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Science Fiction

So you’ve got a problem: you’re sending people on a year-long voyage with no gravity, and people don’t work well without gravity.

Simple solution: you spin up your space ship and create your own gravity. Problem solved.

Except that people haven’t evolved to live in a small, spinning frame of reference, and when you raise your arms, only to have them go sideways instead, motion sickness is the least of your worries…

Watch the lab training astronauts for precisely that:

Day of Ascension by Adrian Tchaikovsky coverTLDR: In the bleak future of humanity, there is only eat, and perhaps, being eaten alive in this combat-heavy but well-written Warhammer 40k novel.

Triskellian is a tech priest, a machine-worshiping half-cyborg. He’s also the runt of the litter of tech-priesthood, with everyone from the Grand Fabricator to your junior acolyte looking down on his fascination with bio-engineering. And his only friends are a comic duo of misshapen tech-Igors.

Davien is a spy, the vanguard of a proletariat revolution that never comes. She’s also the last guardian of a sick brother, and a more-or-less fanatic follower of a cult of murderous, bio-engineered aliens. And if that isn’t bleak enough, the pair of them live on an Adeptus Mechanicus forge world, a hollowed out shell of poisoned planet where everything is either a smoking factory, an open pit mine, or a tenement crawling with filthy, starving, diseased humanity.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Warhammer 40k, which puts the “grim” in “grimdark”. (more…)

What happens if you take AI-bots, and train them in martial arts moves for 10 years? Some pretty cool stuff!

This is a reply to John Scalzi’s post on not using art AI:s.

I’m going to stick out my head to get it chopped off: I’m somewhat AI-positive myself.

Yes, that includes writing AI:s like GPT3, too, even though I’m a writer.

The reason for this is twofold:

First, I’m leaning against the lessons from the Bittorrent debacle in the late 90’s and early 00′. A lot of powerful people screaming how music piracy would destroy music, how no musician would be able to afford a living, and we’d all lose out.

What happened? (more…)

We’re in the middle of the fourth agricultural revolution – and this one is all about green tech, intelligent tech, and saving the world…

The world has lots of dangers, from pandemics, to nuclear war, to climate change. But is humanity doomed?

Probably not. Here’s why:

This is a cool little movie if you’re into AI, or neural networks, or just plain game theory.

Green blobs are prey. Red blobs are predators. Who will survive?

When will humans die out? And how many of us will there be before then?

Hard question. But Kurzgesagt has answers…

Laser pistols, laser turrets, turbo lasers, laser bombs – Science Fiction is in love with lasers. I get it. They’re cooooool. They’re Space Opera. But lasers in hard SF? Don’t make me laugh.

Lasers, as anything other than a close-range weapon, are completely useless.

Here’s why: (more…)

Banner: Movie clickAutonomous battlefield AI. Dystopian future. SciFi.

Already here.

Yes, it’s a controversial topic. AI could do a lot of good. It could also make precision killing very, very cheap.

After all, it takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a professional soldier. It takes a couple of minutes and maybe a thousand dollars or two to build an autonomous gun (once the platform is established).

Here’s a political movie about it, and if you’re interested, a behind the scenes look at Slaughterbots.