Most important news: Kurzweil postponed his Singularity to 2054. I think this is the postponed postponement of the postponed postponement. Perhaps it will happen shortly after the experimental proof of the existence of the hydrino state and of antigravity in rotating superconductors...
The Millennium Project is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.
A bit late, but it is very interesting and instructive to listen to Gordon Moore's words "It almost doubled every year (...) so I said in the next 10 years it's going to continue to double every year, we are going to go from 16 components on a chip to 16 000. Pretty wild extrapolation!". This extrapolation (exponential with only 5 initial points) is now well-known and is one of the things that changed the World, it is pretty amazing how this "wild" futuristic vision came true.
NASA should revive its Institute for Advanced Concepts, a blue-skies idea mill that closed in 2007, says an expert panel – but it says the new incarnation should have its feet a little closer to the ground.
When you finally get bored asking "what is love?", ask: "what is money?"
There's of course a bit of propaganda, but one thing seems to be true - one day, the system *will* collapse.
"The dataset contains practically all actions of all
players of the MMOG Pardus since the game went online in
2004 [18]. Pardus is an open-ended online game with a world-
wide player base of currently more than 370,000 people. Play-
ers live in a virtual, futuristic universe in which they interact
with others in a multitude of ways to achieve their self-posed
goals [22]. Most players engage in various economic activities
typically with the (self-posed) goal to accumulate wealth and
status. Social and economical decisions of players are often
strongly influenced and driven by social factors such as friend-
ship, cooperation, and conflict."
quite impressive ...
"Pérez and his friends were astonished to see the unicorn herd. These creatures could be seen from the air without having to move too much to see them - they were so close they could touch their horns.
While examining these bizarre creatures the scientists discovered that the creatures also spoke some fairly regular English. Pérez stated, "We can see, for example, that they have a common 'language,' something like a dialect or dialectic."
"Feed it the first few paragraphs of a Guardian story about Brexit, and its output is plausible newspaper prose, replete with "quotes" from Jeremy Corbyn, mentions of the Irish border, and answers from the prime minister's spokesman."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=37&v=XMJ8VxgUzTc
"Feed it the opening line of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" - and the system recognises the vaguely futuristic tone and the novelistic style, and continues with:
"I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science."
(https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction)
It's really lucky that it was OpenAI who made that development and Elon Musk is so worried about AI. This way at least they try to assess the whole spectrum of abilities and applications of this model before releasing the full research to the public.