Monthly Archives: March 2025

Not emergence but convergence

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My post yesterday, ‘Immediate Emergence – Are we ready for this?’ I said, “Think about how fast we are going to see the emergence of intelligent ‘beings’ when we combine the brightest Artificial Intelligence with robotics…” and continued that with, “Within the next decade, you’ll order a robot, have it delivered to you, and out of the box it will be smarter than you, stronger than you, and have more mobility and dexterity than you.”

On the technology front, a new study, ‘Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks’ proposes: “measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under five years, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.”

More from the article:

“…by looking at historical data, we see that the length of tasks that state-of-the-art models can complete (with 50% probability) has increased dramatically over the last 6 years.”

“If we plot this on a logarithmic scale, we can see that the length of tasks models can complete is well predicted by an exponential trend, with a doubling time of around 7 months.”

And in conclusion:

“If the trend of the past 6 years continues to the end of this decade, frontier AI systems will be capable of autonomously carrying out month-long projects. This would come with enormous stakes, both in terms of potential benefits and potential risks.”

When I was reflecting on this yesterday, I was thinking about the emergence of new intelligent ‘beings’, and how quickly they will arrive. With information like this, plus the links to robotics improvements I shared, I’m feeling very confident that my prediction of super intelligent robots within the next decade is well within our reach.

But my focus was on these beings ‘emerging suddenly’. Now I’m realizing that we are already seeing dramatic improvements, but we aren’t suddenly going to see these brilliant robots. It’s going to be a fast but not a sudden transformation. We are going to see dumb-like-Siri models first, where we ask a request and it gives us related but useless follow up. For instance, the first time you say, “Get me a coffee,” to your robot butler Jeeves, you might get a bag of grounds delivered to you rather than a cup of coffee made the way you like it… without Jeeves asking you to clarify the task because you wanting a bag of coffee doesn’t make sense.

These relatively smart, yet still dumb AI robots are going to show up before the super intelligent ones do. So this isn’t really about a fast emergence, but rather it’s about convergence. It’s about robotics, AI intelligence, processing speed, and AI’s EQ (not just IQ) all advancing exponentially at the same time… With ‘benefits and potential risks.’

Questions will start to arise as these technologies converge, “How much power do we want to give these super intelligent ‘beings’? Will they have access to all of our conversations in front of them? Will they have purchasing power, access to our email, the ability to make and change our plans for us without asking? Will they help us raise our kids?

Not easy questions to answer, and with the convergence of all these technologies at once, not a long time to answer these tough questions either.

Immediate Emergence – Are we ready for this?

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I have two daughters, both very bright, both with a lot of common sense. They work hard and have demonstrated that when they face a challenge they can both think critically and also be smart enough to ask for advice rather than make poor decisions… and like every other human being, they started out as needy blobs that 100% relied on their parents for everything. They couldn’t feed themselves or take care of themselves in any way, shape, or form. Their development took years.

Think about how fast we are going to see the emergence of intelligent ‘beings’ when we combine the brightest Artificial Intelligence with robotics like this and this. Within the next decade, you’ll order a robot, have it delivered to you, and out of the box it will be smarter than you, stronger than you, and have more mobility and dexterity than you.

Are we ready for this?

We aren’t developing progressively smarter children, we are building machines that can outthink and outperform us in many aspects.

“But they won’t have the wisdom of experience.”

Actually, we are already working on that, “Microsoft and Swiss startup Inait announced a partnership to develop AI models inspired by mammalian brains… The technology promises a key advantage: unlike conventional AI systems, it’s designed to learn from real experiences rather than just existing data.” Add to this the Nvidia Omniverse where robots can do millions of iterations and practice runs in a virtual environment with real world physics, and these mobile, agile, thinking, intelligent robots are going to be immediately out-of-the-box super beings.

I don’t think we are ready for what’s coming. I think the immediate emergence of super intelligent, agile robots, who can learn, adapt, and both mentality and physically outperform us, that we will see in the next decade, will be so transformative that we will need to rethink everything: work, the economy, politics (and war), and even relationships. This will drastically disrupt the way we live our lives, the way we engage and interact with each other and with these new, intelligent beings. We aren’t building children that will need years of training, we are building the smartest, most agile beings the world has ever seen.

Morning walk

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I’m visiting my sister (and mom is visiting too). It’s great to be together with family, and to be somewhere where a morning walk doesn’t involve rain gear. My wife and I are continuing our tradition of going for morning walks while on holidays. I love that this little vista is just minutes away from my sister’s house.

Holidays can be hard to maintain fitness habits, and I likely won’t be visiting any gyms while here, so these morning walks are going to be a good balance to offset my sister’s awesome cooking and restaurant meals. They are a great way to start the day with something physical, and with some pretty nice views too!

Nerdy Dialogue

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It’s March break, and for me the start of any break means it’s time to enjoy a good fiction book. Scanning my options last week, I saw that a science fiction series I really enjoyed had the next book out. So I added it to Audible and started listening on Friday. I’m not going to mention the series beyond saying it’s a science fiction, because I do enjoy it, but my critique below is far from flattering.

