Category Archives: Futurism

Hey! Pick that up!Take Out the Trash

After completing a seven-hour spacewalk to move an airlock from one part of the International Space Station to another, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin intentionally yeeted a sizeable bundle of discarded hardware drift away into space.

"Bye bye," said one of the cosmonauts after letting go of the bundle during a livestream of the spacewalk. "Just flies beautifully."

While that sound feel like the equivalent of throwing trash out a car window, experts say the bundle will harmlessly burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, the BBC reports effectively using the atmosphere as an enormous trash incinerator.

While it was an intentional act, experts have warned that errant pieces of astronaut equipment could add to our existing space junk problem.

It's not always intentional. For instance, NASA astronaut Ed White infamously lost a spare glove while venturing outside of the Gemini 4 spacecraft back in 1965. In 2017, astronauts Peggy Whitson and Shane Kimbrough lost a bag containing a debris shield during a spacewalk.

Still, burning up junk in the atmosphere has become a well-established convention for the space station. Crew members regularly load their trash into a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to have it and the garbage inside of it burn up on re-entry.

Other manmade objects orbiting the planet, including SpaceX's broadband-beaming internet satellites, are also designed to burn up in the atmosphere at the end of their lifespan.

Nonetheless, something about watching cosmonauts send a giant pack of discarded hardware spinning into the distance feels off.

After all, the Earth's orbit has become incredibly cluttered over the years as human space exploration efforts have increased.

The Department of Defense is tracking more than 23,000 pieces of debris larger than the size of a softball in the Earth's orbit. Experts estimate there are some 100 million pieces of debris roughly one millimeter in diameter littering the space around our planet.

While that's small, they can still do considerable damage. The ISS has had to make several maneuvers over the years to dodge incoming space junk.

Whether the station will ever find itself in the ironic position of encountering errant hardware left behind by its own spacewalking astronauts,though, remains to be seen.

More on space littering: Two Large Chunks of Space Debris Just Almost Collided in an Epic Disaster

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Cosmonauts Caught Littering Directly Into Space During Spacewalk - Futurism

"You wont know youre talking to anybody but an employee."Fries With That?

Wendy's is the latest fast food chain to get in on the AI craze. The company has announcedthat it will let an AI chatbot take customer orders at the drive-thru window.

TheWall Street Journal reports that the Ohio-based company will be introducing an AI chatbot, developed by Google's cloud-computing division, to one of its Columbus locations as it tests out whether the technology can help "streamline" its business.

While we don't know much about the chatbot yet, including how much it costs or what kind of interface it will use, a glib comment from Wendy's CEO Todd Penegor reveals the dystopian undertones of the whole endeavor.

"It will be very conversational," Penegor told the Journal. "You wont know youre talking to anybody but an employee."

As if that wasn't creepy enough, the timing of this announcement could also be telling given that in January, Wendy's announced that it is "restructuring" its business and that layoffs were possible.

Heading off concerns that Wendy's may seek to replace workers with AI, Penegor told the WSJ that AI is not going to replace workers but will instead help them do their jobs better. The argument echoes those being made by other CEOs across industries as they rush to cut costs while still investing big in AI.

This isn't the first time a fast-food joint has tried this kind of scheme.

Earlier this year,Insider reported on a viral trend where people filmed their hilariously bad interactions with the chatbots that have been taking orders at a select number of McDonald's drive-thrus. Some of these customers ended up getting bags of random packs of butter and ketchup without ever asking for them.

The takeaway: AIs may not be not ready to replace human labor at the drive-thru lane and could cause more chaos instead of actually supporting employees.

To get ahead of any stand-offs at the checkout, Wendy's is having an employee oversee interactions between customers and AI which might be a wise decision.

"You may think driving by and speaking into a drive-through is an easy problem for AI, but its actually one of the hardest," Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, who is working on the project, told the WSJ.

Nevertheless, as CEOs keep trying to find new ways to shoehorn AI tech into their products to appease investors, customers will likely have to interact with a chatbot in one way or another in the near future whether they like to or not.

