A high(er) end smartphone has a battery capacity of approx. 0.019kWh (5000mAh), a gtx3080 has a max power draw of 320W so running that (at max load) for two hours is 0.64kWh, which is equivalent to fully charging ~34 smartphones.
No way in hell would I do that if I had that kind of knowledge. Look what happened to Snowden for doing something like that.
He would still spend the remainder of his life in federal prison or be executed if he ever steps back on US soil or the soil of someone with an extradition treaty that is looking to get some brownie points.
That wouldn't happen to all of them, but I bet you there are some working on some classified mess that would be found and made an example of in short order to shut the others up.
This isn’t new. Check out Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley. It’s a nice primer. Most of our internet tech was built for the military or funded by the military for military ideas (no matter what MIT or Berkeley theoreticians might try to convince you of).
In 2017, I played a part in the successful #CancelMaven campaign that got Google to end its participation in Project Maven, a contract with the US Department of Defense to equip US military drones with artificial intelligence.
Today a similar movement, organized under the banner of the coalition No Tech for Apartheid, is targeting Project Nimbus, a joint contract between Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing infrastructure and AI capabilities to the Israeli government and military.
If a strategically placed insider released information not otherwise known to the public about the Nimbus project, it could really increase the pressure on management to rethink its decision to get into bed with a military that’s currently overseeing mass killings of women and children.
It certainly wasn’t a spontaneous response to an op-ed, and I don’t presume to advise anyone currently at Google (or Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir, Anduril, or any of the growing list of companies peddling AI to militaries) to follow my example.
Back then, the company responded to our actions by defending the nature of the contract, insisting that its Project Maven work was strictly for reconnaissance and not for weapons targeting—conceding implicitly that helping to target drone strikes would be a bad thing.
Today it maintains that the work it is doing as part of Project Nimbus “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” At the same time, it asserts that there is no room for politics at the workplace and has fired those demanding transparency and accountability.
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Depending on how it's implemented, it might very well be one of the non-creepy uses. As long as it isn't taken to extremes, being able to have a chance to say goodbye to your loved one could be therapeutic. Or to see them once a year during the Ghost Festival to help keep their memory alive.
It does have high creepy potential (all deepfakes do), but I can understand the appeal. Make sure you take some nice videos of the people you love, and let them take some of you. Death doesn't always come with a warning, and you don't want to be wishing you had some recordings.
If there is one thing the Chinese government does well it is law enforcement. If you make a deep fake that isn't in line with the public narrative you disappear.
I wonder how long it will be before we see people purposely create these so they can influence their descendants. There might be a future where people have "relationships" with a collection of long dead people.
AIs controlling money is the application that scares me the most, honestly, not weapons. It's flexible and attached to every section of life by design; there is no such thing as sandboxing.
We have mammoth DNA and scientists have been working to restore them for at least a couple of decades now. Every few years you'll see an article about how it's just around the corner to clone one.
Sure, we’ve sequenced the genome, but they’ve tried somatic cell nuclear transfer only to find out that the cell dies with the mammoth nucleus. Unless it was stored in cryogenic storage beneath lead shielding to protect from ionizing background radiation it’ll never work.
The only hope they have is cloning huge sections of the mammoth genome into the elephant genome, which is a project the size and scale of which will never be performed if we can’t even be fucked to properly care for their only surviving relative the elephants (or even care enough to do anything about global warming for that matter).
which is a project the size and scale of which will never be performed if we can’t even be fucked to properly care for their only surviving relative the elephants (or even care enough to do anything about global warming for that matter).
You know, I can't rule out billions of dollars being poured into resurrecting a species with nowhere to go. The human capacity for BS is truly enormous.
Getting a live mammoth, assuming we'd manage it would just get one sad and lonely animal which would be isolated from any other member of its species. For creatures that most likely had social structures as strong and important as those of elephants, it seems like you'd get a neurotic animal. It's not at all a given that it could integrate in an elephant group.
Research in the last 5ish years has shown that "any" cell can be induced to change into a stem cell by changing its environment and adding specific growth factors.
Edit:
I spent an hour looking for the research I was referring to. I found the papers and dissertation of the author who's talk I went to where the topic was discussed. Unfortunately, with a quick read I didn't find where the author talked about it, leading me to believe it was a discussion had at the end of their defense.
Although I couldn't find the research, [email protected] found what I was talking about (induced pluripotent stem cells)
Edit 2: As [email protected] points out the techniques are not currently at the level where induced stem cells can replace native stem cells.
This link is a relatively new development, but
induced pluripotent stem cells have been in use since around 2006 for research purposes. They can be made from a variety of cell types.
There's so many "buts" attached to that it's not even funny. They don't work as well as an actual stem cell, for one thing. That's why there's still plenty of demand for the embryonic kind.
No, a critter is more than just DNA. And most genome sequences aren't complete, and DNA is currently slow to print artificially, and the OG samples from anything dead in ambient conditions for more than days are badly degraded.
If we have DNA we could maybe do it one day, in principle. Especially for critters like mammoths with living relatives. This particular tech from the story isn't highly related, though.
Ethical research guidelines bar any attempts to culture human embryos beyond 14 days of gestation, so as usual it’s clickbait and not something that will be explored anytime soon.
As a general concept, sure. Actually making it happen in a petri dish can be detail-intensive and unreliable, which is why we haven't been doing it routinely for decades.
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