There are several companies working on solar covers for reservoirs. I agree, seems like a win win. Reduce evaporation and have a large, level, “field” for solar arrays.
I call shenanigans. A fully autonomous space vehicle is three miracles away - we need a revolution in avionics to get systems capable of running computationally-expensive models, a revolution in sensor technology to allow for dense state knowledge of satellite systems without blowing mass and volume budgets, and we need a revolution in AI/ML that makes onboard collision avoidance and system upkeep viable.
I do believe that someone has pre-trained a model on vegetation and terrain features, has put that model up on a cube sat, and is using it to “autonomously” identify features of interest. I do believe someone has duct-taped a LLM to the ground systems to allow for voice interaction. I do not agree that those features indicate a high level of autonomy on the spacecraft.
The phrasing of the article makes it sound like robots will be replacements for human companionship, which is probably nonsense in any near term like the ten year period quoted, but it could maybe get to the point of imitating a companion animal like a dog or a cat to alleviate abject loneliness and pester people to move around their house. (The Aibo dream can finally be realized in my lifetime!)
Maybe a robot conversation could fool an older person with dementia or something, but I would definitely worry about leaving anyone detached enough to be fooled into thinking a language model is a conversation unattended with one. And if you're not fooled then it's just a spiral.
There’s just so much wrong with this article. The whole website seems to be geared towards people who celebrate tech without understanding any if it. I.e.: tech bros.
Which is why I’d expect to see this article quoted on satire groups like: “did silicon valley reinvent the bus again?”.
A common scam is to attribute medical miracles to stem cells - Similar to the cloning scandal from Korea - Because they know other countries legally CAN’T test the findings to either prove or discredit. They do this to fleece foreign institutions out of money and prestige.
Don’t dismiss it based on that criteria. It’s a particular type of study called a case study where they go more in-depth on a particular case or set of cases. Of course it should be complemented by other types of studies, but that’s just true of science in general. The danger, of course, is when laymen and journalists get excited over something like a case study and start spreading bad advice.
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