More on machine labor:Self-Checkout Machines Ridiculed for Asking for Tips

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Wendy's Installing Drive-Thru AI Chatbot That Takes Your Order - Futurism

Starting in September 2024, youll be able to step foot inside exhibitions on cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, constellations, climate change and dozens of other topics at the intersection of art and science.

PST Art: Art & Science Collide will see more than 50 Southern California museums and galleries organizing exhibitions around that theme for the latest edition of the Gettys multi-museum initiative. In addition to $17 million in grants awarded (so far), the Getty also announced that it will permanently fund PST Art (formerly known as Pacific Standard time, now with amore easily Google-able name) for its return every five years.

Were going to make sure that we keep Southern California at the absolute forefront of global culture and art and continue to solidify our place as one of the significant global art capitals in the world, said Katherine E. Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, during a kickoff event on Tuesday.

If youre unfamiliar with PST Art, it last surfaced in 2017 with dozens of exhibitions about the crossroads between L.A. and Latin American and Latino art. Before that, 2011s inaugural Pacific Standard Time staged a coming-out party of sorts for the L.A. art world with survey of 20th-century local art.

The 2024 theme, Art & Science Collide, pulls an even wider breadth of museums into the fold thanks to its subject matter, with participation from science-minded institutions like JPL and the Griffith Observatory, and spans farther with outside-of-L.A. destinations like the Palm Springs Art Museum and the San Diego Museum of Art.

Here in L.A., youll be able to learn about the use of biological materials in sustainable design at Craft Contemporary and unearth the origins of ecofeminism at LAXART. The Broad will honor Joseph Beuyss 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) by planting actual trees across L.A. while the Hammer Museum, in a show about ecological and social forces impacting our literal ability to breathe, will commission a living garden created by South L.A.s gangsta gardener, Ron Finley. The California African American Museum plans to spotlight pioneering engineer George Washington Carvers lesser-known art career as well as his breakthroughs in plant-based pigments.

MOCA will debut a large-scale commission from Olafur Eliasson, the IcelandicDanish artist best known for his monumental pieces inspired by earths elements, while the Natural History Museum will restore a closed-for-decades diorama hall with immersive installations that explore conservation, colonialism and changing museum display techniques. Even the whats-even-real-here Museum of Jurassic Technology will join in on PST Art with a gallery makeover that dives into the geometric forms behind Muslim architecture in the Al-Andalus region.

Among the many announcementsyou can expect more than 60 exhibitions in totalthe most eye-catching one for pop culture fans comes from the Academy Museum. Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures will examine the impact of the near-future sci-fi subgenre with props, costumes, concept art and production materials from classic films like Akira, The Matrix and Blade Runner (during Tuesdays event, museum director Jacqueline Stewart spoke next to a beautiful, neon-hued piece of concept art from the latter). Rewinding a century or two, Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema will trace the evolution of the role of color starting with hand-tinted silent films from the late 1800s and up to the present day.

The Autry, too, will simultaneously turn its attention to the past and future. Indigenous Futures, or How to Survive and Thrive After the Apocalypse will feature more than 50 works from contemporary Indigenous artists that employ Futurism as a way of responding toand creating a way forward fromlasting colonial trauma. Cannupa Hanska Luger, whose sci-fi-fashion Future Ancestral Technologies series will be on display, spoke to the apocalyptic part of the exhibition title. Well, it was called 1492, said Luger, whos of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota heritage. In the biblical sense, the most radical apocalypse that everybody has ever written or theorized about or feared is a part of my discipline. Im like three generations into apocalypselook at what I found in my post-apocalyptic wardrobe, scavenging the leftovers of this violent history, he said, gesturing toward his own stylish outfit. Its nice. You can survive and thrive.

Some of the PST Art shows extend beyond gallery walls. As part of a project from Self-Help Graphics & Art, artist and scientist Maru Garca is cleaning up lead contamination in East and Southeast L.A. by creating mosaics and sculptures composed of zeolites, materials that can soak up lead like a sponge. So the sculptures are meant to disintegrate through time and then they will be able to heal the ground as they are dissolving, she explained.

