Clippy, AI and Distant Worlds

Xiaolce or Cortana or Siri or - just creepy dystopian AI

In my last post, I bemoaned human nature as the weakest link in our rapidly advancing, technology driven world -  as if to prove me right , Microsoft created a virtual teen AI as an online ' chatbot' .
Known as Tay, it was modelled on succesful AI which Microsoft introduced to China , named 'Xiaolce ' which gave great recitals of stories and made good conversation.
With 40 million devotees, it was decided to quickly expand the exercise .

Taught to Troll 

Sadly , though, apparently in the West, we still teach parrots to swear - and so, within 24 hours, the chatbot known as 'Tay' was withdrawn , as it had ' learned ' fascism , hyper-sexuality, and was producing a slew of offensive tweets .
Back to the drawing board, Microsoft - just don't reduce it to another ' Clippy' , please ...dysfunctional AI is one thing, but software that induces murderous rage is a no - no.

If you never suffered with 'helpful' Clippy, you're lucky

The burgeoning world of AI is heaving with personal assistants - from Siri to Cortana and Echo and Alexa, it's a troublesome field - but is it really a practical solution, or just a chance to slack off, whilst enjoying the idea of having AI resolve issues for you ?
My personal worry is the end result of ' outsourcing' questions - will it ultimately create a knowledge deficit ?
I suppose it's really no lazier than saying " I'll Google it", the great fallback for tricky questions; but even so, is it a virtual cop-out ?
Discuss...

Meanwhile, out in the solar system...



The area of online info regarding what's new in space is a burgeoning field, and NASA have created a new site to cover most things, so I will be lessening my focus on all things space related -
I am only a keen amateur, after all.
At the end of the day, the reappearance of a floating city in China interests me as much as tectonics on Pluto, so...
!
However, I am impressed with the pictures which show us ' Mithrim Montes' , a set of mountain ranges on Titan, one of Saturns moons.
The images look a bit like vague watercolour , as they are from radar readings which penetrate the hazy atmosphere, allowing us to gauge surfaces beneath , so not true - vision , really.
even so, I'm impressed.
Why ?
Because it may be a blurry image, but they have deduced the height of the tallest mountain on the satellite of a planet which is over a billion kilometres from here.*
That's why I'm impressed.

    Occator crater on Ceres               pic NASA/ JPL / CALTECH/

Staying with the idea of unconventional imaging, we also have a ' gravity map' of the martian interior.
Given the strangeness of Ceres   , I wonder whether we'll get a similar interior probe ?
Although the Mars map is made from three separate readings from three explorers -  Maven, Orbiter and Curiosity, whereas Ceres only has Dawn to survey it , at present.
The latest news of Ceres is that it almost certainly contains a subsurface, briny ocean - and the expulsion of bright salts we see are possibly the result of impacts .

Colour image of spots on Ceres           pic NASA

There have been recent launches including Exo Mars, the next level of Martian exploration -  a lander module and an orbiter , which will eventually lead to a research base , not a permanent colony .
After all , we still don't know if the way is clear.

Meanwhile, on Jupiter , there seems to be activity on the poles , which already have a permanent aurora display - also a mysterious collision has occured on Jupiter.
I say mysterious, it's almost certainly a wandering meteor, asteroid , or a comet . The incident is further detailed here.
Don't forget, with the NASA Juno probe entering Jupiters atmosphere in July this year, we may see the next collision up close .





* That's an approximation, the distance between us varies greatly .