Russian Cosmism

Russian cosmism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, and again, at the beginning of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a burst of scientific investigation into interplanetary travel, largely driven by fiction writers such as Jules Verne and Herbert Wells as well as philosophical movements like the Russian cosmism.

Cosmism entailed a broad theory of natural philosophy, combining elements of religion and ethics with a history and philosophy of the origin, evolution, and future existence of the cosmos and humankind. It combined elements from both Eastern and Western philosophic traditions as well as from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Cosmism was one of the influences on Proletkult, and after the October Revolution, the term came to be applied to "...the poetry of such writers as Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov...: emotional paeans to physical labor, machines, and the collective of industrial workers ... organized around the image of the universal 'Proletarian', who strides forth from the earth to conquer planets and stars."  This form of cosmism, along with the writings of Nikolai Fyodorov, was a strong influence on Andrei Platonov.

Many ideas of the Russian cosmists were later developed by those in the transhumanist movement.  Victor Skumin argues that the Culture of Health will play an important role in the creation of a human spiritual society into the Solar System.

The Culture of Health is the basic science about Spiritual Humanity. It studies the perspectives of harmonious development of "Spiritual man" and "Spiritual ethnos" as a conscious creator of the State of Light into the territory of the Solar System" (by Skumin).

A Question of Ethics

(CNN Business)In September, Timnit Gebru, then co-leader of the ethical AI team at Google, sent a private message on Twitter to Emily Bender, a computational linguistics professor at the University of Washington.

"Hi Emily, I'm wondering if you've written something regarding ethical considerations of large language models or something you could recommend from others?" she asked, referring to a buzzy kind of artificial intelligence software trained on text from an enormous number of webpages.

Google reshuffles AI team leadership after researcher's controversial departure
The question may sound unassuming but it touched on something central to the future of Google's foundational product: search. This kind of AI has become increasingly capable and popular in the last couple years, driven largely by language models from Google and research lab OpenAI. Such AI can generate text, mimicking everything from news articles and recipes to poetry, and it has quickly become key to Google Search, which the company said responds to trillions of queries each year. In late 2019, the company started relying on such AI to help answer one in 10 English-language queries from US users; nearly a year later, the company said it was handling nearly all English queries and is also being used to answer queries in dozens of other languages.

"Sorry, I haven't!" Bender quickly replied to Gebru, according to messages viewed by CNN Business. But Bender, who at the time mostly knew Gebru from her presence on Twitter, was intrigued by the question. Within minutes she fired back several ideas about the ethical implications of such state-of-the-art AI models, including the "Carbon cost of creating the damn things" and "AI hype/people claiming it's understanding when it isn't," and cited some relevant academic papers.

Gebru, a prominent Black woman in AI — a field that's largely White and male — is known for her research into bias and inequality in AI. It's a relatively new area of study that explores how the technology, which is made by humans, soaks up our biases. The research scientist is also cofounder of Black in AI, a group focused on getting more Black people into the field. She responded to Bender that she was trying to get Google to consider the ethical implications of large language models.

Bender suggested co-authoring an academic paper looking at these AI models and related ethical pitfalls. Within two days, Bender sent Gebru an outline for a paper. A month later, the women had written that paper (helped by other coauthors, including Gebru's co-team leader at Google, Margaret Mitchell) and submitted it to the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, or FAccT. 

The paper's title was "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" and it included a tiny parrot emoji after the question mark. (The phrase "stochastic parrots" refers to the idea that these enormous AI models are pulling together words without truly understanding what they mean, similar to how a parrot learns to repeat things it hears.)          READ MORE

ETHICS: Deepfakes

Falsified videos created by AI—in particular, by deep neural networks (DNNs)—are a recent twist to the disconcerting problem of online disinformation. Although fabrication and manipulation of digital images and videos are not new, the rapid development of AI technology in recent years has made the process to create convincing fake videos much easier and faster. AI generated fake videos first caught the public's attention in late 2017, when a Reddit account with the name Deepfakes posted pornographic videos generated with a DNN-based face-swapping algorithm. Subsequently, the term deepfake has been used more broadly to refer to all types of AI-generated impersonating videos.

While there are interesting and creative applications of deepfakes, they are also likely to be weaponized. We were among the early responders to this phenomenon, and developed the first deepfake detection method based on the lack of realistic eye-blinking in the early generations of deepfake videos in early 2018. Subsequently, there is a surge of interest in developing deepfake detection methods.

A climax of these efforts is this year’s Deepfake Detection Challenge. Overall, the winning solutions are a tour de force of advanced DNNs (an average precision of 82.56 percent by the top performer). These provide us effective tools to expose deepfakes that are automated and mass-produced by AI algorithms. However, we need to be cautious in reading these results. Although the organizers have made their best effort to simulate situations where deepfake videos are deployed in real life, there is still a significant discrepancy between the performance on the evaluation data set and a more real data set; when tested on unseen videos, the top performer’s accuracy reduced to 65.18 percent.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE BY SIWEI LYU

Stairway to Enlightenment

ENLIGHTENMENT is...

the state of having knowledge or understanding

the act of giving someone knowledge or understanding

a movement of the 18th century that stressed the belief that science and logic give people more knowledge and understanding than tradition and religion

ENLIGHTENMENT... 

was centered around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

ENLIGHTENMENT...

happens when one reaches the state of having attained spiritual knowledge about the true nature of our body and soul and all of divinity. Everyone struggles to experience, enjoy and embody what awakens your heart and soul.

ENLIGHTENMENT...
is difficult only because we are not willing to let go of the way we currently express consciousness. Yet to those who have attained enlightenment, it is the most natural way of being. Some enlightened beings express genuine wonder why would anybody choose to live any other way.

ENLIGHTENMENT...
happens when people accept themselves just the way they are. 

happens by being aware of any self critical thoughts and then deciding that they are not true. 

There is a 

THREEFOLD PATH to ENLIGHTENMENT:

First --  there is ethics which is the avoidance of non-virtuous deeds

Second --  there is concentrations which involves controlling one's mind

Third --  there is wisdom which pertains to insight into the nature of reality

These three revolve around:

CORRECT...

1. action
2. speech
3. livelihood
4. effort
5. mindfulness
6. concentration
7. view
8. intention

SOUNDS SIMPLE...  DOESN'T IT?

Hump Day

Here in the Valley, social distancing is not really being followed when people are out and about, and every time my wife needs to go out for groceries, like Walmart, she notices that no one is wearing face masks...

Of course, there is less than 25 people in our area that have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and only 7/8 deaths so far, giving rise to a lack of concern among the local residents here; but, to me that is a stupid way to behave.

People like me, who have a low or no immunity, MUST follow the social distancing guidelines or else face a high probability that we will catch COVID-19 and possibly die.

As always, I spend most of the morning watching FOX News...  and, the reason why I watch this cable channel is because I have previously watched:  CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC and what I have discovered is that ALL OF THESE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS distort the truth against President Trump and/or they simply do not broadcast those stories that FAVORS President Trump...

Why is this important to me?

FIRST AND FOREMOST, I did not vote for candidate Donald Trump.

Second, I am a Conservative Liberal and as a result am a SEEKER OF THE TRUTH...  regardless of whether the truth agrees with my personal political beliefs or not.

THIRD and equally as important as my FIRST AND FOREMOST is the fact that no matter what President Trump does or says, the Democrats and mainstream media are against him.  This is a fundamental problem for our DEMOCRACY, not to mention the concept that it is ethically wrong, morally wrong, and a complete loss of integrity which is the heart and soul of the American Mindset in my opinion.

If this philosophy continues, we will most certainly lose our FREEDOM...