Star Trek TOS episode 2:14 Spock tied up the computer (it emitted smoke) computing the last digit of pi. TNG had people asking the computer to generate large scale computations. Ridiculous. Versions of that now happening, but users need to understand and convey much more than depicted. New tools.
Actual risks from modern AI. $1.5T in existing investment grade bond debt for AI data centers. Then there is training debt. And no cash flow positive products deployed. The more all in on new AI that a company is, the more risk. Failures will ripple through the economy. www.fool.com/investing/20...
I thought it helpful to plot out the annual positive cash flows for all (every one of them) companies that have achieved that from deploying learning based robots (VLA, VLM, LLM, RL, and even more conventional DL for driving) this century, including AVs. Here they all are, named and plotted.
Data centers are now everywhere and part of critical infrastructure. They are now targets in wars. Amazon reports that two of its data centers were hit in the UAE and one in Bahrain overnight. Having visited data centers recently I suspect repairs will be complicated. www.cnbc.com/2026/03/02/a...
Changes to the NASA crewed lunar landing plans were inevitable. Level headed approach from new NASA administrator. This makes for more but smaller steps, opens things to both Blue Origin and SpaceX and rescues SpaceX from its own unrealistic hubris. www.nbcnews.com/science/spac...
I think it is a bubble. I got a copy: Brooks thinks the current wave of massive investments has probably gone too far. “I don’t think they’ll pay off the way some people have imagined,” he said. “I’m not an investment advisor. But yeah, I think there’s a danger.”
I think we just saw exactly that with LLMs. Their language proficiency is way beyond what we had before; their performance vs competence (one of my "7 sins") is making some people think we have reached human level intelligence. They have not. But it is a big software only jump. So, yes, possible.
In the Boston Globe behind a paywall. As I undertand it a *physicist* derides me as out of touch for not worrying superintelligent AI is going to kill us all. I'm not worried because we are nowhere near close to even human level. But black holes, they worry me! www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/24/b...
A lede today in WaPo: "Massive investment in AI contributed “basically zero” to U.S. economic growth last year, Goldman Sachs has calculated." Hype distorts people's minds. FOMO can drive stupid behavior. FOBAWTPALSL even more so.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Good discussion between @mikell.bsky.social (worked with her in the early days of Rethink Robotics) and @bheater.bsky.social
of A3, about the reality of building and deploying robots. Mikell has been at many robotic startups and more recently Amazon Robotics, and GM. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNLe...
Throwing that amount of money at a broad search for new ideas would make it more likely. But instead the world is throwing money at a very narrow approach and competing on how far that particular approach can be pushed. Chances are it is not yet the right approach. And a waste of money long term.
I see the two I identified (climate and pandemics) as potential existential risks for humankind. I don't see AI or erosion of democracy having that level of impact. I think humankind would survive collapse of democracy, as horribly immoral as it would be, and return to it at some point.
5/5 What I do see as the big challenges for the rest of the 21st century (all my grandchildren can be expected to live beyond the year 2100), are global warming, and rise of diseases due to vaccine deniers.
Stay calm. Love those around you. Be kind to everyone.
4/5 Individuals, corporations, and national governments may use some of these tools to influence people with bad intentions on the part of the humans using the tools.
I don't see these as existential risks for humankind.
3/5 The other risk I see is that the AI tools for synthesis of images and videos are now so good that it is sometimes hard to know what is real and what is fake in social media postings.
2/5 The risks are not in an AI system having any intentions to do anything at all. The current AI systems are more like super search engines with merging multiple results from the search into a somewhat coherent response, but often including confabulations.
1/5 I am getting more and more emails from individuals directly to me expressing fear for their children from possibly physical actions from AI. They mention that my views seem balanced and ask me to respond to their words. The attached four skeets are a response to one such that I wrote today.
2/5 The risks are not in an AI system having any intentions to do anything at all. The current AI systems are more like super search engines with merging multiple results from the search into a somewhat coherent response, but often including confabulations.
This is a pretty good write up on where we are with new AI tools. Nicely done Lisa Eadicicco @lisaeadicicco.bsky.social www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/t...
Human guided.
Pure Vision SLAM was not practical in large spaces until the last three years. BTW, Gemini started a year late. At a 1985 conference, Chatila&Laumond had one paper and I another where we independently invented loop closing. Then Cheeseman fixed our independent but lousy probabilistic computations.
Visual SLAM is now real. Paul Mandel at Robust.AI (where I am CTO) says: We just moved into a new office and it took our team under an hour from uncrating Carter to driving around autonomously, including bringup, mapping the entire (large!) new space and annotating locations of interest. Incredible!
The CIA World Factbook has been a great source of data over the years. As of 10 days ago it is just gone with a bland announcement. And the archives, e.g., the-world-factbook/about/archives/2021 @ www cia gov have vanished. Wayback machine has them. The announcement: www.cia.gov/stories/stor...
For US 250th birthday Forbes got humans to nominate and rank living US innovators and then let ChatGPT and Gemini have their say to get greatest 250. Surprised to learn about the list and that I am #44. Started as a pure mathematician, ended up in vacuum cleaner sales. www.forbes.com/sites/alexkn...
SpaceX plays a serious role in US Defense. "folding xAI into SpaceX, Musk is...taking the profits from...Starlink subscription and ... buy[ing] chips for Grok...turns SpaceX from a disciplined aerospace logistics company into...capital fund for Musk’s other interests." www.inc.com/jason-aten/t...
When the prize stakes are perceived to be enormous then the stakes that are wielded in the battle are sharp. A new advertisement. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSa...
SPACE RACE! SpaceX is abandoning short term Mars plans to get an uncrewed (needs mods) Starship on the Moon by March '27. It will require orbital refuels (never done by anyone). Blue Origin flight lander in final test at Johnson, say they will launch this qtr w/o refuels. www.wsj.com/science/spac...
This is really helpful, and the most complete description I have seen. Cheers to the Wayback Machine!!
We've known for a while that Waymo has remote people in the loop (they were overwhelmed with "no green light" exec decisions during the Dec 20 SF power failure), but we did not know that many of them are in the Philippines--suggests a large scale contingent. futurism.com/advanced-tra...