Back inside a more traditional museum setting, the Getty itself will of course host its own exhibitions too, primarily with shows that focus on light: Medieval astrology, an 18th-century French microscope, early 1900s avant-garde photography, mid-20th-century experiments with lasers and contemporary holograms.

Meanwhile, LACMA will mount exhibits on the nature of color in Mesoamerican art and how digital tools have forever altered design, photography and film. In addition, the museum has teamed up with the Carnegie Observatories and the Griffith Observatory to show how different cultures and generations have attempted to explain the universes origins and meaning.

Theyre not the only museum looking to the stars for answers. Pasadena-based Fulcrum Arts will cross county lines for an exhibition at Chapman University that surveys how contemporary artists have translated the Pacific Rims many different vibrations, from seismic events to military operations.

Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific will also look at how Indigenous artists have passed along their traditional environmental knowledge. Caltech physicist Rana Adhikari, whose work factors into the exhibition, noted how the art of ordering the night skys stars into constellations over the past hundred thousand years has doubled as a means of archival science. Since weve been drawing things about the night sky for thousands of years, that means we are like the rings in a tree: We have a record [of the night sky] going on at the beginning [of humanity] and thats in our artworks, he said. And those artworks we can use to figure out how the night sky vibrated in response to cataclysmic things going on in the universe.

They alsothrough all of these PST Art exhibitspose a far more compelling way to absorb information that might otherwise seem overly academic to the average person. If you want to pass on a piece of information and its really, really important that nobody forgets, you better do something better than give someone a textbook, Adhikari continued. Youve got to make it a song or a painting or a film. And I think thats what humanity has done with recording our knowledge of the night sky.

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Exhibits on cyberpunk, Indigenous Futurism and holograms are ... - Time Out

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who's currently hard at work automating human labor at an incredible scale, is very confused as to why anyone might suggest that AI might replace human workers.

Fresh on the heels of Google's Wall Street-winning and heavily AI-focused I/O conference, Pichai made an appearance on The Verge'sDecoderpodcast. And editor-in-chief Nilay Patel wasted no time in hitting him with some tough questions aboutAI-abetted job losses.

"If you believe it's a platform shift, this might be the first platform shift that regulators understand because it's very obvious what kind of labor will be displaced," said Patel. "Lawyers, mostly, is what I gather, right? They can see, okay, a bunch of white-collar labor will go away, like a C-plus email about a transaction, entire floors of those people can be reduced."

Patel's question isn't exactly out of left field. Some industries have already seen job losses, while a recent Goldman-Sachs memo estimated that roughly 300 million jobs could feasibly be delegated to AI.

Pichai, however, didn't quite rise to the occasion.

"For 20 years of tech automation, people have predicted all kinds of jobs would go away," Pichai responded, adding that "movie theaters were supposed to end" as the result of tech innovation. That's an interesting choice on Pichai's behalf, considering that theater attendance has been steadily declining since 2002, not to mention thatHollywood is in the throes of a writer's strike in which AI has emerged as a major issue.

But when Patel pointed out that the film industry is in decline, the Google CEO almost seemed at a loss for words.

"There's always going to be... Unemployment over the last 20 years of tech automation hasn't fully... Twenty years ago, when people exactly predicted what tech automation would do, there are very specific pronouncements of entire job categories which would go away," said a seemingly flustered Pichai. "That hasn't fully played out."

"I don't know. I don't know," he added later. "So it's not exactly clear to me how all this plays out."

Elsewhere, Pichai claimed that "new professions [are] constantly getting created," though he conceded that "big societal labor market disruption" will occur and "governments need to be involved."

"But I think we shouldnt underestimate the beneficial side of some of these things, too," he added. "And its complicated, is maybe how I would say it."

To his credit, it's true that no one really knows what's on the other side of the brimming AI hype wave.

Still, it's hard not to find Pichai's answer to the automation question a little disappointing. Several industries including journalism, videogame design, and tech have already replaced human labor with automated tools, and some of those industries have even witnessed layoffs in the wake ofthe tech's rollout.

Right now, though, it very much looks like AI could have a radical impact on the labor market and Google will have played an instrumental role in that.

