EdEarl

IBM's Watson, winner of Jeopardy, is being taught to diagnose human maladies, and it will be better than any doctor at that task when it is released for general use. We know little about it, so it may already be better at diagnosis than a doctor. In any case, once it can diagnose, it can prescribe, because there are standard prescriptions for maladies. If a doctor can be replaced by AI, then all knowledge worker jobs, except (maybe) ones that require inventiveness, can be replace by AI. Eventually, all jobs will be taken by AI, not just manufacturing, and it will happen quicker than we imagine.

Personal AI will be able to provide food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education. Just as trees grow from soil nutrients; nanotech will be able to absorb from the soil whatever is needed to provide for our needs and desires. AI will be able to 3D print exact copies of the Mona Lisa and other famous works. And, we can barter among people for man made trinkets.

The AI era of human civilization will nearly eradicate many kinds of crime, for example theft, because anyone can have what they want. There may be kleptomaniacs, but we can have our AI replace anything they take; some laws will become obsolete. Eventually, nanotech may be able to 3D print diamonds of any size.

How the transition from our current culture to the AI era culture will occur is impossible to predict. Some will resist the change and others will embrace it. It's likely to be a bumpy.

Isn't there solar powered drones already though?

Experimental, yes. http://www.newsweek.com/google-tests-solar-powered-internet-drones-421561

Commercial?

Solar doesn't work at night, and batteries are heavy ATM. Lithium air batteries might make them more practical. There's lots of EM at night, but not much light. An EM powered drone might trail a nanotube antenna.

Phys.org: Radio waves not battery fire up WISP, future seen in construction



NASA flew a solar powered plane. Is it possible to reap enough EMF from the environment to power a drone? If not, surely a control station with directional antenna could be used to send a beam of modulated EM energy. Such a system could hover indefinitely. Hast it been done or is someone working on it?

Sometimes I feel bad when some people I know see me eating alone in a restaurant.

 

Is it normal to feel this way?

You are existentially alone, whether people surround you or not.

Is it ok to eat alone in a restaurant?

Yes

Does it make me look unsocial/selfish if I only eat by myself?

Some people will guess your motives for eating alone, and a few will craft a story, various stories.

Every time I go out, must I eat with others as to not seem unsocial/friendless/selfish?

Few in your life will understand you. Someone might think you are trying to control their thoughts by being friendly.

 

I think this is the problem with me. I don't have the "socially unacceptable" database in my head, I speak my unfiltered mind and it usually lands me in sh*t. I may need reprogramming.

You can do it if you want to.

Inventions are a continuum. If technology started in the stone age, a few years later we build robots. There are many steps between, a few setbacks, a lot of cussing, and some celebrations.

As kids, we went to the Monahans Sandhills beach

I doubt nanobots are as well developed as robots, which are inept compared overall to a human. Computer controlled machine tools (CCMT) are useful and in special cases do better than people. As an analogy, current CCMT are like cellphones when they were the size of a brick. Improvements are rapid.

Suppose you could buy nano-wallpaper with embedded computers, display, speaker, microphone and internet connection that gives you the ability to decorate your walls however you wish. All you have to do is chat with an AI wallpaper app that tries to satisfy your wildest dream. Your AI handyman has just finished papering your walls; what would you have on them?

My wallpaper will not always be the same, and decorations can change frequently. Most of the time it would show nature, a beautiful sky and conifer forest with a vista of distant mountains and critters living. At night the stars would shine. The handyman might 3D print a few accents to go with my most popular scenes.

Do you believe this is the future; if so, when and how will you decorate?.

 

Abstract from Science Direct

The application of advance materials to manufacture hard armor systems has led to high performance ballistic protection. Due to its light-weight and high impact energy absorption capabilities, composite metal foams have shown good potential for applications as ballistic armor. A high-performance light-weight composite armor system has been manufactured using boron carbide ceramics as the strike face, composite metal foam processed by powder metallurgy technique as a bullet kinetic energy absorber interlayer, and aluminum 7075 or Kevlar™ panels as backplates with a total armor thickness less than 25 mm. The ballistic tolerance of this novel composite armor system has been evaluated against the 7.62 × 51 mm M80 and 7.62 × 63 mm M2 armor piercing projectiles according to U.S. National Institute of Justice (NIJ) standard 0101.06. The results showed that composite metal foams absorbed approximately 60–70% of the total kinetic energy of the projectile effectively and stopped both types of projectiles with less depth of penetration and backplate deformation than that specified in the NIJ 0101.06 standard guidelines. Finite element analysis was performed using Abaqus/Explicit to study the failure mechanisms and energy absorption of the armor system. The results showed close agreement between experimental and analytical results.

