Oh dear. AI?  So tell me, is AI this extremely dangerous threat that’s going to take over humanity and kill us all?  Or is that just fearmongering from people who want the government to own it and control it from the get go?

If it’s this big existential threat should we let government regulate it?

Or should we resist that and let any old body develop it?  And if so does that mean China will abuse it and take over the world? 

Should we let the U.S. government control it so China doesn’t?

I don’t even really know what the hell it is.  What exactly is the difference between AI and regular computers, which already seem too sentient for my taste?

Short answer, no.  The state of the art of AI right now is of a relatively stupid person who can usually follow instructions correctly.  But also has a huge memory for trivia.  Anything that AI can do, you can find some person to do it.  They may be slower, but they will get the job done just the same.

It's fearmongering by those who want to keep the technology for themselves.  Kind of like guns.  "Guns will kill us all so you don't get them.  But I will continue to have them around me to protect me."

There is no way to regulate AI.  You can have some guidelines and ethics for commercial AI, but you can't regulate the development of AI any more than you can regulate the development of an application for your phone.

There's a lot out there that's labeled AI that really isn't.  The best example is "if / then / else".  Or something like:

Input "What is your name?" A$
Output "Hello " A$ "how are you today?"
input F$
If f$ = "Good" then output "I'm happy to hear that"
if f$ = "bad" then output "I'm sorry to hear that"
else output "Can you be more specific?"

There you go.  AI.  All the self driving car does is take input from a buttload of sensors and based on that, make a decision to do this or do that.  But I'd hire a driver before I'd trust my life to a self-driving car. 

In a very short while, what we think of as AI today will become just the way we do things and will be nothing special.  At that time, the definition of truly "intelligent"AI will shift to something out there a little farther.  Today the really big deal is in natural language processing and image recognition.  Very cool to see that compared to where we were just a few years ago.  But still, no great whoop.  The biggest danger, in my opinion, is with analytics where massive amounts of data can be combined into a very complete picture of each of us.  We've only survived this long since each data owner wants to keep it for themselves and not share.  The government is now forcing data sharing.  No way to regulate that, either.

The stuff I'm doing with AI is super cool.  But it will probably never be a threat to humanity since no one has come back from the future to stop me.

So my mom died on July 28th, the Friday of AirVenture. She was with my sister in Bethesda and passed away peacefully after a long illness. She was 89 so lots of things were failing.

Her funeral is tomorrow in Illinois. I never realized how relatively smooth the process could be with someone dying across the country and getting shipped. Still, it’s quite a process.

I think I need another summer vacation.

I am so very sorry for your loss. 

I can't imagine trying to teach a bunch of kids origami. Trying to show them the precise folds to get the figure just right. Do you have some sort of camera / projector so they can see what you're doing?  I tried to teach my niece to make a paper airplane.  It did not turn out well.  She must have been a very bad student   

I carefully pick the models, my success rate is very high.  Also, I make certain there are parents with the very little ones.  One of my favorite classes this year was when a family of four sat down and wanted to do an Origami.  I decided to make a great little bracelet, mom and the kids mad the pieces, which were really simple.  Dad assembled the bracelets.  Everyone had fun, and the kids got a pari of nice origami bracelets.

Miss old Joan Rivers! Joan said this back in 2014:

CNN) -- Who needs Fourth of July fireworks when you have Joan Rivers around?
The comedian known for her lack of self-censoring recently officiated a same-sex wedding and was asked by a photographer if she believed the United States would ever see the first gay or female president. Her response was typical Rivers.

"We already have it with Obama, so let's just calm down," she said. "You know Michelle (Obama) is a trans."
When asked to further explain Rivers said, "A transgender. We all know it."
A representative for Rivers released the following statement to CNN from the comic about her remarks to the photographer:
"I think it's a compliment. She's so attractive, tall, with a beautiful body, great face, does great makeup. Take a look and go back to La Cage Au Follies (sic). The most gorgeous women are transgender. Stop it already ... and if you want to talk about 'politically correct,' I think this is a 'politically incorrect' attack on me because I'm old, Jewish, a woman and a 'hetty' -- a heteosexual ... and I plan to sue the reporter who, when he turned off his camera, tried to touch me inappropriately on the a** - luckily he hit my ankle. Read the book ... if you think that's silly, wait to (sic) you see what I say about FDR and Eleanor!"

