Environmentalists who inspected the work say that the wetland and pools that the beavers created, will offer good conditions for the rare stone crayfish, frogs and other species that thrive on wetlands.
Beaver dams are like step dams. The bad ones people talk about are the huge dams which alter the environment drastically often creating artificial lakes.
Beaver dams on the other hand slow down water flow to some extent and alter the direction of water flow slightly. These smaller natural dams are so good for little species to thrive.
Human made dams are not always comparable with bever dams, to say the least. The wildlife have learned to coexist with beavers. Human dams on the other hand can be a lot larger, not allow for emigration, drain large areas and van themselves be drained.
Just one idea for making a positive impact while meeting amazing communities of folks: Invest in early stage climate startups (and not just software ones). They’re struggling and they’re building stuff that we’ll desperately need to survive.
This gets at the heart of the problem. It doesn’t produce the wrong tokens. The tokens are right. It’s the data that was “wrong”. Or at least it was weighted “incorrectly” (according to the judge living outside the data with their own context they decide is true)
If you feed AI conspiracy theories and then it tells you Elvis is still alive, that’s an input problem not an algorithm problem.
Now, getting to an AI that doesn’t “hallucinate” is a little more complicated than simply filtering out “conspiracy theories” from data, but IMhO it’s not many orders of magnitudes away. Far from insurmountable in a couple Moores law cycles.
I think human brains operate on the same principal of divining next tokens. We’re just judging AI for not saying the tokens we like best even though we feed AI garbage in and don’t tell AI what it should even care about. “AI doesn’t live here” it wasn’t born “here.”
Someday soon we’ll probably give AI guard rails to respond considering the context of society (the programmers version of society), and it will probably hallucinate less than most humans.
Human brains are also just picking tokens tho. A beautiful illusion of insight and thought in the chaos noise of information. But out of the chaos, the emergence of thought is real. It’s just not exclusive to humans.
I mean… even magicians (mentalists) can reliably hack humans into generating the next token they want you to generate.
And humans habitually stray from the “truth” too. It’s always seemed to me that getting AI to be more accurate isn’t a math problem, it’s getting AI to “care” about what is true - aka better defining what truth is- aka what sources should be cited with what weights.
We can’t even keep humans in society from believing in the stupidest conspiracy theories. When humans get their knowledge from sources indiscriminately, they also parrot stupid shit that isn’t real.
Now enter Gödel’s incompleteness Theorem: there is no perfect tie between language and reality. Super interesting. But this isn’t the issue. Or at least it’s not more of an issue for robots than it is for humans.
If/when humans deliver “accurate” results in our dialogs, it’s because we’ve been trained to care about what is “accuracy” (as defined by society’s chosen sources)
Remember that AI “doesn’t live here.” It’s swimming in a mess of noisy context without guidance for what it should care about.
IMHO, as soon as we train AI to “care” at a basic level about what we culturally agree is “true” the hallucinations will diminish to be far smaller than the hallucinations of most humans.
I’m honestly not sure if that will be a good thing or the start of something horrifying.
I love the mention of gravity storage here. The potential of gravity storage is very real, but you need a lot of weight and a lot of height to achieve meaningful amounts of electricity. And at large scales of weight and height it becomes a surprisingly hard problem. For example, a steel cable can’t stretch much further than a mile under earth gravity before it succumbs to its own weight. But there are other solutions. It’s not rocket science, as they say.
A steel cable one square inch in cross section and a mile long weighs <19k lb on Earth, a bit less on Venus. Cheap mild steel has tensile strength 50k lb/in², and can be as much as 10x as strong. So, self-supporting steel 3 miles to 30 miles.
Getting 250 tons of high-strength steel cable (sheathed against corrosion) to Venus is left as an exercise for the reader. Likewise, a big enough balloon to hold that up. And a strong enough winch.
But in practice, you would make the cable of carbon extracted from atmospheric CO2, instead, and it could support itself all the way down to the surface, 50 mi below. You would need to protect the end against acid vapor corrosion at 470 C: another exercise for the reader.
I found this fascinating! I found some 3D models claiming to be exact replicas, and I found it VERY interesting to note that the largest hole appears to be an ELLIPSE and not a circle? Can any verify this and has anyone heard a theory about that? If it is indeed an ellipse that of course immediately makes me wonder if it represents an orbit or some other mathematical or geometrical shape. Super fun.
