Is AI about to take off fast?
Also, new writings about plasma and zero point metafysiks.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please mark your calendar for the Terasem Colloquium on July 20. You are invited!
The Colloquium will explore diverse points of view on the topic of space expansion in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, it will explore answers to the question:
Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?
Michelle Hanlon, Moti Mizrahi, Frank Tipler, Stefano Vaj, Frank White, and Robert Zubrin have confirmed that they’ll give talks at the Colloquium.
Google DeepMind has announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) agent called AlphaEvolve. It helps solve complex problems in math and computing.
Experts praise AlphaEvolve as a major step. It’s the first system using general-purpose AI to make new discoveries. Google has already deployed AlphaEvolve across its data centers, chip designs, and AI training systems.
Observers enthusiastically comment that AlphaEvolve shows signs of being self-improving AI. AlphaEvolve “demonstrates an intriguing evolution in AI itself,” notes VentureBeat, “starting within the digital confines of Google’s servers, optimizing the very hardware and software that gives it life.”
Already in the 1960s Irving John Good said:
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”
Good’s seminal paper “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” is in “Advances in Computers, Vol. 6” (1965), edited by Franz Alt and Morris Rubinoff.
It seems plausible that AI technology will really take off, and very fast, when AI becomes able to improve itself. AlphaEvolve seems an interesting step in this direction.
This image is in one of my last articles in BLAXXKY (see below), but now that I think of it the same image can illustrate all the things that I’m saying here. I love it and may use it as profile picture somewhere.
My last article in BLAXXKY, “Zero point science and metafysiks. Zero point science could explain weird things including UAPs, produce unlimited energy, take us to the stars, and give us spiritual insights,” begins with:
I praise Joe Rogan for bringing the work of great minds, working at the frontiers of highly imaginative science and technology, to the attention of the public. In “Irrational mechanics,” I say that science “must descend from its ivory tower and join us in the street. This book is a manifesto for street science.” Joe Rogan’s work is a great example of street science.
I’ve been watching two recent episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast.
One episode is a conversation with physicist and space engineer Harold “Sonny” White. One often hears White’s name in connection with “crazy” space propulsion ideas like the Alcubierre warp drive or the much maligned EmDrive. White also researches creative ways to extract energy from the “zero point field” of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum.
He has founded a company that wants to build nanotechnology able to leverage the Casimir effect to extract zero point energy from the quantum vacuum. The Casimir effect was first theorized by physicist Hendrik Casimir and then confirmed in the laboratory. When two parallel metal plates are very close to each other in the vacuum, there is a force that pulls them closer. White explains that this force comes from fluctuating fields in the quantum vacuum.
For a technical presentation of all these things, see for example the last chapter of “Future Spacecraft Propulsion Systems and Integration.”
Another episode is a conversation with maverick physicist Hal Puthoff, renowned (or maligned) for his work in unconventional scientific areas, including remote viewing and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Puthoff has also been involved (bigtime) in the physics of the zero point field…
Subscribers to BLAXXKY can read the rest.
My previous article in BLAXXKY, “Strange alien beings in the universe and near us. Living stars and superintelligent plasma life,” begins with:
In a science fiction novel, Robert Forward described exotic life forms based on nuclear interactions, which could exist in high energy environments such as neutron stars. In another science fiction novel, Fred Hoyle described a living, superintelligent and extremely powerful cloud of gas and plasma. Robert Freitas and Clément Vidal speculate that even more exotic life based on gravitational fields, the fabric of apparently empty space, could exist around or inside black holes. I mentioned these and other pictures of very strange aliens in my books.
I suspect that really advanced aliens could be superintelligent balls of quantum fields or whatever sub-quantum weirdness comes underneath quantum fields. If so, there’s no good mental picture of them that we can form at this moment. But there are mental pictures of strange aliens that are much closer to home in the sense that they are based on more or less understood physics - and perhaps, as we’ll see, also much closer to home in a literal sense.
Perhaps the stars are living entities. Perhaps plasmas are intelligent beings. Perhaps there are superintelligent cosmic clouds of plasma near the Earth, which could be related to all sorts of paranormal phenomena…
Subscribers to BLAXXKY can read the rest.
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says in her last post: “We would love it if you became a paid subscriber to accelerate independent research into the weird.” Please note that yours truly doesn’t pocket even one cent of BLAXXKY subscription money, all goes to fund the project.
Stella promises that one day I'll make a lot of money from BLAXXKY subscriptions. I just told her that day I PROMISE to eat a whole Hawaiian pizza with pineapple (to a Neapolitan like me this is the greatest blasphemy and an insult to the holy grace of the cosmic operating system). I look forward to eating that Hawaiian pizza!
Street science may have a place. The scientific method as another method of thought. Thinking scientifically is not the problem with science and neither is trusting intuition. The problem is thinking that either kind of thought is complete or infallible. There has to be some point where we trust that the scientists who are studying something and devoting thousands of hours to it need to be given some credit for that work. Having somebody pontificate from their recliner chair (or "podcast" expertise) about how much science gets wrong is not going to replace science. Let's use podcasts for what they are meant to be.