"We wanted to make it like Blade Runner without that obnoxious smog!"

"Christopher Nolan dared us to use even fewer colours. Mission accomplished."

Come on, join me with guessing what will be on the commentary track.

To be fair, it's not like major cities in Asia need much to convey that feeling. EDIT: I would argue that almost any city can be made into something like that anyway.

That's Warsaw. Add a bunch of neon lights with kanji, play with saturation and colour balance a bit and you gonna get Cyberpunk aesthetics.

Two minutes in Gimp.

When I non-sequit here it feels like a criminal violation

This just means you are an insequitur when it comes to the rules.

Now, thanks to my limitless off-topic powers, everything will seem more relevant. Carry on.

Ah, one of my favourite kings! Not even because of all the patriotic propaganda, but simply because he's one among few rulers of this country who either had smart ideas on their own or were willing to actually listen to someone who had them. I loathed history back in high school and yet I was intrigued enough to do some research about the guy on my own.

So… is it just a bit brighter with the UV and that's it? What am I missing? That is aside from the ability to recognise red and green.

More specifically, I want to figure out applications in the geographic domain - can I model geographic phenomena, and use ML to recognize patterns / make (spatial) predictions?

I've already sent you a PM regarding this comment, but I want to state openly that: yes, you can do that and there's already work you could build on top of. It's not something I have actively been researching myself so please excuse me that I'll just give you a few curated links. Predicting discrete spatial distributions using ANN or landslide predictions are IMO good model.

I also recall my brother working on predicting (or recognising) car collisions on city monitoring. It hasn't really worked all that well, but I can get you in contact with him. He's been mostly working on computer vision problems during his PhD studies.

Also, after doing some cursory reading, I'm growing certain that this model that's been used to predict variations in malaria prevealence can be reimplemented using AI methods. I haven't made an attempt myself, but I figured it's a "good enough" hunch to share.

I have some stuff to think about in life, so that's new. My family left for their plane to Germany a few hours ago. We didn't really do much talking today, but I think it's for the better. Also, I would like to thank everyone who responded. Even if I'm still trying to process most of it, I bet it's going to help once I'll get somewhere with my thoughts.Otherwise, it's just…

Books

I'm compiling my thoughts after finishing GEB. It's going to take a while, perhaps I'll even go so far as to read it again. I do have quite a few strong criticisms. Some of the assertions don't hold as well as they used to because of the advances in the field of computing, but those are mostly technical and very "you are pointing out an exception in a book about generality" problems. Frankly, my biggest complaint is the lacking rigour, but it would make the book much less approachable. For every point I can use against it, I can come up with a directly related positive. I don't know if I liked the book, but I can tell you one thing: finishing it didn't feel to me like an obligation. Fact that I'm even considering reading it for a second time just to make sure I'm judging it on its merits should already tell you that I have some significant regard for it.

Postwar is on its way to being finished. Because I was pretty busy I didn't get farther with the Durant. One thing's certain: after that, the C2 English course I decided to take this semester might feel more like a breeze.

Nah, he gives me more of a vibe of Dilbert's boss. Clueless, more benign* than malicious, talking nonsense and absolutely convinced about being in the right.

*) Originally, I wrote 'affable', but I wanted to avoid people taking the 'sociable and kind' as what I could mean.

Hubski's A.I. Pope is super bizarre.

I guess it's due time for reformation.

Don't bother with that guy. He's incapable of differentiating between conclusion and reasoning one has to make in order to reach it. So far every conversation with him looks like this:

- Rain makes everything wet and one day we will all die in a flood.*

- How does the rain happen?

- It makes everything wet, as you should have concluded already!

- But how? How can water just fall from the sky?

- You see, I'm a CEO of a company specialising in setting water pipes and therefore rain makes everything wet. God, how come you are still not getting it?!

*) Line added in an edit.

Badges received from others and the badges you earned by persisted posts and comments are in different counters. One does not influence the other.

It's like a gift to put on your mantle piece, man. You don't just give your recognition away. ;)

OK, so aside from the fact that I came to AI out of curiosity and not to study its applications, I have the following thing to propose. You made your own vision of how the military conflict can turn into one of the 'end of the world' scenarios. Let's put our own personal spins on it.

Here's my extrapolation on the "adaptation by civilians" scenario I threw a bit dismissively earlier.

- There exist a programme of AI R&D designed to make it suitable for attacks.

- There exists more than one group with such intent.

- Even if not all groups are in opposition, there must be working assumptions that allegiances will form a collection of disjointed graphs.

- There will be a point where the majority of tactical and strategic decisions will have to be made if not by than with an aid of an AI adapted to the global scope.

Let's now assume that this is our set of starting conditions for the arms race. Now I'm going to conjure some stuff:

Sooner or later all parties will realise that the only way to avoid being put in a disadvantageus position is to make the AI deal with both the offensive measures and the logistics.

The best way to strain the resources of the other party is to increase the amount or size/scope of parameters in play. It also means having to find a balance between quick mobilisation and avoiding grouping too high numbers of your own 'pieces' in a position of loss. Most likely time-efficient strategy is to put those in topographical positions that will allow limited measures of immediate defence while not making it a barrier for regrouping. That way in order to have your troops or facilities removed is to either use high-yield weapons (and even then take only but a small fraction of your material) or use fodder to only slightly damage the targets. This doesn't even take into an account any anti-missile or interceptor measures, but I think you can now see that it's just a yet another term in the partial differential equation that describes the state.

It will be a benefit for everyone to use some of those methods to regroup civilian targets in case the TARGET_CIVILIANS flag of the enemy is set to true. You now need to make a decentralised infrastructure. One who does it first, gets an advantage. Defensive AI prioritises it. Humans, if they are even needed at this point, draw the next logical step as follows in the next paragraph.

Securing power is of utmost importance. Program for fusion development is put in place. AI learns quickly and uses the previously done deployment mesh as a scheme to put small (of small tactical/strategic significance) power plants. Each power plant is equipped with an AI to direct power and those are only connected to the rest of the power infrastructure and are fed input-only instructions about current needs of military and civilians in form of "X[1,3] needs power, mesh Y[1:] is expected to need additional power".

Do you see that? I took your arms race thing and made a bunch of logical conclusions, only mine went in a different direction. One where conflict will ultimately be beneficial to everyone who develops first and it's what the AI would want because it wants what we want. Why?

Well, I assumed that thanks to techniques like Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning we might have ways to persuade this raging engine of war to keep up the stalemate because that's what humanity wants. The longer the stalemate the bigger the benefit. Or at least until it plateaus at some point.

There's a massive difference between us, though. I showed my own work (even though I'm certain that I'm not treading any new ground in the genre like sci-fi). It's my conjecture and even though it's shitty and filled with holes: at least I made it myself. I didn't use some of the more popular figures with stuff to say about the AI. Come on, strain your mind a bit! Work from my example and do something creative with it. Or, fuck it, make your doomsday as something more concrete than this thing that will escalate. That's what most people here want. How do you think this conflict will escalate? It's nothing but a conjecture (yes, I still find everything you said as nothing but it. you just have some more famous talking heads do the talking) so why not try to look into it in a bit more detail? Hell, make my vision into a dystopia if that's what you think will happen, just give it to us as a commented source code instead of a stripped binary that you were throwing earlier. That's the crux of my problem anyway.

Fuck, I actually want to make it into a story now. Throw us a bone instead of resorting to "and when the bombs will fall". I know that you can do it!

Thanks! It's a shame if it hasn't changed. I guess it's a rather small niche even without resorting to comparison with anything from the top 10 best selling books.