SF and Nonsense: A potpourri

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

A potpourri

Given the widespread reporting on Google's self-driving cars and Tesla's recent foray into autonomous driving (and with a dollop of wishful disregard for recent incidents of wireless automotive hacking), you may have fond thoughts of upgrading sometime soon to such vehicular luxury.

Look, Ma, no hands!

Maybe think twice. Navigation and lane following may require only (comparatively) simple "narrow AI" tasks, the associated algorithms reasonably robust and perhaps nearing maturity. Not so, the ethical dimension of driving.

For example, suppose that a deer just darted in front of my car. Do I purposefully endanger myself by ramming the deer? Or do I veer, and in the process endanger pedestrians or other drivers? For a machine to make such judgment calls -- on a case-by case basis, in the split-second during which such decisions must be made -- would seem to require mastering general (aka, human equivalent) AI. See: "Why self-driving cars remain more science fiction than future."

Sorry if that was a downer. Here, let me make it up to you with some out-of-this-world (literally) news.

Closest to home, the latest space bill passed by Congress (yes, Virginia, Congress can pass legislation) will enable American aerospace firms to get serious about asteroid mining. See "US Senate Passes Compromise Commercial Space Bill."

Coming soon?

Chances are that asteroid mining will first happen (if it happens) on near-Earth objects. So, moving out just slightly past those (hoped for) early asteroid visits, let's talk about Mars. A co-founder of the Planetary Society recently opined -- provocatively, but not implausibly -- that Mars might be as far as humans ever colonize: "Oh the Places We Won't Go: Humans Will Settle Mars, and Nowhere Else [Excerpt]." I can't prove Louis Friedman wrong, but I hope this prediction is an instance of Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

(To be fair, prediction is hard. For a charming digression/example, consider "Here’s How Artists in the Late 1800s Imagined Life in the Year 2000." I expect that forecasts of tech a hundred years hence will often turn out to be as quaint as were those steampunky visions.)

Not yet in the pic: V774101

Farther afield, "Astronomers discover new distant object in the solar system." That "object" appears to be a dwarf planet deep within the Kuiper Belt, far beyond any Solar System body previously known. V774101, hopefully soon to get a more mnemonic name, is about half the size (in diameter) of Pluto, and orbits at about three times Pluto's distance from the Sun.

U.S. Senate Passes Compromise Commercial Space Bill - See more at: http://spacenews.com/u-s-senate-passes-compromise-commercial-space-bill/#sthash.KHSEmeUn.dpuf

Speaking of Pluto, do you recall the brouhaha over whether it rated as a planet? In the era of discovering exoplanets more or less daily, have you ever wondered how sure astronomers can be that distantly sensed bodies -- few of which have been imaged as even a single pixel -- qualify as, well, planets? Me, too. I was pleased, therefore, to encounter "Scientists Redefine 'Planet' To Include Exoplanets - And It Works Beautifully."

Viewed from ~450 LY away!

Speaking of exoplanets, how's this for exciting: "Scientists caught a new planet forming for the first time ever."

And with that out-of-this-world news, I'm calling it a day/post.