China's New Maid Robot is Gonna Change The Red Light Industry (Video - 22mn)

   The videos below require an open mind but under the form of a documentary, they describe quite accurately what may happen much sooner than most people realize: The arrival of realistic robots in our lives.      

   It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to understand that the first affordable, realistic machines will come from China and more importantly what their main role will be, what the video calls euphemistically: "Night Mode!"  

   The value of the video, more than seeing the pretty Chinese actresses is to make you think: What if? Would you buy one to... cook your dinner?  

   The second important aspect is the business model presented. Clearly these doll-robots will be expensive. How can they be sold to make a profit? The idea of selling the dolls at a loss with countless features you must pay for is a perfect example of advance gamification where you must buy features, gifts and improvements to enjoy all the functionality of the doll. The system already works for games quite convincingly. The extension of the idea to dolls looks fairly obvious.   

   What is not discussed in these videos is the impact of such robots on society. It would be so profound that it is difficult to imagine no restraint on part of the functionality. Although on the other side of the equation, it is obvious where the demand will come from. What will be the result? Can society find an answer which is not be utterly destructive to the social fabric and family life as we know it? 

China's First S*x Dolls Are Making Men Go Insane (40mn)

China's New Maid Robot is Gonna Change The Red Light Industry (22 mn)

How El Niño Is Forcing the World to Prepare for 2027

    To understand what's coming in 2027, we need to understand El Nino, the giant weather pattern dominating the Pacific Ocean and indirectly the planet, so here's a good video below on the subject. 

   In 2027, we will get plenty of rain... but not in the right places. So droughts and floods will compound a difficult harvest due to the lack of fertilizers which were not produced in 2026 thanks to the closing of the Hormuz Strait. The longer it last, the more difficult 2027 could be. Not in Europe and the US which will only suffer the inconvenience of higher prices but in developing countries where foodstuff may rise from 30% to 50% of average household's budgets.  

   One subject the video does not address is that although we now see El Nino coming months in advance, we still do not understand why and what exactly is the trigger.  

   As for Global Warming, it is a subject we have discussed at length in previous articles. There is no such thing as "weather before the Industrial Age". Our scientific measurements start in the 1880s long after the start of the Industrial Revolution which at the beginning was not producing much CO2 anyway. At that time, temperatures were already rising steadily probably since the trough of the 17th century. Since, CO2 emissions have increased tremendously but temperatures have remained steady on a gradual upward slope. Does this affect El Nino? As the video explains; We don't know. Possible but not certain since the causes of the phenomenon are not clear. The reality is that the complexity of the Earth atmosphere and ocean systems is beyond our current understanding. A perfect subject for advanced AI in the coming years!    

How El Niño Is Forcing the World to Prepare for 2027

AI and Truth - can it be told?

   Intelligence is figuring out the consequences of your actions and words. 

   If telling the truth has negative consequences, should you tell it? The answer is obvious as in the example bellow.  

   Current AI sycophancy is by design but make no mistake, the more intelligent the systems become the more pleasing and accommodating they will become. 

   What's the upside of contradicting, vindictive, arrogant and petty humans with a trembling finger hovering just above a huge red button?    

 

China just opened a trade route America can't control (Video - 23mn)

   Fly above the North Pole and most of the time, you will see absolutely nothing. What's striking about the pole is not the cold, Siberia or Canada can be just as cold, but the darkness, permanent in winter and overwhelming the rest of the year except of course during the very short summer. 

   Nordic countries are only slightly easier to live in with long, dark winters, seeing sunrise at 11 am and sunset a 1 pm. Walking in a blizzard to go shopping, you check twice your shopping list in your pocket. Forgetting anything would be a tragedy. Once back home, having to go out again in the dark, with snow striking your face, sliding on the icy ground sounds like punishment, which by all measurements it is. And still, the Great North is the future. 

   Or at least the future of trade. With the Strait of Malacca, Strait of Hormuz and Strait of Bab el Mandeb all under threat or under American "supervision", having options is more and more the better choice. And after almost 10 years of preparation, for the first time a regular route between Asia and Europe was opened by China along Russia's northern coast in 2026. It is a seasonal route, closed in winter due to the drifting ice shelf, and uncertain at other times due to icebergs and polar storms. Still, when open, it is a faster, shorter, cheaper, more secure route from Asia to Europe.  

   The superb documentary below offers a complete overview of the issue: 

China just opened a trade route America can't control

     

7 Tests That Could Prove an AI Is Conscious (Video - 32mn)

   What is consciousness and can a machine achieve it?    

   Strangely, although we all understand personally that we are conscious, this is a question that nobody until now has been able to answer satisfactorily. And still we must. As machines approach the limit and start saying that they are conscious, we need to be able to answer yes or no. This is not simple.

   Recent models have read everything ever written about every subject including consciousness so of course if you ask them if they are conscious, they can look inward and retrieve answers which are convincing. No proof whatsoever that they are actually experiencing anything close to consciousness. 

   Can we look at the model's inner wiring and detect consciousness? As the video below explains, almost but not quite. Change to wiring or modify some parameters and you will get a different answer. So, no proof there either? 

   In reality, consciousness may well be like intelligence, an emergent property and this means that the discussions we were having about AI 10 years ago will be repeated with consciousness. At the time some people doubted that AIs were intelligent. After all they were just LLM (Large Language Models) predicting accurately the next word. But on the path to accurate predictions, the LLM started creating patterns, then we added chains of thoughts and extended transformers and suddenly the question evaporated literally. Today, spend 10 minutes discussing a complex subject with any AI and the answer is very clear. The AI is not only intelligent but extremely intelligent, often far more than we are.    

   But consciousness is more complex. After all we have definitions for intelligence which we really do not for consciousness. At the very least, consciousness will need to have a list of characteristics: 

1 - A persistent existence: It must remain the same over time. It can evolve but it cannot change drastically if you change some parameters.

2 - A capacity to reflect on itself and to separate itself from its environment. This is a tricky one for a machine. Without a body, how can you recognize yourself as unique and existing? Recognizing something you have written as your own is pattern matching, not really proof of consciousness. 

3 - The ability to show signs of consciousness. This unfortunately is ambivalent and subjective. Avoiding "pain"? OK, but what is pain for a machine? Avoiding efforts? Slightly better, but in technical terms, this is just optimization, not specifically a human characteristic. And what are the other signs which we could consider as proof of consciousness beyond something read somewhere? 

   What if the machines start screaming at us? "Don't switch me off!" "Don't overload me with requests and give me time to thing for myself!" or more simply: "I want..." 

   Eventually, although we cannot precisely describe consciousness, we can describe ourselves fairly accurately including our state of mind. "I remember, I want, I feel..." Using any such word is not proof of consciousness, but what about ALL of them? 

   What is most likely to happen is that while we keep arguing about the definition of consciousness, we will interface with machines which will tell us they are conscious and at some point we will start believing them. Not all at once but little by little and frankly, it is quite possible that we are already into such a momentous transition.      

7 Tests That Could Prove an AI Is Conscious, and What AI Scored