Community Status Updates

Unless an intelligent alien civilization is located very close to Earth, we will not discover intelligent aliens until we begin to explore our entire galaxy.

It's funny listening to how American Buddhists describe their practices. For example, they talk about their teacher like a lover; in fact, I was listening to a Buddhist podcast, and I got confused, because I thought they were describing a sexual "relationship", instead of a student-teacher one. And then it's also always funny to hear how they describe their "enlightenment". They try to tiptoe around saying that *they* were enlightened, instead describing how other p...

A problem with finding alien life is the speed of light. As the universe is really big, the light from exoplanets takes a long time to reach Earth, so we are seeing these exoplanets are they were in the past, not as they are, so if we ever find an exoplanet that almost certainly has alien life living on it, we must send a spacecraft to see if it does.

I might purchase Gartner's hype cycle for AI document I will make a account and check out the price

What other good AGI forums are there so I can watch AGI develop through all the new AGI news and discussions (dont worry I will leave politics out of a pure AGI/AI forum lol)

Suppose you are able to time travel easier than it actually is. Would you want to time travel and if so, when would you want to be? For myself, I would want to time travel and arrive in 2050 because I don't want to go too far into the future without seeing everything that has changed since I last saw in the past.

Will COVID lead to the extinction of America?

Two COVID articles: 1) How Likely is a Second wave? (https://lockdownsceptics.org/addressing-the-cv19-second-wave/); 2) 50,000 COVID-19 deaths and rising. How Britain failed to stop the second wave (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-britain-newwave/)

Ernest Cline's "Ready Player Two" is features brain-computer interfaces + VR as key technologies for the plot ("Ready Player One" reflected on VR): https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/11/24/ready-player-two-ernest-cline The idea of an "empathy machine" is, coincidentally, something I wrote about here: https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/topic/22959-my-thoughts-on-kernels-flow-brain-scan-device-event-and-the-future/?p=288144

Finding alien life will be easy as there are several places in our solar system where they could exist, like Mars, Europa, etc. Finding intelligent alien life will be much harder as we would basically have to find another Earth.

Part of me sometimes thinks Ray Kurzweil is transgender (without knowing it). I keep remembering clips of Ray talking about how he wants to live in a VR world as a woman called Ramona and does so in various video games such as second life ect. I believe he said his recent book about a girl was inspired by him thinking what he would be like as a young inventor girl. He talks about this stuff in movies as well. Here is a short clip showing what I mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EjcIwcRwwo

Socialism has been criticized as "slowing progress" and growth. That's maybe not necessarily true; but why is it a *bad* thing to slow growth? I think once tech progress advances even more, and physical labor becomes automated away, people will be wishing things *did* go a little slower. Beyond that, AI is going to trounce human intelligence in every field; even genetically-enhanced humans will not be able to compete -- and this will happen very soon.

And in 30 years, he'll say he knew the future world depicted in "A.I." was inevitable. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8992445/Jude-Law-says-warned-filming-Contagion-real-pandemic-inevitable.html

I think ODST is my favorite halo

Until we find intelligent aliens, I will remain uncertain if our fondness of killing each other is a trait that all intelligent life has.