The author is a total nerd. How do I know this? Every reference to earth is related to things only a nerd would think worth referencing, and the dialogue is extra nerdy. Meanwhile the science of the scifence fiction seems to follow a level of theory that is intelligent and beyond my scope to critique… And while I’ve enjoyed the plot line of every book, including this one so far, the dialogue is very painful, and getting annoying.

The banter is always the same, no matter which characters are talking, and while the women are all intelligent, they all eye roll to the same style of corny jokes and all have similar responses to male dialogue. I bet if I met the author, I could typecast both him and his wife.

Robertson Davies was a novelist who seemed to be able to put himself into characters and ‘be’ someone completely different. I remember reading Fifth Business, and when the protagonist lost a leg I actually looked up the author to see if he had lost a leg too, because I couldn’t imagine that this experience wasn’t at least partially autobiographical.

On the other hand, I’ve read another series by this nerdy author and the humour and banter between characters does not diverge. Not one bit.

I know dialogue is hard. I’m not sure i would be emotionally intuitive enough to live the perspective of fictional characters well enough to create good dialogue beyond my own experience. Still, that doesn’t take away from my critique, and this author only has the ability to write dialogue from a single, very predictable perspective. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his books, but I think this is going to be the last one that I’ll read, and it’s because of the very nerdy, and very predictable, banter and dialogue between characters.

Stop taking things so seriously.

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I love this quote by Chris Williamson:

Stop taking things so seriously.

No one is getting out of this game alive.

Literally.

In 3 generations, no one will even remember your name.

If that doesn’t give you liberation to just drop your problems and find some joy, I don’t know what will.

Life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later.

So you might as well enjoy the ride.

I had a simple reminder of this yesterday. My original Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog was down for a while and I finally got around to going into the back end and figuring out what plugin was preventing it from working.

Then my phone got a notification:

“The site’s downtime lasted 4 months. We’re happy to report your site was back online as of 2:37pm on March 16, 2025.”

For 4 months a blog that used to be my baby, that I put thousands of hours into vanished, a white screen followed by an error page… and not even I noticed that it was down for a full 4 months. And anywhere from 1-5 years after I’m gone the DavidTruss.com domain hosting will expire and literally thousands of blog posts will be lost to all but the internet archive. When is the last to you visited that site to find a dead article? For me it had to be at least 5-6 years ago.

The frame to think about this is the one Chris shares above, “In 3 generations, no one will even remember your name. If that doesn’t give you liberation to just drop your problems and find some joy, I don’t know what will.”

Our journey here is short. The things we should worry about should not outshine the things we should be grateful for. The reasons to be frustrated or upset should not compete with or get in the way of things we appreciate and bring joy to us and others. We can all take at least a small dose of not taking ourselves so seriously.

A Tetraverse Response Video

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This video probably has an ideal audience of less than a couple dozen people in the entire world. If you are reading this as a regular Daily-Ink reader, you might not spend much time thinking about 4D space and the structure of the universe… and you can just bypass this, or at least watch the second video I share as an introduction to what Joe Truss and I are talking about.

Here is:
A Dimensional Twist of the Tetraverse (A response video to Klee Irwin’s 20 Group Twist)

And hopefully more digestible, and more introductory in nature, here is:
We live in a Tetraverse

And if you want something a little more esoteric, try:
Secret Origins of the Enneagram

And finally, here is the first response video we made, to Neil deGrasse Tyson & Chuck Nice’s Startalk interview with Sarah Imari Walker:
A Short Take on Assembly Theory in the Tetraverse Model: A Geometric Representation

More videos to come in our Book of Codes series.

Effort over output

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On my fitness journey, I’ve learned that building up my strength with certain exercises does not progress evenly. There are times when I get stuck on a weight and can’t seem to improve, and other times when I see surprising progress. I hit plateaus as well as peaks. And it can be a bit demoralizing when I hit a peak and then can’t replicate it for days or even weeks.

What I’ve come to realize is that the personal bests don’t matter, what really matters is the effort. Today I couldn’t lift nearly as heavy as I have in the past. For example, in my morning workout I struggled to get 6 reps of 185lbs once (with assistance) on incline bench. Yet I did 3 sets of 7 reps just a couple weeks ago, with no assistance.

However, I pushed myself really hard today. My muscles got a good burn, and I feel like I left nothing in my reserve tank when I did that heavily assisted last rep today. If I tried another rep my spotter would have had to do more work than me.

Effort over output.

Some days getting to the gym is hard. Some days in the gym are hard. Today was hard, but in a different way. Today was hard because I couldn’t lift as heavy as I usually do. I felt I needed more rest between sets, and everything seemed more challenging than usual… and yet I still pushed myself. I put in maximum effort.

So leaving the gym I felt good. I know that I put in the best effort I could, and I realized that it would have been easy to be disappointed if I paid attention only to my strength during the exercises. However it wasn’t the strength output that mattered it was the effort input… and with that as the measure, I rocked it! I kicked @$$!

Effort over output for the win.

