An Air Force Colonel Said a Simulated AI Drone Killed Its Operator, But the Service Is Denying It - JUN 5, 2023

https://www.popularmechanics.com/mi...s-own-operator/

The Air Force walked back an eyebrow-raising story involving artificial intelligence that seemed like it was pulled right from The Terminator.

In a simulation, an AI-powered drone, told to destroy enemy defenses, saw its human operators as an obstacle in its way—and reportedly killed them.

Now, the Air Force says the story was hypothetical, and that the experiment was never actually tested.

The Air Force has denied a widespread account that one of its killer drones turned on its masters and killed them in a simulation. The story, told at a defense conference last month, immediately raised concerns that artificial intelligence could interpret orders in unanticipated—or in this case, fatal—ways. The service has since stated that the story was simply a “thought experiment,” and never really happened.

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

I don't fret over things that I have absolutely no control over. It's unhealthy and pointless. I prefer either gallows humor - "humor that still manages to be funny in the face of, and in response to, a horrible, deathly, tragic, dramatic, perfectly hopeless situation" - or mocking a hyped topic.

I don't think SENTIENT "Terminator" AI is that imminent. It's simply a matter of faith that AI would ever even become sentient. However, as always, BAD PROGRAMMING by humans IS the problem with AI and other software efforts which is what they were trying to avoid in the HYPED USAF "thought experiment" that led to the sensational, click-bait AI headline.

I can provide a long list of threats to humanity that are far more imminent than the THEORETICAL AI one and all of them directly involve humans. Here are a few:

As detailed by Dr. Robert Malone in one of his recent books, pathogen gain-of-function research has become the loophole workaround against the severely flawed, loophole-filled biological weapons treaty research ban since such "peaceful" research is actually "dual use" (military and civilian).

AI Or Gain-Of-Function Research: Which Is More Dangerous? (the answer is GOF -W)
May 30, 2023

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steven...sh=6d000379497e

Laboratory Escapes and “Self-fulfilling prophecy” Epidemics
By: Martin Furmanski MD
Scientist’s Working Group on Chemical and Biologic Weapons Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation
February 17, *2014*

https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-co...-17-14-copy.pdf

This paper presents an historical review of outbreaks of PPPs or similarly transmissible pathogens that occurred from presumably well-funded and supervised nationally supported laboratories. It should be emphasized that these examples are only the “tip of the iceberg” because they represent laboratory accidents that have actually caused illness outside of the laboratory in the general public environment. The list of laboratory workers who have contracted potentially contagious infections in microbiology labs but did not start community outbreaks is much, much longer. The examples here are not “near misses;” these escapes caused real-world outbreaks.

Lab Accidents Prompt Calls for New Containment Program
SCIENCE – 28 May *2004* – Vol 304, Issue 5675 – pp. 1223-1225

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126....304.5675.1223a

While breathing a sign of relief that the latest outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China is over, health officials are still deeply troubled that they have not pinpointed the original source of the infection. They are also questioning whether research on the virus should be restricted to prevent further lab accidents.

Investigators are convinced that the infections in April involved two separate biosafety lapses within the Institute of Virology at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. But they have been unable to pin down what went wrong. With four separate infections within the last year at three different institutions in Beijing, Singapore, and Taipei, health experts fear that the next SARS epidemic may be more likely to emerge from a research lab than from the presumed animal reservoir. [Prophetic, no? – W]

Here's another one: a LONG overdue economic crisis caused by the THIRD artificial and BY FAR largest economic bubble caused by the creation of money from thin air which was the (NON)fix for each of the previous bubbles - the dot com bubble and the subprime housing bubble which caused the Global Financial Crisis. This time the bubble is in EVERYTHING and WORLDWIDE, this time being so huge that it won't be able to be papered over as in the past with money created from thin air since that would destroy fiat currencies.

And what may come of THAT besides economic effects? I predict a war with China. And during such a war, even if it doesn't immediately go kinetic, the sort of infrastructure disruptions some are worried about being caused by sentient AI will be carried out by human hackers, not AI. Here's a FANTASTIC NON-FICTION documentary film about that using a real world example, the over-RPM destruction of Iranian centrifuges being used for the U235 enrichment of uranium:

Zero Days (legal freeview with ads)

https://tubitv.com/movies/588509/zero-days

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Hey AI, COME AND GET SOME ! The best defense against AI: A SUPER SOAKER !
WE all know what happens when you get electronics wet. Hit all the main frames at the same time.

