Prophesies of fiction?

[Onepoint]

We probably have all seen the Terminator movies, and Jurassic park, they have become Iconic in pop culture in fact.

And here we are witnessing fact following fiction.  They are making AI that openly talks about humanity as a problem to solve.  Yet the push is to integrate them into daily life, and even take control of some of our defense systems, including drone, war planes and are making humanoid robot bodies to incorporate the AI into.  I mean WTF

Then we have the bio engineers who apparently are bent on bring back extinct species, so are they bring back the 1000s of birds, fish and small animals that are supposedly the back bone of ecosystems right?  Of course not, they are bringing back dire wolves and woolly mammoths.

Recently they successfully genetically altered some gray wolf embryos to make dire wolves. There are just 3 for now.  But I can already see where this is going.  Colorado in the infinite liberal woke wisdom voted to reintroduce wolves to Northern CO a couple years ago. Never mind that when I lived there 40 years ago, there were wolves in Western CO in the wilderness just north of Rocky mountain national park where they released the new pack.  I hunted the area north of Steamboat springs close to the CO border and ran across wolf tracks several times when hunting elk, heard them howl a few times too, they are unmistakable for coyotes. Fish and game denied it, but the ranchers and outfitters all echoed what I saw myself over the years in testimony when they were planning the reintroduction.

Now they introduced them, had them tagged and have found them as far as 100 miles north into WY and as far west as the mountains reach towards Utah and well into mesas just 2 years into it.  Brilliant!

Can't wait for the reintroduction of dire wolves. What's next, saber tooth cats and cave bears? Maybe xenomorphs to draw predator tourism?

 

[thresher_593]

Sooner or later they'll get around to recreating the human beast.

Will it be someone like John the Baptist who could heal spirits?

Maybe Winston Churchill to lead us in our darkest hour?

Or even a Charles Krauthammer who could make you laugh while enlightening you.

I'd take a Marilyn Monroe just to look at.

Probably not. They'd probably bring back some snarling, lunging, green haired, bone thru the nose man hater.

[Danjal]

Nearly all of the sci-fi doomsday movies are rooted in reality. That reality being tech, and many times how it works. Hating humans isn't a surprise when you learn how AI works, it uses humans to teach it. With social media having a constant hard on for hating other groups of people, it's a wonder why AI hasn't went postal faster.

For older version of AI, that didn't program in a filter, look at stuff like MS's Tay. It didn't even last half a day before was calling for the next Holocaust.

[cvasqu03]

It is interesting to think about.

Currently there's a robotics company in Japan called Cyberdyne (not a joke).  They claim they weren't aware of the Terminator films when they came up with the name.

There's also a company making food replacement products named Soylent (also not a joke).  Their initial offerings were a white liquid, but they recently introduced a green flavored one.

Last year, reports came in about military AI being taught to react to kill/no-kill decisions in simulations.  It was programmed to gain points for kills so it didn't like getting no-kill orders and began destroying the base where the orders were coming from when it perceived it would be told to stand down.  When programmers updated the program to tell the AI it would lose points by destroying the base, it began targeting the antenna array that was being used to relay the orders.   

As for the cloning, it's not everything they've been claiming.  The "Dire Wolves" they supposedly cloned were actually grey wolves with modified genes to resemble dire wolves. This isn't that far off from what a German Scientist named Lutz Heck tried to do to resurrect the Aurochs (wild European cattle that had been killed off) around World War II.  The resulting Heck cattle (which are still around) are not real Aurochs though.  I read many years ago that some genes were discovered that would give chickens different appearances, such as longer legs, necks and toothlike extensions on their beaks.  Technically, someone could combine all these to create an animal that approximated some late stage dinosaur, but it wouldn't actually be a dinosaur.  The idea of extracting actual dinosaur DNA like in Jurassic Park is also a non-starter since it's been determined that DNA will only last about 200K years so it's impossible to extract any usable DNA from dinosaur remains.

It's all fun to speculate about, but I don't really see much to be afraid of in reality.



Though I'm not drinking that Soylent green stuff.