Look, we're not saying that Pichai needs to be particularly sympathetic about layoffs. But since this is one of the biggest questions that the public is currently asking about AI, and he's the CEO of a company that practically controls the internet, Pichai's around-the-bush response just falls short.

In fact, he just sounded deflated.

"There's a new technology," Pichai told the Verge. "It has a chance to bring unprecedented benefits. It has downsides. I think you are right."

"I think we need to think about it," he added. "We need to anticipate as early as we can."

More on AI and the job industry: IBM Replacing 7,800 Human Jobs with AI, Including Human Resources

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Google CEO Baffled by Suggestion That AI Will Take People's Jobs - Futurism

"But is it good for the next 200 years of the world that the ability to do so has been unleashed?"Long Shadow

One of the world's foremost financiers is sounding the alarm on artificial intelligence even comparing itto the invention of the atomic bomb.

During Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting over the weekend, CEO Warren Buffett paraphrased Albert Einstein's famous quote about the atomic bomb when saying that "with AI, it can change everything in the world, except how men think and behave, and that's a big step to take."

"We did invent for very, very good reason, the atom bomb," said Buffett, who has long been fearful of nuclear war. "It was enormously important that we did so. But is it good for the next 200 years of the world that the ability to do so has been unleashed?"

The titan of industry was full of quips during the meeting that's nicknamed the "Woodstock for Capitalists," including his reassurance, in response to a shareholder question, that "there won't be anything in AI that replaces" Ajit Jain, Berkshire Hathaway's insurance czar.

"It can do remarkable things," the 92-year-old oracle of Omaha said, "but it couldn't tell jokes."

All the same, Buffett said that he's nonetheless concerned about the seemingly endless things AI can or could soon be able to do.

"It can do all kinds of things," he said. "And when something can do all kinds of things, I get a little bit worried."

Buffett's righthand man Charlie Munger also had some of his own comments about AI during the meeting.

"I am personally skeptical of some of the hype that has gone into artificial intelligence," Berkshire Hathaway's 99-year-old vice chairman said. "I think old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well."

With AI being perhaps the hottest tech topic since the dot-com boom, more and more influential people are going to make their feelings about it known though until they put their money where their mouths are, it will just be more waxing prolific.

More on billionaire AI opinions:Bill Gates Says AI Will Be Teaching Kids to Read in 18 Months

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Warren Buffett Compares AI to the Atom Bomb - Futurism

Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's lawyers argued that 2016 recordings of him making big promises about the car's Autopilot software could have been deepfaked.

While the judge didn't buy the lawyers' arguments and ordered Musk to testify under oath, the stunt illustrates a broader trend. As generative AI-powered tools make it easier than ever before to synthesize the voices and faces of public figures, lawyers are trying to seize the opportunity to undermine the very foundation of a shared factual reality.

That has experts deeply worried, NPR reports.The phenomenon could end up influencing the beliefs of jurors and even the general population.

Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR that he's worried about a future in which evidence of "police violence, human rights violations, a politician saying something inappropriate or illegal" is dismissed because of the possibility that it was digitally faked.

"Suddenly there's no more reality," he said.

Musk's lawyers weren't the first to argue that deepfakes were being invoked in court. Two defendants who were present at the January 6 riot attempted to claim videos showing them at the Capitol could've been AI manipulated, according to NPR.

Insurrectionist Guy Reffitt argued that audiovisual evidence implicating him were deepfakes, arguments that werelater dismissed by a judge, with Reffitt being found guilty.

But that may not always be the case as US law is woefully ill equipped for this kind of argumentation.

"Unfortunately, the law does not provide a clear response to Reffitts lawyers reliance on deepfakes as a defense," Rebecca Delfino, associate dean at the Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, wrote in a February review paper. "But this much is clear the 'deepfake defense' is a new challenge to our legal systems adversarial process and truth-seeking function."

Delfino argues lawyers are using these objects to "exploit juror bias and skepticism about what is real," which is a troubling development considering the current guidance was "developed before the advent of deepfake technology."

The stakes are high. With the widespread proliferation of manipulated media, the public's trust slowly erodes as the lines between fact from fiction continue to blur.

Legal scholars Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron dubbed this paradox the "Liar's Dividend."