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Neal Miller
Master Blaster NAR# 58296

Interesting article relating to Google/OpenAI vs. Open Source for LLMs

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/goog...oat-and-neither

This is from a leaked document that was posted to SemiAnalysis. Some quick take-aways (assuming the document is legitimate)

• OpenAI and Google Bard are worried about how fast AI is improving once Meta's LLaMA was leaked and adopted by the Open Source community
• Open Source has brought about changes that are very dramatic in a short period, such as
  • Scalable Personal AI: You can fine tune a personalized AI on your laptop in an evening.
  • LLMs on a Phone: People are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 at 5 tokens / sec.
  • Multimodality: The current multimodal ScienceQA SOTA was Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.trained in an hour.
• Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.

Article is lengthy, but a good read. Again, if the letter is legitimate, it explains a few things, like:

• Why big corporations want AI to be regulated
• Why big corporations want developers of AI to be licensed

This is a technology they can no longer control, and so to regain their advantage they need to make it difficult for anyone else to use the technology. They are hoping the Federal Government will assist them by creating laws and regulations to restrict access.

The biggest issue I see currently with AI is not the technology itself, but the way people are using it. Numerous stories of people using the tech to 'be lazy' and not making sure the information spit out by the AI is correct. (They probably don't check to see if the Wikipedia article they are quoting is factual either). This subsequently gets them in trouble (legal or otherwise).

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Web Site and Blog
https://rocketryjournal.wordpress.com

YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@AustinAerospace

3D Printing Designs
https://www.thingiverse.com/austin_aerospace_education

Software
https://sourceforge.net/u/austinaerospace/profile

NUTHIN' wrong with LAZINESS just like nuthin' wrong with GLUTTONY.
I find them to be VIRTUES, not downfalls, and worthy of being a life CREDO !

Hyuk, yuk, yukkkk !

That said, NO STINKIN' CYLONS !!!

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, and HAVOC !

Yep, that is often or perhaps even usually why regulations are created - on behalf of the deep pockets which are the ACTUAL owners of our governments at nearly every level. Those deep pockets can afford regulations out the yin yang, but small businesses and smaller competitors can't:

Plumbing the Depths
How the Gears Turn
FRED REED • MARCH 9, 2008
(This first appeared in shorter form in The American Conservative)

https://www.unz.com/freed/plumbing-the-depths-386/

Intro:

Common delusions notwithstanding, the United States, I submit, is not a democracy—by which is meant a system in which the will of the people prevails. Rather it is a curious mechanism artfully designed to circumvent the will of the people while appearing to be democratic. Several mechanisms accomplish this. [he details nine of them; an excellent column, BTW - W]

------------

Follow the science!

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens [Princeton University, 2014]

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites...olitics.doc.pdf

Excerpts:

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.

When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system [that describes the overwhelming influence of the administrative state and lobbyists - W], even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.

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One AI example, voice cloning, is in my opinion virtually perfect:

DaveClone - Testing Eleven Labs AI Voice Cloning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4tHtPwYQ_o

However, in one of his daily podcasts Dilbert cartoonist and author Scott Adams pointed out that distributors (or somewhere in the standard publishing chain) will not accept auto-transcribed books using AI to read a text into audio. To heck with the blind or poorly sighted, huh? Gotta' keep those voice actors employed.

On the over-hyped "Terminator" threat of AI, I think mankind (oops, I mean HUMANkind) will do the best job of destroying itself without help or, at most, with the assistance of less-than-sentient AI.

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

The USA was never intended to be, nor was our government designed to be, a democracy - we were conceived as a republic, though a good case can be made that we no longer are one and haven’t been since the early 20th century.

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John Scott B.

NAR #102949/L1

Someone always brings that up because the most accurate definition of a "democracy" is "majority rule" meaning that two wolves and a sheep vote for what's for dinner, so Fred Reed avoided that by defining what he meant with that term: "Common delusions notwithstanding, the United States, I submit, is not a democracy—by which is meant a system in which the will of the people prevails." Republic or not, the Princeton study proves with data that he is correct. THIS is reality:

Honest Political Ads - Gil Fulbright for Senate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz_V4lRdtjo

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Very true, the United States is a "Constitutional Republic", not a "Democracy", in any way shape or form . . . Of course when the "Government" IGNORES the Constitution, "all bets are off", unfortunately !

Yes, I know that as did Fred Reed in his editorial and as did the Princeton study I quoted, so semantics don't detract from the validity of those inputs.

On your latter point, that has been the case for a long, LONG time for the reasons detailed by both Reed and Princeton. Why do those reasons exist? Because corporations weren't as big of a thing during the time of the founders and, as a very UNFORTUNATE result, they failed to SPECIFY in their Constitution that the rights they were referring to specifically related to NATURAL persons (wetware) and not ARTIFICIAL persons (corporations). Thus, the so many horrible SCOTUS rulings since then.

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan