My random thoughts

Anything that doesn't quite fit in elsewhere...
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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As narrow AIs get better, there will be more and more claims that some lab has built an AGI, only for those claims to turn out wrong upon further investigation. The repeated false alarms might lead the general public to start ignoring all claims, until it finally turns out that, "Yes, the one that Lab X announced three months ago was actually it."

Imagine the irony of shrugging off such a momentous event in history.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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If a passenger plane is going down, I wonder if it would be safer to posthumans to jump out in midair rather than stay in their seats and hope to survive a crash-landing. Every posthuman would have the same skills as a veteran parachutist and wingsuiter, so they would be able to steer themselves during the fall and land their bodies in the best possible positions. There have been many cases of people surviving falls from high altitudes.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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Machine soldiers would have less need for fancy accessories that humans add to their guns because the machines would have better vision and would be naturally better shots. Scopes, flashlights, and laser sights might totally disappear, or at least be shrunk down. The need for fully automatic fire might also disappear since machines would be so accurate with single shots that every shot would hit the target. Moreover, since machines would be ambidextrous and able to memorize complex operations, their weapons wouldn't need features that made them suited for right- and left-handed shooters, nor would they need to be easy to field strip and reassemble.

As a result, machine soldiers would have guns that were cheaper and simpler than human guns, and humans would find machine solders' guns to be uncomfortable and suboptimal for their own use.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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In the far future, advanced genetic technology will let us create new species that can reproduce and survive in the wild. Fantastical beings that are now only found in fiction, like the xenomorphs from the Alien movies, or dragons from old stories, could be made real.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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I just watched Top Gun: Maverick. These fighter pilot movies will seem so weird once machines are flying the best planes. And imagine that whole macho, competitive, cocky fighter pilot culture disappearing. What will those people do with themselves?
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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Machines could send secret messages to each other by varying their pronunciations of spoken words in ways that were imperceptible to listening humans, but perceivable to each other. By very slightly changing the pitch of a word, the speed at which it is spoken, or the emphasis on one syllable vs. another, a spoken sentence could actually contain a secret meaning different from its literal meaning.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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I just started playing the game Death Stranding. It's a weird game, and one of the weird elements is the existence of "Bridge Babies," which are fetuses floating in artificial wombs the sizes of basketballs. Your player can carry around one of these and, using a port on the outside of the womb, plug it into your cybernetic outfit so that the fetus' mind can interface with your sensors.

https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Bridge_baby
https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Bridge_baby_pod

This brings to mind a possible future form adult humans will have. Each person will exist as a brain in a jar. The inside of the jar will have wires connecting to hundreds of thousands of different spots in the brain. The jar will also have an integral life support module with its own battery pack. That module's purpose will be to provide nourishment, temperature regulation, immune protection and other things needed to keep the organ alive. The outside of the jar will have ports that data cables could be plugged into.

A jar could have any variety of devices plugged into it, giving the brain access to different bodies, information, and modes of existence. You could keep your jar in a server room all the time, plugged into the internet so you could remotely control bodies from the other side of the planet if you wanted. Or, you could load your jar into one body of your choice and walk around like that. Switching bodies would be little different from changing clothes outfits today.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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I just watched Unbreakable for the first time since it was in theaters (gives you a sense of how much I liked it). In it, Bruce Willis plays an ordinary man who discovers he is a superhero. Some of his key attributes are:

1) Super strength (can lift cars off of trapped people)
2) Super durable body (can survive a train wreck without a scratch)
3) Super immune system (never gets ill)

Those are all qualities that some robots and posthumans will have in the future. It would make for a good segment in a sci-fi film for some kind of accident to occur that kills or severely injures most or all of the human passengers, leaving their robot servants and companions to rescue them.

Likewise, if the zombie apocalypse happened far enough in the future, robots would be unaffected. That would put an interesting twist on the genre.
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Re: My random thoughts

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I just watched the movie Signs, courtesy of YouTube making it free, and again made some connections to futurism. The aliens' ability to jump from the ground to a roof overhang 10 feet up is proof of their inhuman strength. Also, one of the aliens jumps off the roof, lands on the ground, and without suffering apparent injury or breaking its stride, runs into a cornfield, demonstrating a more durable body than humans. These feats will be common for robots and posthumans.

Think of how things would be different for you if you were strong enough and coordinated enough to jump 10 feet into the air, to scramble up or down the side of a building, tree or cliff with the skill of a human expert, and to survive falls from great heights.


The Signs aliens also had sharp claws on their fingers, and "stingers" that could pop out of their wrists to squirt poison gas into the faces of captured humans. A major downside of human anatomy is our lack of natural weapons, but I believe this will not be a problem in the far future, again thanks to robots and posthumans being able to design and change their own bodies. If Signs were set in 2202 instead of 2002, the invading aliens would have encountered much tougher opponents on Earth (another sci-fi film idea?).

The aliens in the film also had chameleon skin, which we could also incorporate into the bodies of intelligent life forms in the future. However, I don't see how it would be useful for normal life, and instead see it as a feature people will use for artistic expression, crime, or tactical missions.
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Re: My random thoughts

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FIVR, AI-generated personal realities, and hallucinogenic drugs will be the cures for boredom on long space missions.
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