Lifeboat Foundation

In the first episode of the new season of “Star Trek: Picard,” Raffi (Michelle Hurd), while working for a mysterious, faceless contact within Starfleet, is attempting to locate dangerous stolen technology that can be used as a massively destructive weapon. Raffi catches wind of where the weapon will be used but arrives moments too late to stop it. She watches in horror as the Starfleet recruitment building — the entire massive structure — is sucked into a mysterious portal that is instantaneously formed below it. An exit portal then appears about a mile up and a few miles over, and the building crashes to the ground, crushing its own next-door neighbors.

The practical implications for portal technology will, of course, be immediately evident to anyone who has ever played the 2007 video game “Portal.” That game was predicated on making magical doorways through which the player would pass in order to surmount increasingly complex physics and maze puzzles. If one could form an entrance portal in front of them, and then an exit portal on a platform above, one could easily traverse the world.

Generally speaking, the relationship “Star Trek” has with technology is very positive. Starships allow people to travel the cosmos, replicators have essentially ended hunger, and transporters allow people to visit alien worlds. But often, when new technologies are introduced into “Star Trek,” ethical concerns are immediately raised. What, for instance, is a building-size portal-maker really for besides transporting entire buildings a mile into the air and then dropping them? Characters speak often about how certain machines could handily be weaponized.

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While AI has been a part of game development for years, generative AI’s ability to create assets for games instantly is a relatively new component. This new technology has the capacity to serve as a tool for game developers, especially those with smaller teams — and, according to the creators of Story Machine, it already is.

Continue reading “Story Machine demonstrates how AI is helping game development” »

My music score for Rotwang’s robot in the silent German expressionist film METROPOLIS by Fritz Lang. 1927.

This film had a major influence on me, but that would come later. When I saw it for the first time I was 9 years old. Little did I know, this scene in particular would haunt me to this day.

Continue reading “Rotwang’s Creation: a tribute to Metropolis” »

One of the often-overlooked parts of movie-making is how Hollywood blockbusters are distributed worldwide. While subtitles are common, dubbed audiences more widely embrace films to the point that certain native stars get associated with English-speaking performers. Variety reports that the Italian dubbing workers and voice actors are going on strike over the studios laying the groundwork to replace them with AI dubbing.

Italian voice actors and dubbing workers have been on strike since February 21st and will continue for at least another week. The complaints from the workers sound very similar to those of Marvel’s VFX contractors: low wages, long hours, and an unsustainable pace of work. Now that AI programs are becoming widely available and more cost-efficient than human work, the union worries dubbing will be fully overtaken by machines.

Rodolfo Bianchi, head of Italy’s dubbing director’s organization ADID, explained, “We are forced to sign contracts in which we give away the rights to the use of our voice, this also involves the use of our voice for artificial intelligence purposes.” AI is already capable of realistic deep fakes, including appropriating celebrity voices, and with how far the technology has come in a relatively short period, Bianchi’s fears are well-founded. While a computer program would struggle to match the tone and tenor of a voice during a dramatic performance, it can be done, and it can be done cheaply.

It’s called 2dumb2destroy, and it lives up to its name.

Acting stupid can be fun. So, some developers produced a goofy little chatbot called “2dumb2destroy.” The system is trained on entertaining datasets that emerge from crap like all seven “Police Academy” movies, quotes and lines from the Naked Gun films, Pauly Shore features, the sayings of Homer Simpson, Ralph Wiggum quotes, and a lot more useless but fun stuff.

It was created by the developer of OpenAI’s GPT-3, Craig Shervin and Steve Nass, who met while working at a New York advertising agency.

Continue reading “New ‘dumb’ AI chatbot offers goofy fun replies you can’t ignore” »

In a stunning turn of events, a top-ranking AI system was soundly defeated by a human player in the strategic board game Go. This marks a significant reversal of the 2016 victory by the computer, which was widely celebrated as a landmark achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The victorious player, Kellin Pelrine, holds a rank just below the top amateur level and was able to exploit a previously unidentified vulnerability in the AI system that had been detected by another computer. The games were played without any direct computer assistance, and Pelrine emerged as the clear winner by winning 14 out of 15 games.

Financial Times mentioned that this victory, which has not been previously disclosed, brought to light a flaw in the top Go computer programs that is common to many of today’s prevalent AI systems, including San Francisco-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. The strategy used to win the Go match was proposed by a computer program that investigated the AI systems to discover any weaknesses. Pelrine, who executed the proposed plan with merciless precision, was able to use the tactics to put the human player back on top of the Go board.

LCARS is the fictional computer operating system used by Starfleet starships in several Star Trek TV shows and films. The system is currently displayed in the animated comedy Trek series Lower Decks. Now, one intrepid fan has adapted the Lower Decks version of LCARS into a “crazy fan project:” Project RITOS.

RITOS is a webpage that recreates the LCARS system. It’s a fun little site to poke around on. But, since this is just a recreation, there’s no actual functionality you can incorporate onto your computer. As the RITOS About page states, you just “point & click & watch. There are no goals nor wrong thing to do here. It’s just a mindless site.”

It may be mindless, but it’s also a faithful recreation of the LCARS system as depicted not just in Star Trek: Lower Decks but also in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Users can click around into various displays that show crew quarters, a ship map of the Cerritos (the Federation starship in Lower Decks), JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) images, and a Sick Bay screen. There are plenty of fun things to click on and little easter eggs to uncover for dedicated Trek fans.

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) — U.S. diplomatic communications with China remain open after the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon this month, but contact between the countries’ militaries “unfortunately” remains shut down, the White House said on Friday.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also said it was not the “right time” for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to travel to China after he postponed a Feb. 5–6 trip over the balloon episode, but President Joe Biden wanted to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping when it was “appropriate.”

Kirby told a White House news briefing that U.S. and Chinese diplomats can still communicate despite tensions over the balloon incident.

A video about nuclear weapons. The song is “Electric Funeral” by the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath off their 1970 album Paranoid, an extremely influential album for metal and rock music.