💪😀👍

Morality police

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I have regularly created AI images to go with my blog posts since June, 2022. I try not to spend too much time creating them because I’d rather be writing blog posts than image prompts. But sometimes I try to create images and they just don’t convey what I want them to, or they come across as a bit too much in the uncanny valley, feeling unnatural. That happened with my post image 4 days ago, and I used the image anyway, because I was pressed for time.

(Look carefully at this image and you’ll see a lot wrong with it.)

I made 5 or 6 attempts to adjust my prompt, but still kept getting bad results, so I made do with the only one that resembled what I wanted.

And then for the past couple days I had a different challenge. I don’t know if it’s because of using the version of Bing’s Copilot that is associated with my school account, but my attempts to create images were blocked.

And:

However, Grok 3, a much less restricted AI, had no problem creating these images for me:

And:

I’m a little bothered by the idea that I am being limited by an AI in using these image prompts. The first one is social commentary, the second one, while a ‘hot topic’, certainly isn’t worthy of being restricted.

It begs the question, who are the morality police deciding what we can and cannot use AI to draw? the reality is that there are tools out there that have no filters and can create any image you want, no matter how tasteless or inappropriate they are, and I’m not sure that’s ideal… but neither is being prevented from making images like the ones I requested. What is it about these images requests that make them inappropriate?

I get that this is a small issue in comparison to what’s happening in the US right now. The morality police are in full force there with one group, the Christian far right, using the influence they have in the White House to impose their morality on others. This is a far greater concern than restrictions to image prompts in AI… but these are both concerns on the same continuum.

Who decides? Why do they get to decide? What are the justifications for their decisions?

It seems to me that the moral decisions being made recently have not been made by the right people asking the right questions… and it concerns me greatly that people are imposing their morals on others in ways that limit our choices and our freedoms.

Who gets to be the morality police? And why?

Taking the shot

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I got my second shingles vaccine yesterday. Today my arm is sore, I have a mild headache, and I feel a bit of a chill. But the symptoms are mild and I’ll go about my day just fine. I do marvel at the idea of vaccines and how they can build our immunity to prevent serious sickness. I’m also further excited about how medical scientists are doing research using mRNA vaccines tailored to specific people to fight certain kinds of cancer. This is an incredible breakthrough because normally our immune system does not detect cancerous cells as foreign, and that’s why they are left unharmed by our immune system and spread so easily.

On the flip side, I saw a social media post by a pastor in a small town in Texas bragging that his school was the least vaccinated against measles in the country. There is a measles breakout currently going through Texas and so far one unvaccinated child has died (not from the school mentioned above). In all likelihood, there will be more as a result of not taking the vaccine.

I’m no longer surprised by anti-science, conspiracy minded people.

I can question whether during Covid, if we actually needed to vaccinate small children when only 0.4 percent of the deaths were in those under 20 years old… and still see that the vaccine worked. In fact, the stat above might have been quite a bit higher without the vaccine. I can question the application of the vaccine without needing to question the efficacy.

Imagine our world, with polio and smallpox still being a concern. When is the last time you recall someone getting the mumps? I know that I’m not immune to shingles now, but my likelihood of catching it, and/or having a very bad case is drastically reduced thanks to the vaccine. A friend of my wife got it a week before her scheduled vaccine, and she had to take a lot of time off, and still has nerve damage as a result.

Sometimes you need to trust the science, trust in conventional research, and not social media posts that cherry pick stats and outright lie to convince you otherwise. There are not a cabal of scientists collaborating to dupe you into taking measles or shingles vaccines, to somehow inject you with (insert conspiracy theory here). There are thousands of scientists dedicated to making life better, curing diseases, and increasing both your quality of life and also your time here on earth.

I’m grateful for the advances we’ve seen, and I encourage you, if you’ve missed any of these shots, to go get them.

Morality and Accountability

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I saw this question and response on BlueSky Social and it got me thinking:

Why are ethics questions always like:

“is it ethical to steal bread to feed your starving family?”

And not:

“is it ethical to hoard bread when families are starving?”

Existential Comics @existentialcoms

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Because the first question shifts the blame to the desperate, making their morality the focus, while the second question demands accountability from the powerful. It’s easier to question survival than to challenge greed.

Debayor @debayoorr.bsky.social

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That last sentence really struck a chord in me, “It’s easier to question survival than to challenge greed.”

We separate morality from accountability in ways that don’t really make sense. To me it’s the difference between a socialist and a capitalist democracy. A socialist democracy infuses accountability with morality, while a capitalist democracy separates the two.

Another way to look at this is with a quote from the comic book Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.” A socialist democracy takes the quote literally. A capitalist democracy redirects the focus: “Holding great power becomes my responsibility.”

Accountability to others versus accountability to power and self. Morality takes a back seat to greater control, and greater success. And that is who we idolize… the rich and famous. The ones with power and influence. Morality doesn’t come into play. Accountability doesn’t come into play.

If you came from another planet and witnessed the accumulation of wealth that happens at the expense of so many who lack wealth, what would you think of the morality of humans? Who would you admire more, the mother or father stealing a loaf of bread to feed their family, or the limo-driven CEO’s who earn 1,000% or more income than the thousands of employees under them?

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