Signal to Noise Report
Moon Burials, AI Filters, Electronic Tongues, Cleaning Robots... and more headlines from the bright, unnerving world of today.
The Signal to Noise Report collects headlines to illustrate humanity’s move into what is beginning to resemble a hybrid species: The Jetsons meets Blade Runner. The idea being that we have a proclivity to accept (with glee) whatever new techno gizmos are shoved at us, yet rarely question their purpose and/or their long-term effects on our health and sanity.
This AI robot garbage picker can sort over 500 types of trash in seconds
The Fast Picker 4.0 is a high-speed waste sorting robot that is ideal for lightweight materials such as paper, plastic and aluminum. It has the Heavy Picker beat at a rate of 80 picks per minute or 4,800 picks per hour. This is double the average pick rate of a human sorter, which is 30-40 picks per minute.
Navajo Nation’s objection to landing human remains on the moon prompts last-minute White House meeting
CNN - The White House has convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private mission to the moon — set to launch in days — after the largest group of Native Americans in the United States asked the administration to delay the flight because it will be carrying cremated human remains destined for a lunar burial.
If successful, the commercial mission scheduled to launch Monday — dubbed Peregrine Mission One — will be the first time an American-made spacecraft has landed on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. But Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said that allowing the remains to touch down there would be an affront to many indigenous cultures, which revere the moon.
“The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology,” Nygren said in a Thursday statement. “The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.”
An ‘electronic tongue’ could help robots taste food like humans
Popular Science - AI programs can already respond to sensory stimulations like touch, sight, smell, and sound—so why not taste? Engineering researchers at Penn State hope to one day accomplish just that, in the process designing an “electronic tongue” capable of detecting gas and chemical molecules with components that are only a few atoms thick. Although not capable of “craving” a late-night snack just yet, the team is hopeful their new design could one day pair with robots to help create AI-influenced diets, curate restaurant menus, and even train people to broaden their own palates.
Unfortunately, human eating habits aren’t based solely on what we nutritionally require; they are also determined by flavor preferences. This comes in handy when our taste buds tell our brains to avoid foul-tasting, potentially poisonous foods, but it also is the reason you sometimes can’t stop yourself from grabbing that extra donut or slice of cake. This push-and-pull requires a certain amount of psychological cognition and development—something robots currently lack.
An AI feud is roiling the music industry
Music artists are increasingly concerned there is little protection for their own names, likenesses, and voices being used without their permission to create AI-generated songs.
Some have already had their voices mimicked without their permission, while deceased artists have also had their voices reproduced without the involvement of their families.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warns no one will be able to escape the claws of AI.
Dimon revealed that he’s got 200 workers at JPMorgan dedicated to researching the wave of large language models, from Bing and Bard to ChatGPT—including how they could be used internally.
AI will eventually "be used in almost every job," he concluded.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: AI should be a human right
Yahoo! Finance - "I think AI has to be almost a human right," Benioff said on Yahoo Finance Live Wednesday at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. "I've actually been saying ... for decades that AI could be a creator of inequality. It could also be a creator of equality."
About 40% of global employment is exposed to AI, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In advanced economies, roughly 60% of jobs are exposed to AI due to the prevalence of "cognitive task" oriented jobs.
Overall exposure is 40% in emerging markets and 26% in low-income countries, the IMF said.
Although many emerging markets and developing economies may experience less immediate AI-related disruption, the IMF reasons they are also ready to capitalize on AI's advantages. This could "exacerbate" the "digital divide" and "cross-country income disparity," the study concluded.
AI could consume as much energy as Argentina annually by 2027
Popular Science - According to a commentary published October 10 in Joule, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Business and Economics PhD candidate Alex de Vries argues that global AI-related electricity consumption could top 134 TWh annually by 2027. That’s roughly comparable to the annual consumption of nations like Argentina, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Although de Vries notes data center electricity usage between 2010-2018 (excluding resource-guzzling cryptocurrency mining) has only increased by roughly 6 percent, “[t]here is increasing apprehension that the computation resources necessary to develop and maintain AI models and applications could cause a surge in data centers’ contribution to global electricity consumption.” Given countless industries’ embrace of AI over the last year, it’s not hard to imagine such a hypothetical surge becoming reality. For example, if Google—already a major AI adopter—integrated technology akin to ChatGPT into its 9 billion-per-day Google searches, the company could annually burn through 29.2 TWh of power, or as much electricity as all of Ireland.
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Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.
we will all be replaced in time