"As the public becomes more aware of the idea that video and audio can be convincingly faked, some will try to escape accountability for their actions by denouncing authentic video and audio as deepfakes," they wrote in a 2018 law review paper. "Put simply: a skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence."

Even more worryingly, that kind of loss of trust could be very difficult to regain.

"We really have to think about how do we inbuild some kind of security so that we can ensure that there is some degree of trust with all the digital content that we interact with on a day-to-day basis," Nina Schick, political scientist and technology consultant who wrote the book "Deepfakes," told CBS News last year.

"Because if we don't, then any idea of a shared reality or a shared objective reality is absolutely going to disappear," she added.

But given recent developments, the situation is likely to get worse before it can get better. AI tools are making it easier to generate deepfakes every year. These days, an AI can be trained on a relatively small stockpile of audiovisual data to convincingly make it look like somebody is making a statement they never made.

"Whats different is that everybody can do it now," Britt Paris, an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers University, told the New York Times earlier this year.

"Its not just people with sophisticated computational technology and fairly sophisticated computational know-how," Paris addd. "Instead, its a free app."

That means we're already seeing a flood of deepfakes making the rounds online. So far this year, we've seen deepfaked clips of president Joe Biden declaring a national draftand podcaster Joe Rogan promoting male enhancement products on TikTok go viral.

It's not just lawyers that are leading the charge in rewiring reality. Even political parties are jumping on the bandwagon.

Last month, the Republican National Committee released an attack ad aimed at Joe Biden's reelection campaign that heavily featured AI-generated images of Taiwan being invaded by China and borders that were being "overrun" by "illegals" all dreamed up by AI.

In the midst of all that destabilization, we should expect to see more lawyers reaching for the "deepfake defense" in the near future.

And while courts have successfully held the line so far, there's no guarantee that a judge won't eventually be swayed by a particularly convincing argument.

More on deepfakes: Grimes Says She'll Split Royalties With Anyone Who Deepfakes Her Voice Into a Song

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Reality Is Melting as Lawyers Claim Real Videos Are Deepfakes - Futurism

If you've lost a loved one, but still take a comforting scroll through their old tweets from time to time well, we might have some bad news.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk took to the social media platform yesterday to declare that Twitter was preparing to mass-eradicate inactive accounts from the platform, warning users beforehand that they might see their follower counts drop as a result.

"We're purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years," read Musk's announcement tweet, "so you will probably see follower count drop."

All fine and good, but, uh, one problem: culling inactive accounts doesn't just mean that random old businesses and expired bot accounts get removed from the site. It also means that the social media archives of dead people get removed from the platform and pulling the plug without much care means that some folks lose lost loved ones' digital archives.

In other words, the repercussions from this move go deeper than a drop in follower count.

As journalist Matt Binder pointed out, Musk's brash choice is so controversial that Twitter's previous leadership had made a similar announcement back in 2019, butwhen met with intense user pushback, chose to forgo such a purge.

Concerned once again that they would lose these treasured archives, users unsurprisingly quickly flocked to Musk's replies to decry the Twitter owner's announcement, urging the app owner to reconsider.

"This will include several people who are no more but their words and interactions still remain as a fond memory to their friends/family," added another. "Don't do this."

A notable name in the comments? Doom creator, VR pioneer, and chief Meta antagonist John Carmack, who took a different but compelling offense to the purge.

"I may be reading this incorrectly, but if you are actually deleting inactive accounts and all their historic tweets, I would STRONGLY urge you to reconsider," tweeted Carmack. "I still see people liking ten-year-old tweets I made, but the threads are already often fragmented with deleted or unavailable tweets. Don't make it worse!"

"Some may scoff at any allusion between Twitter and ancient libraries, but while the burning of the library of Alexandria was a tragedy, scrolls and books that were tossed in the trash just because nobody wanted to keep them are kind of worse," he added. "Save it all!"

Musk did respond to Carmack, assuaging the VR visionary that "the accounts will be archived." But Musk didn't give any details as to what that archival process might look like, and considering that Twitter breaks down more or less constantly these days, we're not totally convinced that he can soundly deliver that process.

