A.s.a. hardware upgrade

 In the last week I have built up a new computer system with a CPU speed of 5-6 GHz, 14 cores, 64 GB of RAM, 2 TB of internal SSD, and many TB of external memory.

Co-intelligences and disembodied A.I.s

 In my post of 25 August 2024 I describe how machinery augments my biological intelligence. Conversely, biological senses and intelligence can be used to supplement/augment a computer system. For example, we can replace one or more (all?) of the lowest layer elements of the concept hierarchy* in my post of 4 September 2024 with human input. If the lowest layer is completely replaced with human supplied inputs we then have a disembodied A.I. (This may or may not be desirable.)

* as well as some preprocessing, like the ANNs in my 4 September post.

dia de los muertos

A year ago for the day of the dead I listed a number of ways in which we might be immortal but I forgot to mention cloning (perhaps in combination with life logging across generations).

2024 US election

It should be impossible for Donald Trump to be elected US president. The fact that it isn't is proof once again that the human value system is inadequate. It is not necessary to "align" A.I. s' values with human values. It isn't even desirable.

Space "race"

Large projects must be broken up into pieces and the work distributed among many cooperating specialists. For these specialists to coordinate with one another there have to be schedules.

Work can be done either too fast or too slowly. Attempts to work fast push up costs and lower safety. The death on the first soviet manned Soyuz flight is an example. Work can also be done too slowly. The fixed overhead that must be covered year after year is one issue. Low launch rate also unfavorably impacts worker skill levels.

But it seems to me that the U.S. has no need to "race" at the current moment.

If the soviets had been first to land a crew vehicle on the moon that might well have led to a stronger American post-apollo effort. Similarly, today, if the Chinese land a crew on the moon before the U.S. that might lead to a stronger U.S. program going forward.

I also think that the payback from space telescopes and other unmanned space assets has exceeded that of the manned programs. Crew should only be included when they are actually needed for the mission. Also, see my blog of 3 November 2010. 

Musk

If you try to do too many things at once you end up doing none of them well. Some years ago I criticized Spacex for this. I would now suggest that Musk is trying to do too much: spacex, starlink,  electric cars, solar power, AI, robots, twitter, neuralink, politics, boring, ... I don't care how many good engineers he hires, this is too much. 

Robot skin/clothes

 My AI robots require a lot of sensors and, therefore, a lot of wiring:

One should, of course, first shorten all the wires as much as possible. It is possible to then cover the wiring (and the bot) with "skin" or "clothing." This can be "resistive rubber" sheeting (velostat, linqstat) or more conventional cloth with embedded flex/force sensing thin film ribbon sensors. Any tethers can have their wiring similarly covered.