This armor improvement is step toward better protection; ultimately, armor is an illusion. Underground fortresses aren't completely safe. On the other hand, this kind of armor saves lives. Though, it shouldn't be long before a countermeasure is developed.

Andrew McAfee gives TEDx, Race Against the Machine, that makes the case for AI taking jobs. He says human translators are almost obsolete, because software translators have taken over, and other knowledge worker jobs are at risk. In addition, bot technology is improving rapidly, partly due to DARPA, and corporate investments are high in both software and hardware, adding business capacity, but creating few jobs.

Death is inevitable, corporations, jobs, and parties didn't exist for most of human existence. The hyperbole catches my attention, but I can't assimilate this long conversation...dyslexic effect.

I think democracy and stratification of society are our big problem. The rich want regulations to keep their booty. The poor feel powerless. When government favors the rich, and assist the rich who want to own everything, sooner or later the disenfranchised will revolt. As long as there is greed, someone will attempt to dethrone the king, even if billions of people die of starvation.

Democracy has worked because it allows voters to feel they have some power; it satisfies some human needs. However, democracy is practiced by humans and they can pervert the better intentions of democracy; thus, it is also part of the problem. I realize the US is a republic, not a democracy, but that doesn't make much difference. Perhaps it allows perverting the system easier.

IMO it is necessary to think outside the box. I'm concerned technological and cultural changes are too rapid for adaptation by some subcultures and they will resist necessary changes. We can hope younger generations will reverse the trends of their elders, and the US will become a kinder gentler society.

Jet aircraft seem unlikely to be displaced by electric propeller aircraft, because cruising speed an altitude would be limited to about P51 Mustang performance. Propeller aircraft amount to less than half of the planes sold in the general aviation market of $25B in 2014. Jets are more expensive than propeller aircraft; thus, sales of general aviation jets contributes most of that $25B. Jets dominate the much larger commercial market.

It is possible that AI pilots and electric airplanes could be inexpensive enough to spawn a short-haul taxi service; for example DC to Philly, London to Bristol, Amsterdam to Brussels, etc. This market would need a VTOL aircraft along the lines of the Osprey. It could land at a heliport, yet fly fast as a winged aircraft.

Seems to me the price of a small electric aircraft would be greater than most people could afford, even though they would probably be less expensive than a comparable piston engine aircraft.

This video was made in 2013. It shows an AI office manager interacting via vision and voice with people coming to see Eric Horvitz, who gave this TEDx Talk. The office manager was not finished, according to Horvitz, in 2013; today I'd expect more polish. However, it is astonishing, and really illustrates a trend in the kind of jobs AI can do.

Two promising battery improvements, 200,000 charges and 5x energy density would make electric cars lighter, probably less expensive to purchase, and certainly less expensive over a lifetime.

 

200,000 charges April 20, 2016

 

Scientists have long sought to use nanowires in batteries. Thousands of times thinner than a human hair, they're highly conductive and feature a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons. However, these filaments are extremely fragile and don't hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. In a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking.

 

UCI researchers have solved this problem by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination is reliable and resistant to failure.

 

The study leader, UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai, cycled the testing electrode up to 200,000 times over three months without detecting any loss of capacity or power and without fracturing any nanowires. The findings were published today in the American Chemical Society's Energy Letters.

We recently replace our Prius battery after eight years operation. Current batteries are limited 7000 charges; although, fewer charges is more common. Two hundred thousand (or more) charges is more than 25 times battery life, 8*25=200 years. That's ten human generations instead of 2/5 of a generation.

If this technology scales up for mass production, large battery size, and low cost, it will be important.

 

5x Density October 29, 2015

 

Scientists have developed a working laboratory demonstrator of a lithium-oxygen battery which has very high energy density, is more than 90% efficient, and, to date, can be recharged more than 2000 times, showing how several of the problems holding back the development of these devices could be solved.

 

Lithium-oxygen, or lithium-air, batteries have been touted as the 'ultimate' battery due to their theoretical energy density, which is ten times that of a lithium-ion battery. Such a high energy density would be comparable to that of gasoline - and would enable an electric car with a battery that is a fifth the cost and a fifth the weight of those currently on the market to drive from London to Edinburgh on a single charge.

If the prediction of 1/5 cost and weight can be achieved in mass production for large batteries, it will be a game changer, even at 2000 charges.

If these two technologies can be married, a 200,000 charge lithium air battery could make tailpipes obsolete. Even if these two technologies cannot be married, this research hints that battery research will improve both number of charges and power density, and sets goals for researchers. Even 20,000 charges and doubling energy density would be big.

