You might enjoy the book "Blindsight" by Peter Watts.
It does a phenomenal job telling a very unique first contact story. I can't remember if cameras are much of a plot point (I think they use them occasionally), but one of the characters is a linguist, and the aliens are distinctly non-human.
I disagree there - peer review as a system isn't designed to catch fraud at all, it's designed to ensure that studies that get published meet a minimum standard for competence. Reviewers aren't asked to look for fake data, and in most cases aren't trained to spot it either.
Whether we need to create a new system that is designed to catch fraud prior to publication is a whole different question.
Senate seats can't be altered much shifting the lines on the map because there's two per state, what you take from one you give to the other
Senate seats are ALWAYS state-wide elections, with no district lines to draw or gerrymander. Gerrymandering still arguably has an impact on senate elections, but it's a secondary factor of reducing turnout and not a primary factor of just picking the best districts.
Quantum computers will likely never beat classical computing on classical algorithms, for exactly the reasons you stated, classical just has too much of a head start.
But there are certain problems with quantum algorithms that are exponentially faster than the classical algorithms. Quantum computers will be better on those problems very quickly, but we are still working on building reliable QCs. Also, we currently don't know very many quantum algorithms with that degree of speedup, so as others have said there isn't many use cases for QCs yet.
This isn't a "comic book" universe, but the parahumans story universe (Worm and Ward) fits this pretty well.
Without spoiling too much of the story, characters all get powers in response to traumatic events. The powers they get also tend to reflect the type of trauma that occurred, so if they lost an arm they might get a healing power, or if they were trapped in a burning building they might get the ability to phase through walls and a resistance to fire. All of the powers in the setting tend to follow this approach, and stay within the rules of the setting.
After a few years the orbit will degrade enough that it'll start to fall back to earth. At that point, the satellite will either burn up completely on re-entry, or partially and the rest will fall to earth.
Either way, each of these satellites will be completely gone from orbit after a few years.
In the book, they also took pains to point out the steps he took to try to avoid it happening to the other airlocks after that point too - by actually balancing out their usage a bit more, instead of just always using the same one.
But intelligence is the capacity to solve problems. If you can solve problems quickly, you are by definition intelligent
To solve any problems? Because when I run a computer simulation from a random initial state, that's technically the computer solving a problem it's never seen before, and it is trillions of times faster than me. Does that mean the computer is trillions of times more intelligent than me?
the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
If we built a true super-genius AI but never let it leave a small container, is it not intelligent because WE never let it manipulate its environment? And regarding the tests in the Merriam Webster definition, I suspect it's talking about "IQ tests", which in practice are known to be at least partially not objective. Just as an example, it's known that you can study for and improve your score on an IQ test. How does studying for a test increase your "ability to apply knowledge"? I can think of some potential pathways, but we're basically back to it not being clearly defined.
In essence, what I'm trying to say is that even though we can write down some definition for "intelligence", it's still not a concept that even humans have a fantastic understanding of, even for other humans. When we try to think of types of non-human intelligence, our current models for intelligence fall apart even more. Not that I think current LLMs are actually "intelligent" by however you would define the term.
If you're mixing things up in the kitchen, typically you try to be somewhat precise with ratios.
The difference in this case being that because the actual ratio of the blend is unknown, you don't actually know how it would crystallize. Technically they could even change up the ratio week to week based on the price of high-fructose corn syrup so you wouldn't even get consistency from it.
If this actually did lead to faster matrix multiplication, then essentially anything that can be done on a GPU would benefit. That definitely could include games, and physics models, along with a bunch of other applications (and yes, also AI stuff).
I'm sure the papers authors know all of that, but somehow along the line the article just became"faster and better AI"
Believe it or not, but companies outside of Boeing and Airbus are capable of designing airplanes.
It's not just "good" regulation holding them back either - in 2017 Boeing accused Bombardier of "dumping" some CSeries planes because they sold them to Delta at below the retail cost (about a 30% discount). The CSeries was/is a good plane, but took an incredibly long time to get through certification so Bombardier had been losing money and was desperate to sell them. Boeing complained about this discount to the US International Trade Commission who imposed a massive fine on Bombardier. Because of the delays, Bombardier couldn't afford to fight the fine so they ended up having to give up a 50% stake in the design to Airbus for only $1. The year after, the fines were appealed and overturned, but the damage was already done. Bombardier has since completely sold their stake in the CSeries (one less competitor), and Airbus gets the renamed A220 series for a massive discount.
As an aside, I can't argue that the FAA doesn't do more good than harm in this space generally, but I'm the last ~5 years it's becoming clear to me that they have a massive blindspot for Boeing in particular.
Good point! Obviously the solution here is to stop funding the science!
(/s)