than the fastest things in nature. I think we were meant to earn it so we do not take it for granted. We need to take the power back. We need our freedom back. We need to have our government put in check and eliminated or changed at a fundamental level to serve people, not control them. Most of all we need to organize and take it, not ask for it, but TAKE it. what are we waiting for? They are never going to give us freely that which we deserve. Absolute power corrupts absolutely UNLESS it is possessed by everyone.

 

I was watching a report on the Boeing 737 Max plane that crashed. Seems the computer decided to fly the plane and was more in control then the pilots.

The pilots were battling the computer and it resulted in a nose drive. Allegedly one can shut off the computer but I think that was speculation. This is an example of man losing to a computer.