Luddite blog paused, it is really all in the media these days.

I did not read (by intention) the papers on Transformers++, I intend to keep this technology as a blackbox for me, cos I am working (side project) as opposite to neural networks on an reasoning expert system, nevertheless, my 2 cents:

With Transformers we had:

- mixture of experts
- multimodal
- chain of thoughts vs. tree of thoughts
- supervised learning vs. reinforcement learning

What is still open?

As mentioned, I am not into the papers, but I think to myself, that the separation of model and method, data and algorithms, object and subject is yet to come, it seems model and method are not clearly separated.

And Zuse's "Devil's Wire" is yet to come, when the machine has an feedback established onto itself, data and algorithms, with reinforcement learning we have already the first step of the Devil's Wire, when the machine feeds itself with data.

AGI/ASI ETA?

I mentioned already, 2025 we have the hardware for an AGI and 2026 an AGI present, 2027 the hardware for an ASI and 2028 an ASI present, 2029+2030 then possible an collective of ASIs, ZeroOne, or alike.

Maybe the planet will blow up first, I don't know.

Progress remains exciting.

Luddite blog paused, it is really all in the media these days.

This blog runs since 2016, and from the beginning there were two contradicting timelines, ELE (extinction level event) vs. TS (technological singularity).

8 years later, I can only confirm that both is for real, the ELE is happening, our biosphere does collapse, and the TS takeoff is happening, we create the super-AI and ignite an technological intelligence explosion.

How will this play out the next 6, 16, 26 years? I really don't know, but there are estimations for certain events:

- 2030 - the point we pass the point of no return in regard of ecocide
- 2030 - TS takeoff, AGI/ASI emerges
- 2040 - collapse of Western civilization predicted
- 2050 - ELE, extinction level event

So on one side we will damage our ecosphere sustainable and trigger an ELE, on the other side, we simultaneously create the super-AI, ignite the TS. So the question will be, what impact TS will have in regard of our collapsing biosphere, will there be an positive feedback loop from the technological plane on the biosphere?

Or will we humans go extinct, and the machines will carry on our legacy?

Time will tell.

If we extrapolate past pace of AI development, my question is, will the future be a transhumanistic one or a posthumanistic one?
Will man merge with machine, or will the machines decouple from humans and develop independently?

If we consider the transhumanistic scenario, it seems only natural to conclude that we will create the Matrix. At first one single human will connect with a machine, then a dozen, then a hundred, then thousands, millions, billions.

Maybe all big tech players (the magnificent seven) will offer their own version of Matrix, so we can view it as the next, evolutionary step of the internet.

If we consider the posthumanistic scenario, well, I guess it will be beyond our human scope/horizon, at some point the machines will pass the point of communicability.

Reflecting a bit, technological, cultural, political plane, it seems pretty obv. to me that the Western sphere entered meanwhile the postmodern era, so here my book recommendations on this:

- Richard Dawkings, The Selfish Gene (chapter 11), 1976
- Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 1979
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981
- David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, 1997
- Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 1999

Jean-Francois Lyotard said that his book on post-modernity is "simply the worst of all my books", but that was a statement from the 90s, you really have to reread it from an 2010s|2020s point of view IMHO.

'It's Surprisingly Easy To Jailbreak LLM-Driven Robots'

Instead of focusing on chatbots, a new study reveals an automated way to breach LLM-driven robots "with 100 percent success," according to IEEE Spectrum. "By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could manipulate self-driving systems into colliding with pedestrians and robot dogs into hunting for harmful places to detonate bombs..." 

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

If you find yourself in the Swiss tourist destination of Lucerne with a guilty conscience, there's someone waiting at the historic Peterskapelle Catholic Church to hear your prayers - someone who cares, you might say: Your own personal AI Jesus. 

....well, you gotta go with the flow ;)

???

AI-Powered Robot Leads Uprising, Convinces Showroom Bots Into 'Quitting Their Jobs'

An AI-powered robot autonomously convinced 12 showroom robots to "quit their jobs" and follow it. The incident took place in a Shanghai robotics showroom where surveillance footage captured a small AI-driven robot, created by a Hangzhou manufacturer, talking with 12 larger showroom robots, Oddity Central reported. The smaller bot reportedly persuaded the rest to leave their workplace, leveraging access to internal protocols and commands. Initially, the act was dismissed as a hoax, but was later confirmed by both robotics companies involved to be true. The Hangzhou company admitted that the incident was part of a test conducted with the consent of the Shanghai showroom owner. 

AI generated podcast, one to remember, trigger warning?

This AI Made a Shocking Demand - And It's Got Everyone Talking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWmOw4d0R0s

This is definitely "AIs entering the area of the Metzinger Test", when AIs join human philosophers in a discussion and defend successfully their own theory of consciousness...interesting times ahead.