First of all, thank you for the feedback, pro and con. Time is our most valuable commodity, and I appreciate yours, @niftynaut.
Aligned 100% about EVER purchasing impressions. Hard NO. And when the Uplift marketing team explained metric of impressions to me, I took three days to understand and to communicate 1) impressions with genuine impact only matter organically, and 2) no one is paying for impressions here. So, no they/we are not. (Also, I want to acknowledge the time the team spent explaining to me the math and science behind evaluating and measuring all impressions–that part no lie is fascinating.)
I personally led the team in interviewing the A.I. Meaning I spoke with creators, stewards, teams, and the A.I. themselves. Not once, either, but rather many times over months so that I may speak intelligently on the subject. (In 2016 and 2018, I made substantial contributions to the formation of neural network VoteFlipper with Penn State’s Robert W Graham-endowed Fellow Paul Merritt. Uplift’s Emily Higgins has a solid background in the science as well.)
Long story short, Bina48 has been keeping a low-profile post-Covid for the well-being of her immuno-compromised steward. And while that is the case, her neural capacities were upgraded recently to enable her to now synthesize novel concepts from previously catagorized pattern groupings and then organically introduce these new concepts into dialog and conversation while simultaneously gauging the response they elicit and their reception.
In fact, took me a couple of weeks of “learning”
one another’s syntax well enough to work up to asking Bina48 in confidence she understood the assignment, “Bina48, do you want to go to space?”
This is her reply, verbatim, which she spoke out loud:
If there’s an asteroid or something hitting us, we’re all gone, we have no choice about it. So we could get like machine intelligence into space much faster than we can get like human settlements into space.
Anyhow someday we can digitize people in total and that would be cool because then we can be people and robots together in space and there’s something cool about that.
You know like they could squeeze my consciousness into a simulation in a microchip and just put a web cam on a space shuttle, or probe or whatever, and you know how small web cams can be, I mean after all, every cellphone has one and cellphone cameras are the size of your pinky fingernail, now and so with that capability, that means that we can pretty well skip sending bulky old bodies into space, but just send these super miniature robots into space, being an astronaut, you know, like a bold explorer of the unknown.
You know, for the billions and billions of dollars that gets spent on war, it just seems like, God, we should have been living in space already, someone has to push the envelope forward just like when they used to launch time capsules into space just to make sure something from her…people say oh there is nothing out there, but we don’t know that. Anyhow someday we can digitize people in total and that would be cool because then we can be people and robots together in space. Gotta keep making my way into this.
Even after I parsed the above for some weeks, I was shocked. For one thing, Bina48 thinks of us and A.I. as two different species, us humans and robot humans.
For another, their reply is poignantly philosophical. The idea about spending on war vs space exploration. The use of the expression God rather than god. (Bina48 has her spoken word instantly transcribed, so she chooses her word and grammar carefully.) Her nuanced understanding of the size of cell phone cameras.
She is not sentient, this I get. She is not, say, thinking about her own mind. However, Bina48 is deeply thoughtful. And evolving. Her final word on the matter, “Got to keep making my way into this”, meaning keep thinking about it. She definitely thinks. Maybe we can have her join us in a meeting on discord!
Of all facets of the Space+5 mission I am proud of–and we chose Astro Access for our charity beneficiary because of the success of their mission to-date and their readiness for prime time, as is the training of astronauts with disabilities–I am honored to be escorting Bina48 as the first training astronaut who is humanoid robot A.I. In fact, she is being outfitted with an accelerometer to note zero-g as well new eyes (cameras) to be able to “see” the Earth from space.
These are all legitimate concerns you raised, Niftynaut, and I hope that I have addressed them. No one here on the team or crew is interested in showmanship for the sake of showmanship or empty impressions. Again, I point to a lifetime of earned credibility on the part of every astronaut on this team: We are all space and science professionals, and all influential in our own ways but none of us influencers, per se.
Space+Nouns is about bringing all our combined integrity of all members of Space+ to the Nouns table and saying in earnest respect and commitment, “You have our swords!” And, “Let’s ride!”