To that end, it's also worth noting that postmortem archival processes an incredibly complex realm of our digital lives. Facebook has taken the time to hash out a pretty sound postmortem policy, but that's been a long time coming; Twitter's postmortem policy, on the other hand, is much less satisfactory. And if Musk really goes through with mass-deleting inactive users? That blows any such policy to smithereens, anyway.

In any case, if you and your family might be impacted by any inactive handle purge, you might want to take some preemptive screenshots.

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Elon Musk Says Twitter Will Purge the Accounts of Dead People - Futurism

For almost 15 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been blasting through the cosmos on a journey to study the farthestreaches of our solar system.

But now that it's gotten there, NASA has made a surprise announcement: that the mission's primary target is changing from the mysterious objects lurking in our system's Kuiper asteroid belt to studying the environment at the distant reaches of the Sun instead a necksnapping change that has upset the scientists in charge of the mission, Gizmodo reports.

"NASA spent almost a billion dollars to get this spacecraft to the Kuiper Belt," Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, told Gizmodo. "You spend a billion dollars to get a spacecraft all the way across the solar system and then divert it from its primary objective."

It all raises an interesting question: why change the primary objective? And why now?

The brewing controversy which, according to Stern, could result in a takeover by a different team next year highlights the difficulty of finding scientific consensus over a billion-dollar mission that has been going on for almost 15 years.

New Horizons' original objective was to study the worlds lurking at the edge of our solar system that remain largely mysterious to us.

"No spacecraft has ever explored the Kuiper Belt before and no spacecraft has plans yet to come again," Stern told Giz, warning that this could "be the end of any Kuiper Belt exploration by spacecraft for decades because it takes so long to get out there."

Stern's fellow team members are clearly on his side.

"Scientifically, I just dont feel that were at diminishing returns yet," Kelsi Singer, the missions project scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told Nature earlier this month.

New Horizons has already made some impressive contributions to our understanding of the solar system. The spacecraft has had a close look at Pluto's icy surface, revealing some of its secrets. It also performed a flyby of a 21-mile Kuiper Belt Object (KPO) called Arrokoth back in 2019.

But now, New Horizons has run out of KPO targets for a future flyby, and senior NASA scientists are having a harder time justifying future planetary science missions.

A NASA panel concluded in a review report last month that New Horizons wasn't likely to glean any useful data from further studying the KPOs "because the spacecraft lacks resources for long term, high cadence observations for light curves, which are necessary for their proposed planetary science goals/objectives."

In short, the agency is now looking to turn the mission into primarily a heliophysics mission.

"Because thats where the strength lies in the science that can be conducted from here forward," Lori Glaze, head of NASAs planetary science division, told Nature.

But to Stern, it's a needless redirection of a mission almost 15 years in the making.

"We do heliophysics observations every single day... and theres no reason to make it a battle between these two things, they coexist," he told Giz, explaining that the spacecraft can easily do both without affecting costs.

And Stern and his team, alongside other members of the science community, have been lobbying to try and have NASA change its mind on the mission redirect.

"Our team believes that its very short-sighted and premature to quit exploring the Kuiper Belt," he told Gizmodo, adding that "we think its unwise and a bad use of NASA money to move the mission away from Kuiper Belt exploration."

More on New Horizons: Scientists Stumped by "Ghostly Glow" Surrounding Our Solar System

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After 15 Year Journey, NASA Suddenly Redirecting Deep Space ... - Futurism

Concerned about the United States' brimming culture war? According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, you can go ahead and ignore it, actually and instead focus on building artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would be AI that exceeds human capabilities, perhaps by a very wide margin.

"Here is an alternative path for society: ignore the culture war. Ignore the attention war," Altman tweeted on Sunday, encouraging readers instead to "make safe AGI. Make fusion. Make people smarter and healthier. Make 20 other things of that magnitude."

"Start radical growth, inclusivity, and optimism," Altman continued, rounding out the optimistic proposition with a particularly Star Trek idea: "Expand throughout the universe."

