There is not one single right way of doing science

 It has been said that "There are as many ways of doing science as there are scientists." That is surely an exaggeration, but there is definitely more than one way of doing science.* I have argued that being a scientist is just being intelligent (plus careful hard work).** I have also argued that intelligence is a vector quantity, one can be intelligent in various different ways.***

A given "scientific method" may also be subdivided and a scientist may specialize in just one of the resulting pieces.**** The scientific endeavor as a whole becomes a group effort. Publications may also be quite specialized/focused. I'll give an example from my plasma confinement work. We had calculated the curves describing particle and energy balance for a linear solenoid dominated by endloss. These had been verified by comparison with experiment. We then calculated (and published) the curves that resulted when other different loss mechanisms/scalings were active. These might possibly describe other confinement devices. 

Not everyone is going to be following "THE scientific method" in every one of their publications. There are different ways to do science as there are different ways in which to think.*****

* Theories of Scientific Method, Nola and Sankey, McGill-Queen's U. Press, 2007.

**See, for example, my blog of 1 September 2012.

*** See, for example, my blogs of 23 August 2010 and 8 September 2011.

**** For example: theory, computation, experiment.

***** For example: induction, deduction, abduction.

Limited reusability in A.s.a. H.

Many of my A.s.a. H. agents are specialists. They can not be reused (without modification/retraining) for some different specialty. It may be possible, however, to reuse some of the various layers (if the concepts used by the two specialists are the same and defined in the same way).   

A pantheism

With the universe as the body of god.

Evolution as the mind of god.

And evolved agents as children of god. 

Will there be yet another AI winter?

 Fully self driving cars that are always a year away.

AI "experts" that have no academic credentials.

Overpriced hardware.

Closed source software.

"Hallucinations"

Fads, hype, and fanboys.

etc., etc..

Why pluralism?

"...absolute certainty is not achievable...the depth of understanding in any field, including philosophy, often comes from exploring multiple perspectives...there are multiple ways of understanding and interpreting the world." ChatGPT 4.0

See, for example, my blogs of 26 September 2010 and 15 June 2022. 

AI curricula again

An AI should not just uncritically read from (or be trained on) the web.* Garbage in, garbage out. A mature intelligent agent would choose what to read/learn depending upon the quality of the reading material and the agent's goals and values. The early learning curriculum for an AI should be carefully chosen. Once it's matured the AI can choose for itself. 

This is one of the problems with gpt. Mainline AI research has not spent enough time/effort on curricula.

* See, for example, my blog of 6 June 2020. 

AIs learning from human publications

Humans do not share a single common world model and ontology.* The concepts that they employ differ from one another even when the same names are being used to label them. An AI model trained off human publications would, at best, learn some kind of fuzzy averaged world model and concepts.

* See, for starters, my blog of 15 June 2022. 

Realistic space launch economics

I do not agree with the optimistic estimates out of Spacex. Back of the envelope calculations, more detailed studies specifically for the Vulcan rocket*, and similar studies done by the European Space Agency are all much more pessimistic (realistic?). (But at least some of our oligarchs are putting some of their money to good use. I'll give them that much.)

* See, for example, Launch Vehicle Recovery and Reuse, M. M. Ragab, et al, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2015.

Adding more actuators

 We have previously noted some of the advantages to giving A.s.a. H. more sensors.* We think that there is also some advantage to its having more actuators.** Giving it two or more mobile arms, for example, rather than just one.

* See my blogs of 1 Sept. 2022 and 1 Nov. 2023.

** And actuators of various different sorts and sizes.