Cinema virtual

A IA está a evoluir mais depressa do que se previa. Não vale a pena demonizá-la. Veio para ficar. Vai eliminar muitos postos de trabalho, e criar muitos outros. Sem a IA, a Ucrânia já teria sido esmagada pelos psicopatas russos de Moscovo. Uma das empresas que tem ajudado os ucranianos a combater os navios de guerra, aviões, ninhos de artilharia e infantaria da Rússia, chama-se Palantir. É norte americana. O seu co-fundador e CEO é um judeu americano chamado Alexander Caedmon Karp.

AI Can Now Replace Any Actor In A Film
Jim Clyde Monge
Jan 22, 2025

Lights, camera... algorithm?

The silver screen is no longer the exclusive domain of flesh-and-blood actors, all thanks to the recent advancements in AI. Nowadays, it’s remarkably easy to generate videos where actors do or say things they never did or take a film clip and replace the actor’s face with someone else’s.

Tencent’s open-source AI video generator, Hunyuan, has just integrated Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) support. With LoRA, you can train custom styles, characters, and movements, making your AI videos unique and personalised.

Hunyuan was launched in December 2024 and quickly impressed the AI community with its 95.7% visual quality score, outperforming many of its competitors. Now, with LORA integration, it’s even more powerful. This free, open-source AI video generator packs the punch of pricey options like OpenAI’s Sora, which can cost you as much as $200 per month.

Read more

Democracy Maps

My future global human society model is Democracy Maps. It is a new hybrid reality built by social humans assisted by AI.

Given the United States' authoritarian drift, Europe must think quickly about developing its autonomy in cyberspace. The USA will have its own Internet, China already has its own, and Europe must create a proprietary one with original algorithms, namely developing European-based social networks and a European AI (EAI), with its ethics and culture different, as we know, from the American and Chinese ones.

As the joke goes, if China cuts off water to Macau, Macau must cut off water to China. 

Read more:

Recently published (Tue 18 Feb 2025)

Uma nova singularidade a caminho?

When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out
By Kevin Roose
Reporting from San Francisco
The New York Times

Jan. 23, 2025

If you’re looking for a new reason to be nervous about artificial intelligence, try this: Some of the smartest humans in the world are struggling to create tests that A.I. systems can’t pass.

For years, A.I. systems were measured by giving new models a variety of standardized benchmark tests. Many of these tests consisted of challenging, S.A.T.-caliber problems in areas like math, science and logic. Comparing the models’ scores over time served as a rough measure of A.I. progress.

But A.I. systems eventually got too good at those tests, so new, harder tests were created — often with the types of questions graduate students might encounter on their exams.

Those tests aren’t in good shape, either. New models from companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have been getting high scores on many Ph.D.-level challenges, limiting those tests’ usefulness and leading to a chilling question: Are A.I. systems getting too smart for us to measure?

A IA avança rapidamente. Em breve estaremos a discutir a transição dos atuais modelos de governança e representação democráticas para novos regimes constitucionais onde a IA iluminará pela via cognitiva os tradicionais poderes Legislativo, Judicial e Executivo, assim designados por Montesquieu no século XVIII.

DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organization) é uma das experiências de governança democrática descentralizada em curso, a qual assenta no paradigma blockchain. Entretanto, surgiram conceitos novos para designar possíveis futuros no domínio das organizações, como ALGOCRACIA e CIBEROCRACIA. 

Eu próprio avancei uma ideia-modelo assente nos atuais e universalmente disponíveis ciber-poderes (redes computacionais, bases de dados online, redes sociais, blockchain, data-mining, etc.) a que chamei DEMOCRACY MAPS (October, 2012). Estes mapas de democracia dariam forma e representação a todos os paradigmas, sistemas e organizações do poder humano (sexual, social, económico, cultural e bélico), por forma a que os processos de decisão individual e coletivo pudessem dar um salto de singularidade na espécie humana assistida pelas máquinas materiais e imateriais por si criadas.

Vale a pena ir conhecendo este novo mundo...

How do we save humans, an endangered species?

Old and useless tools cannot solve the ethical issues threatening humanity's survival. On the other hand, without new tools, our species is close to a collapse that will have nothing to do with its internal struggles or climate change. The combination of demographic ageing and infertility (or birth suppression) is, in the long run, fatal for any species.

The recently disappeared John Tooby (1952-2023), founder of evolutionary psychology, wrote an enlightening text on this subject.

The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering

By John Tooby

The most remarkable breaking news in science is that I exist. Well, not just me. People like me who, without technology, would have died early. Of the roughly 5 ½ billion people who survived past puberty, perhaps only one billion would be here were it not for modern sanitation, medicine, technology, and market-driven abundance. Ancestrally, the overwhelming majority of humans died before they had a full complement of children, often not making it past childhood. For those who live in developed nations, our remodelled lifetables are among the greatest of the humane triumphs of the Enlightenment—delivering parents from the grief of holding most of their children dead in their arms or of children losing their parents (and then themselves dying from want).

But there is hidden and unwelcome news at the core of this triumph. This arises out of the brutal way natural selection links childbearing to the elimination of genetic diseases. 

…

Genetic repair would replace the ancient cruelty of natural selection, which only fights entropy by tormenting organisms because of their genes.

One can find this micro-essay and other John Tooby's critical reflections at Edge.