MS Word has a built in grammar checker. Otherwise, you can use https://www.grammarly.com/.

I am dyslexic, and Word's grammar checker made a huge difference in my writing.

Perhaps doing one of Einsteins mind experiments will help; although, it depends on whether he accepts that the speed of light is finite or not.

Given the speed of light is finite, have him think about traveling away from a large clock, visible from afar, at or near the speed of light. He looks back at the clock to check the time (ignore redshift). If he is traveling the speed of light, he and the light from the clock are traveling the same speed. Thus, when he looks to see the time, the hands on the clock will not appear to move. In other words, if he started moving at 9am, the light showing the hands to be 9am would travel at the speed of light, along with your father, so looking back would always show the time to be 9am. To see the clock move, he would have to slow down or stop. The slower he travels away from the clock, the faster time changes.

The next hurdle, provided he understands the thought experiment, is that the effect is not an illusion.

Mouse, keyboard, touchpad, touch screen, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, voice recognition, voice synthesis, gesture recognition, handwriting recognition, Braille input and output, eyeball tracking, ...

I'd like to add that some early computers used a row of 8, 12 or 16 switches for input of boot instructions that read a card or tape. This was done before ROM was available. Whoever powered on the computer had to enter several instruction words via the switches; a push button committed one word to memory, and the next switch settings to the next word of memory.

 

Wired.com

 

Today’s Watson is very different. It no longer exists solely within a wall of cabinets but is spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred “instances” of the AI at once. Like all things cloudy, Watson is served to simultaneous customers anywhere in the world, who can access it using their phones, their desktops, or their own data servers. This kind of AI can be scaled up or down on demand. Because AI improves as people use it, Watson is always getting smarter; anything it learns in one instance can be immediately transferred to the others. And instead of one single program, it’s an aggregation of diverse software engines—its logic-deduction engine and its language-parsing engine might operate on different code, on different chips, in different locations—all cleverly integrated into a unified stream of intelligence.

The Breakthroughs

1. Cheap Parallel Computation
2. Big Data
3. Better AI algorithms

AI Everywhere

1. Google
2. Auto driving
3. Financial Predictions
4. others in development, $B for AI

AI - Brain

1. 1977: Deep Blue vs Kasparov
2. Today: AI plus Kasparov vs AI

Tomorrow, everyone is AI augmented, even more than carrying a cell phone.

Will the Unified Theory be discovered by AI plus physicists? What is required?

Why transparent?

Graphene is only one atom thick, so doesn't fulfill your "thick transparent sides" statement.

What do you mean by push down? Put a downward force on the structure, topple, or what?

I'm a senior citizen who has just learned to appreciate rap and hip hop.

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/04/242990504/hip-hop-and-science-a-perfect-combo-for-students

A commercial site has educational songs, including science songs.

https://www.flocabulary.com/

 

I don't drink, so we'd all be better off without alcohol.

Moderation is OK, too. Abstinence is good for those who can't practice moderation, unless one is addicted to food.

Photon propulsion is quite wimpy for anything macroscopic. F=2P/c under ideal conditions, where P is the power of the light. So 1 Megawatt gets you 6.7 millinewtons.

 

Whoa. Fasten your seatbelt.

 

A 10 kg payload gets up to 21 km/s after a year*. In reality, your thrust will decrease as the target gets further away and the laser expands. Plus you have to track the probe.

 

EDIT: *if there's no gravity

Further developments:

 

Stephen Hawking joins futuristic bid to explore outer space

 

With famed physicist Stephen Hawking at his side, an Internet investor announced Tuesday that he's spending $100 million on a futuristic plan to explore far outside our solar system.

 

Yuri Milner said the eventual goal is sending hundreds or thousands of tiny spacecraft, each weighing far less than an ounce, to the Alpha Centauri star system.

IDK if they intend these hundreds or thousands of tiny craft will be individual or a swarm, but a swarm seems like a good architecture. They could rob a bit of energy from the laser to keep formation and to communicate. They could cooperate to beam a signal to Earth, and probe the Alpha Centauri system with microwaves.

Those rocks and water are 2.7 billion years old, and Earth did have continents above water at that time. There were no large plants and animals at that time, and the atmosphere contained little or oxygen.

Since tectonic processes continually expose new rock, mostly under the ocean, and bury old rock, it is likely water cycles with rock into the depths of the earth and out again. Is there evidence that all that water was on the surface at one time, reference?

Doonsberry's "Trump Brand Insults."

http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2016/04/17#mutable

The cartoon is in a format not allowed on this site. I think Doonsberry has made a good caricature of Trump.