Though it's a little vague, Altman's musing certainly seems to imply that successfully creating AGI would play a pivotal role in solving pretty much all of humanity's problems, from cracking the fusion code and solving the clean energy crisis to curing disease to "20 other things of that magnitude," whatever those 20 other things may be. (Altman had tweeted earlier in the day that "AI is the tech the world has always wanted," which seems to speak to such an outlook as well.)

And if that is what Altman's implying? That's some seriously next-level AI optimism indeed, this description of the future could arguably be called an AI utopia especially when you consider that Altman and his OpenAI staffers pretty openly admit that AGI could also destroy the world as we know it.

To that end, the OpenAI CEO often offers polarizing takes on whether AI may ultimately end the world or save it, telling The New York Times as recently as March that he believes AI will either destroy the world or make a ton of money.

Others in the CEO's circle seem to have taken note of Altman's oft-conflicting outlooks on AI's potential impact.

"In a single conversation," Kelly Sims, a board adviser to OpenAI and a partner at Thiel Capital, told the NYT in March,"[Altman] is both sides of the debate club."

And while optimism is generally a good thing, Altman's advice to his followers seems a bit oversimplified. Humanity's problems don't just hinge on whether we're paying attention to talk of the "woke mind virus," and considering that inflammatory language hurts real people in the real world, not everyone has the luxury of ignoring the brewing "culture war" that Altman's speaking to.

And on the AGI side, it's true that AGI could, in theory, give humans a helping hand in curing some of our ills. But such an AGI, and AGI as a concept altogether, is still entirely theoretical. Many experts doubt that such a system could ever be realized at all, and if it is, we haven't figured out how to make existing AIs safe and unbiased. Ensuring that a far more advanced AGI is benevolent is a tall and perhaps impossible task.

In any case, we're looking forward to seeing which side of the AI optimism bed Altman wakes up on tomorrow.

More on AI friendliness scale: Ex-OpenAI Safety Researcher Says Theres a 20% Chance of AI Apocalypse

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Sam Altman Says AGI Will Invent Fusion and Make the World ... - Futurism

This could explain a lot.Hardly Knew Ye

With the metaverse seemingly dead and buried, the question remains: why, exactly, did investors fall for it in the first place?

In a searing editorial for New York Magazine, tech columnist John Herrman offered a simple explanation not only for why Facebook (er, Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg went all-in on his capital-M Metaverse, but also why so many execs and investors seemed to follow suit.

The answer, in short, lies in the world-changing COVID-19 pandemic and specifically, in the executive-level backlash to employees seeming to be empowered by their ability to work from home, which was, as the virus raged pre-vaccine, the only way to keep the world going.

"Empty offices and newlyempoweredemployees drove some tech executivesout of their minds, and the Metaverse promised a solution, or at least functioned as a response," the columnist wrote. "It represented an intoxicating fantasy, just not one that most of us would recognize or, if we did, one that we might recognize as sort of a nightmare."

We are now living, of course, in another executive fantasy: the rise of artificial intelligence, which freaks out everyone but offers tech execs "an endless supply of cheap and obedient labor and a chance to take ownership of the means, of, well, everything," Herrman wrote.

While AI fever dreams do appear to have killed the metaverse, they are, at least, more substantial than the farcical virtual reality worlds into which Zuckerberg and others have sunk so many billions of dollars.

"From one executive to an audience of other executives, the metaverse at least Zucks take on it offered a vision of the future in which everything was different but also pretty much the same: a disruptive technology that maintained the basic order of things, and where you once again knew what your employees were up to, even if they were just avatars," the columnist excoriated.

The metaverse differed from other baldly exec-serving schemes in just how little, even in 2021, it seemed to provide to "anyonebut executives."

"It felt uncanny and hollow, and when people stopped talking about it so much, nobody who wasnt directly invested seemed to care," Herrman wrote. "Its true that Silicon Valley has shifted its attention to AI, but what really killed the metaverse was workers returning to the office."

COVID killed physical offices for some time, but our touch-and-go return to a semblance of normalcy has slowly been putting an end to remote work and so, too, to the dream of the metaverse.

More on the metaverse: Virtual Metaverse Real Estate Is Completely in the Toilet

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There's an Interesting Theory About Why Zuckerberg Wasted ... - Futurism