Rivers is no stranger to controversy. In March 2013 she refused to apologize for a joke she made about the dress "Project Runway" host Heidi Klum wore to the Academy Awards.
"The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into the ovens," Rivers said while appearing on the E! channel's "Fashion Police" show.
The Anti-Defamation League slammed Rivers, calling the remark "vulgar and hideous," but she said it was her way of getting people to talk.
"It's a joke, No. 1. No. 2 it is about the Holocaust," she told HLN's "Showbiz Tonight. "This is the way I remind people about the Holocaust. I do it through humor."
Of course, this latest dust-up coincides with Rivers' book, "Diary of a Mad Diva," which was released on July 1. Rivers' representative told CNN, "These are all funny jokes. The book is hysterical. The prologue says if anyone takes anything in the book seriously (he or she) is an idiot. And (Rivers) says if anyone has a problem with that, they can feel free to call her lawyer Clarence Darrow."



What does Barack Obama call illegal aliens? Undocumented democrats.

Barack Obama is on a sinking ship, who gets saved? The Country!

Why can't Obama dance? Cause he has two leftist feet.

Sometimes being left is a good thing!!

I remember John Wayne and Henry Fonda speaking at some hollyweird award ceremony many years ago.

Jane Fonda was standing between here dad and the Duke, John says, “I never thought I’d live to see the day when Little Janey was to my right!”

Priceless!!

Interesting. We seem to have opposing experiences. I live near the largest refinery in the U.S right now and it doesn’t stink at all and doesn’t appear to be polluting anything.  It provides a lot of jobs for people around here.

I haven’t lived near mines but I have worked in coal burning power plants. The pollution control technology has advanced tremendously in the past few decades. My own husband was involved in installing a new device invented by a small firm based in Sweden. He put those devices on power plants and industrial boilers all over the U.S., Europe and China in the 90s and early 2000s.  China of course cheats and turns theirs off when nobody’s looking. But we have cleaned up U.S. pollution from coal a lot since I was young.

When I was a small kid in the 60s we visited my mom’s family in Johnstown PA and the air pollution was so bad from the steel mills that at the end of the day playing outside, we would bathe and the washcloths were black with soot from our skin. When we blew our noses the snot was black. I don’t know how everyone who lived there didn’t get lung cancer from breathing that stuff.

But I’ve also worked in a nuclear plant and that’s what we should be doing, building more nuclear plants for electricity. Coal and gas will always be useful for power generation for quick peak loads but we should have built far more nuke plants for reliable base energy. You can blame the wacko greenie nuts and the government for the fact that we haven’t.  Oil will always be better for transportation. Electric freight trains, container ships, airplanes and cars just aren’t near as practical and never will be. And even if they did, now you’re back to having to supply the electricity to charge them.

I agree with you about plastic, although I don’t buy that there are bits of plastic floating around in my blood. I just don’t like how it doesn’t degrade.  It would be nice to come up with something as strong and practical but would biodegrade after a few years. 

I don’t like how we have replaced glass jars and bottles with plastic for condiments and stuff.  Nothing wrong with glass ketchup bottles. Those upside down plastic squirt bottles are gross. I hate them.

When I was growing up, nearly every liquid was packaged in glass jars or bottles. We returned pop and beer bottles to the store where we bought it. We put the groceries in paper bags which were used to help start BBQ or fireplace fires, or nicely held the daily newspapers, which we took to church once a month to walk it into a steel shipping container for recycling.

McDonalds burgers were wrapped in paper, and the cups were paper.

Then the leftists thought they’d save the trees and gave us plastic bags, and everything turned to plastic vs glass or paper.

...unalienable Rights, that among these are Life...

Life requires food, water, clothing and shelter so that means government should provide them.
Not my line of reasoning or one I agree with, but I've seen similar.  The meaning of "rights" appears to have been altered by a lot of people to allow that kind of argument to appear valid.

When the modern day mengele (fauci) sees his net worth jump to over $120 million dollars on a government salary and he gets paid untold millions from the scam vaccine that the communist democrats pushed for all it was worth, then it is automatic that blind, ideologues would run around babbling the liberal line of bullshit about infection and mortality rates;
while ignoring the truth that hospitals were paid to lie about covid rates, and doctors were losing their licenses to practice medicine if they dared to prescribe ivermectin which worked wonders for a tiny fraction of the cost paid to the scam vaccine manufacturers, and we are expected to suck off the penis of the left claiming their latest bullshit graph proves anything other than they still know how to lie.

When the communist democrats in office use the doj and medical boards to shut down ANY non-government medical opinions and advice, you already know they are lying out of their asses.

It is no surprise that the big state leftists here are sucking from the same government penis and repeating whatever lie they've been told to repeat.

It's not like democrats have any integrity, anyway...