AI systems + Democracy Maps

Governance of superintelligence

Now is a good time to start thinking about the governance of superintelligence — about future AI systems dramatically more capable than even AGI.

May 22, 2023

Authors

• Sam Altman
• Greg Brockman
• Ilya Sutskever

Responsible AI, Safety & Alignment

...We believe people around the world should democratically decide on the bounds and defaults for AI systems. We don't yet know how to design such a mechanism, but we plan to experiment with its development. We continue to think that, within these wide bounds, individual users should have a lot of control over how the AI they use behaves.

...we believe it would be unintuitively risky and difficult to stop the creation of superintelligence. Because the upsides are so tremendous, the cost to build it decreases each year, the number of actors building it is rapidly increasing, and it’s inherently part of the technological path we are on, stopping it would require something like a global surveillance regime, and even that isn’t guaranteed to work. So we have to get it right.

Read the entire statement

https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence#GregBrockman

Democracy maps, eleven years after its hibernation

On March 22, 2012, I created Democratic Party. After a long eleven-year hibernation, I resurrected it yesterday after realizing the revolution of the so-called AIs (artificial intelligence) and AGI (Artificial general intelligence) and the change that will soon sweep over the human societies as we know them today.

In 1998 I imagined what would become, seven years later, Google Maps. This imagination turned into a project called Portugal Digital, presented at the Pavilhão do Território at EXPO '98. But unfortunately, the teams that developed and programmed my intuition sold their souls to some local devils of technological speculation instead of continuing to work with me. Such arrogance prevented the Google Maps algorithm from being developed before 2006 and, probably, in my country. Nevertheless, it would have been EXPO '98's most outstanding contribution to the country's technological development. 

Later, in 2005/2006, I imagined creating a utopic art technology town called Virtual Museum Park (Parque Museu Virtual). It would have been born in the small Portuguese city Montemor-o-Novo. The local government welcome the project, even assigning Herdade da Adua as a place for its future implantation. And I envisioned something else in 2012: Democracy Maps. The idea here was to use geographically referenced databases to build from their dynamic potential the foundational matrix of a kind of global democracy not imposed on the tip of any bayonet. Some diagrams I draw for this project deserve a review, particularly in light of the emergence of blockchains, OpenAI and DALL.E.

What does this have to do with art? First, I would say that reading authors like Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Jean-François Lyotard, John Dewey, Alfred Gell, or Immanuel Kant, and keeping in mind the impact that artists like Kasimir Malévitch, Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp or John Cage continue to have in the continuity of the arts, everything! Secondly, difficulties at the core of AI lie in the very nature of human flesh, our brains, and all our sensors: skin, eyes, ears and how we have developed our language system.

Mapas de democracia (um novo paradigma)

Em 22 de março de 2012 criei o Partido Democrata. Depois de uma longa hibernação de onze anos ressuscitei-o ontem, depois de me aperceber da revolução das chamadas AIs (inteligências artificiais) e do AGI (artificial general intelligence), bem como da mudança que irá varrer em breve as sociedades humanas que hoje conhecemos.

Em 1998 imaginei o que seria sete anos depois o Google Maps. Esta imaginação deu lugar ao projeto chamado Portugal Digital apresentado no Pavilhão do Território da EXPO '98. Infelizmente as equipas que desenvolveram e programaram a minha intuição venderam a alma a uns diabinhos locais da especulação tecnológica em vez de continuarem a trabalhar comigo. Uma tal arrogância impediu que o algoritmo do Google Maps pudesse ter sido desenvolvido antes de 2006 e no nosso país. Teria sido a maior contribuição da EXPO '98 para mitigar o nosso atraso entre as nações desenvolvidas. Mais tarde, em 2005/2006, imaginei a criação de um Parque Museu-Virtual em Montemor-o-Novo. O município viria a acolher favoravelmente a minha proposta, atribuindo-lhe mesmo a Herdade da Adua como sítio para a sua futura implantação. E imaginei ainda outra coisa em 2012: Democracy Maps. A ideia, desta vez, foi a de poder usar bases de dados geograficamente referenciadas para construir a partir do seu potencial dinâmico a matriz fundacional de uma espécie de democracia global não imposta na ponta de qualquer baioneta. Existem alguns diagramas que merecem agora uma revisão, nomeadamente à luz do aparecimento dos blockchains, do OpenAI e do DALL.E.

O que é que isto tem que ver com arte? Diria que, lendo autores como Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Jean-François Lyotard, John Dewey, Alfred Gell, ou o fundamental Immanuel Kant e mantendo presente o impacto que artistas como Kasimir Malévitch, Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp ou John Cage continuam a ter na continuidade das artes, tudo!

Democracy Maps©

Hipótese

As principais variáveis objetivas necessárias à decisão política democrática podem ser cartografadas, dando origem a mapas intuitivos de grande clareza, os quais terão no futuro grande importância na formação da opinião pública e das decisões democráticas.

Entre as áreas de investigação do lab-D, Laboratório de Política do Partido Democrata, há um projeto a que demos o nome de código Democracy Maps© [2012].

Objetivo: desenvolver o conceito de democracia eletrónica, em rede, nomeadamente através do acesso online a Democracy Maps©, sondagens deliberativas, e a modelos de realidade mista e aumentada associados aos processos eleitorais.

António Cerveira Pinto

Exemplo #1

Democracy Maps by António Cerveira Pinto