the dumber the chat bot is, the more it can be confused with humans ... Who would have thought differently? But seriously, Modern AI can be instructed to behave like a human. You can tell it to talk like an 8 year old and it does it. I have made experiments with asking it to pretend to be an ignorant student and learn some math. It behaves then as such. It does make mistakes as expected. The Turing test has to be done correctly: instruct the AI to answer in such a way that it passes the Turing test. I'm confident that if done as such, it would and ELIZA would have no chance.

one can hope for apple that they keep things simple and do not offer too many different models and options. It is the paradox of choice that has been confirmed later in experiments.

come on. We all know since 24 years that for AI purposes, human batteries are much more effective than nuclear power. Microsoft should know that.

The use of AI is in principle not much different than what one has done before (dinosaur here speaking). When I started programming, I would use core language specifications and lecture notes of classes (profs would actually still write language specifications on the board). There was no internet, just the manuals. I started to program on programmable calculators and in Basic with just the language specifications. Then we used to consult books like "Pascal in 100 examples" or "Kernighan and Pike" and then came the O Reilly media or "bibels" of all kind" (I have still an entire bookshelf of those) to look for snippets. Then came the web and more and more resources became available there. Tools like Copilot or Chat GPT lift us to an other level. Still, I myself get the biggest kick out of things using a "clean slate approach". Start from the ground up without any example code or consulting with anybody. This by the way is very similar to research. Much of research is to start with somebody's work and improves it, mix it with other work. A Clean slate research has become very rare: start from scratch and see where it goes and only later consult with what others have done. A third domain is teaching. The Chat GPT analog of programming or piggy pack analog of research is "teaching from the book" or (what is now become a standard too), teaching from pre-existing worksheets. It is the least satisfying way to teach. But maybe the days of human creativity are soon gone: most programmers will just "meta program and become managers, telling AI entities what to do. Most researchers will be replaced by managers who tell AI minions what they want to research on, Most Teaching will be replaced by bots ,tutoring kids caned fast food. We will see how it goes. When we landed on the moon there were predictions we would be on Mars by 1980. At the moment the predictions of Kurzweil appear no more crazy. That AI will surpass human intelligence in 2029 looked ridiculous but is no more that impossible.

the weight of the batteries has been addressed as a potential problem: it will put more stress on roads and bridges. I can understand however the urge to have large batteries: it is psychological:you do not want to be stranded away from any charging opportunity, even so long drives are extremely rare. Also, since batteries will degrade over time, you want also in a few years to still have enough capacity. It is actually amazing that the loss of capacity is only 2 percent per year. I definitely notice a faster capacity decay in my laptop.

I have used skype for almost 20 years. It had initially been quite user friendly especially before it had been bought by MS. In the last couple of years, it has become more and more convoluted. Sometimes I still find it hard to find the dialpad. If you make an electronic version of a telephone, the first thing you want to be able to do is to dial a number ... Zoom got the user interface part better. It is no surprise that they succeeded.

remember digg? it was driven into the ground by the urge to take control the content. The content which users have provided for digg had been multiple times better than the strongly moderated content. How fast it went down was shocking. Slashdot and reddit are still ok. What slashdot could do better is to give more moderation to users, especially long term users. Moderation works only with a lot of input and trusting the readers. The same can be seen for main stream media. Until a few years ago, they had been trustworthy. Now, the boardroom of these news sites have become more and more partisan. Too much control does not work, both for social media and for old school media. They need to trust more the reader. Here on Slashdot that had worked pretty well, when enough readership was around. To spot trolls or propaganda accounts needs a lot of eyes and also a diverse opinion.

I feel nausea after half an hour of VR. It could be that augmented reality is better. Google glasses have shown the social obstacles. Once the XR can be implemented into usual glasses and switched on and off easily, it might become a hit. Further into the future will come direct projections into the eye by modifying the eye lids surgically: close the eyes, say the magic word and the projector starts displaying stuff. Will be interesting to see whether the apple googles can take off.

Sounds a bit what an AI could do: 1) Pick two random scientific topics or terms. 2) Feed into midjourney for illustrations. 3) Seed into GPT4 to get an article 4) Do a publicity stunt 5) Goto 1). Examples: Chaos + Fractals, Fuzzy + Logic, Many world + time travel, Holographs + Universe, Strings + particles, relativity + quantum mechanics, Quantum + Black hole, Black holes + quantum computing, Wormhole + Monte Carlo, machine learning + quantum entanglement, quantum computers + lattice QCD, quantum + encryption, photosynthesis + 5th state of matter.

Yes, this is indeed the major question. It appears to be a technical improvement, not a "validation". Quantum computers are fancy analog computers. Analog computers have had a great run in the past, especially for solving complex differential equations. Also optical neural networks have reemerged as very effective. Our brain is super effective. Quantum computers might have a great run too. The bigger question is whether quantum computing will alter the Church-Turing thesis or allow to compute things with exponential complexity in polynomial time. I personally doubt both. If somebody should build a machine which can factor larger integers than a digital computer, then things would look more realistic. The largest number which has been factored with Shor's algorithm is n=21! Maybe, now, with this factor 2 improvement they will be able to factor n=42 ,,,

Chat GPT often tells things with such confidence that one simply wants to believe it. When I came out, I tried it on math problems, computations and mathematical proofs. There were often subtle mistakes, circular thinking or simply hand-waving arguments included. We live in a time, where every statement needs to be examined for mistakes. These days this includes of course all media. While trivial for social media, it applies more and more to established media (which often depend these days on advertisements or funding or grants or influence of governments or businesses and good old lobby or PR work) and even to published articles (where a small guild of folks in a field decide what can pass peer review). What is missing in Chat GPT is complete access to the data which were used, complete access to the sources which were used. complete transparency who has written the text. Access to all algorithms which were used (also filters). Wikipedia is in this respect already very good. Most claims have sources attached. There is a history of what has been edited. As for now, I do not trust GPT. And as we speak, it is going to be ruined by a large company who plans to spike it with advertisements.

half a year after everybody had been hyperventilating about AI bots, finally also this guy uses his predictive power. It had been so great in the past ... It is just amazing how everybody listens to a dude with a big wallet. Especially if he makes predictions that are platitude.

who will be able to afford that?

I use both mac OS versions and linux since more than 30 years. I love both worlds but use Linux as the main system to work on. When apple announced a couple of years ago to implement client side scanning (but did not implement it), I temporarily moved over completely to linux and gave away my iphone and iwatch and bought a dell linux laptop. When gettting serious about ditching apple, there were still some obstacles: Final cut works still much better for me than davinci resolve on linux and the presentation software keynote is fantastic. Fortunately, apple got to its senses and stopped implementing opaque spy scanning software, especially as it by nature would have been impossible to audit by a third party due to its horrific nature.

The article states that the plant continues to contaminate ground water and that tanks are expected to be full in the fall. Every day 130 tons of containated water is created.