Fair use or plagiarism?

Is ChatGPT's use of massive amounts of human generated data "fair use" or plagiarism? The problem is ChatGPT regurgitates chunks of input that are too big.

Co-intelligence

Existing AI agents have gotten good at searching and answering questions we put to them but they need to start asking questions of us unprompted.

Ion ramjets

I see that Andrea Lucca Fabris and Mansur Tisaev of the University of Surrey Space Centre are now working on electric ion ramjets for satellite drag makeup. My friend James E. Cox was developing that idea at TRW in the 1970s. I have his TRW report* and he and I discussed the idea at the time as it related to my own work** on ion electric space propulsion.   

* TRW Systems Group 4753.75.3-003, Applications & Feasibility of An Electric Ion Ramjet, 13 January 1975

** See, for example, I.E.E.E. Transactions on Plasma Science,  vol. 10, pg. 8, 1982

Humanoid AI robots

 For the reasons that I have discussed previously* I do not think that the majority of AI robotic agents will have a humanoid form.

* See, for example, my blogs of 1 Oct. 2021, 1 July 2023 and 10 April 2024.

AI power demand

 The time, computational resources, and power required by any given AI specialist agent depends upon the tasks being performed, the environment, the algorithms employed, and the agent architecture and will vary from training to performance. Teaching a common robotic pick and place task via one-shot learning from demonstration requires roughly equal computational power for training and for performance. Traditional backprop artificial neural networks require much more computation during training* and much less during performance. On the other hand for agent specialties where performance requires substantial inferencing then that may actually be more costly than initial training was.

* I've typically been training A.s.a. with handcrafted curricula rather than using the vast amount of data that systems like GPTs require.

Human-robot interaction

 It is usually argued that robots with a humanoid form factor will more readily adapt to the existing human environment. But I find that in most applications we modify the environment to be more robot friendly*. In making use of Roomba, for example, I reduced the clutter and set up virtual walls. Robot lawn mowers typically have a boundary wire. Similarly, factories and warehouses are modified to accommodate the robots that work there. As robots get smarter they may do more of the adapting and we may do less. But if we cohabitate with robots I expect the result will be a compromise, not our current environment, just as factories have long been tailored to both men and machines.

* I think we also modify our activities/behavior in adapting to the use and limitations of software.

Do you use what you studied in college?

For some careers you will use what you learned in college. For others you may not. In becoming a plasma fusion research scientist I certainly used my undergraduate physics major. When I taught at the National University of Singapore I saw that businesses were eager to hire physics majors because they knew our graduates must be smart, worked hard, and were 4 years more mature than high school graduates. The college degree filtered out the better candidates for the employers.