Category: Engineering

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A Glimpse into the Future of Space Travel: A Trip to South Padre Island for SpaceX’s Starship Launch

Witnessing History in the Making at the SpaceX Starship Launch Attempt

Introduction:

I am passionate about empowering the future of finance and innovation, and that’s why I started ApplyingAI.com. I believe in the potential of AI to revolutionize global macro investing, electric vehicles, autonomy, space travel, and free markets. Recently, I had the unique opportunity to experience one such transformative moment firsthand: a trip to South Padre Island to watch SpaceX attempt to launch their colossal Starship rocket.

An Unforgettable Experience:

I joined thousands of spectators gathered at various coastal locations on the Gulf of Mexico, including South Padre Island, to witness this historic event. The anticipation in the air was palpable as we eagerly awaited the launch of SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built. Unfortunately, the launch was postponed due to a frozen pressurant valve, as announced by Elon Musk on Twitter. However, the attempt is expected to resume later this week.

A Game-Changer in Space Travel:

SpaceX’s Starship has the potential to revolutionize the rocket business completely. Designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, it can fly people and satellites to orbit multiple times a day, much like a jet airliner crisscrossing the Atlantic. Elon Musk envisions an era of interplanetary travel for ordinary humans, made possible by this groundbreaking vehicle.

A First for Starship:

Although the top segment of Starship has been tested on short hops, this would have been the first time it would go up with its lower stage, the mammoth booster called Super Heavy. If the launch proceeds as planned later this week, SpaceX will aim for 90% thrust, delivering a force equivalent to propelling almost 100 Concorde supersonic airliners at takeoff.

The Future of SpaceX and Starship:

With the support of a $3 billion investment from NASA, SpaceX is developing a variant of Starship designed to land astronauts on the Moon. The company’s long-term vision includes controlled landings for both the booster and the ship, allowing for refuelling and relaunching. SpaceX’s ultimate goal is to facilitate large-scale human travel to Mars.

A Testament to Human Ingenuity:

My trip to South Padre Island to witness the SpaceX Starship launch attempt was a testament to human ingenuity and the power of innovation. Despite the postponement, the excitement and anticipation I felt during this historical moment are undeniable. As I continue to explore the endless possibilities AI offers in global macro investing, electric vehicles, autonomy, space travel, and free markets, I remain inspired by the incredible strides being made in these fields.

Stay tuned for my coverage of the rescheduled SpaceX Starship launch, and join me in my journey to empower the future of finance and innovation.

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How Afraid Should You Be of AI?

A friend sent me a video today. It started off rather innocuously, with a program called EarWorm, designed to search for Copyrighted content and erase it from memory online. As many of these stories do, it escalated quickly. Within three days of being activated by some careless engineers with no backzground in AI ethics, it had wiped out all memory of the last 100 years. Not only digitally, but even in the brains of the people who remembered it. Its programmers had instructed it to do so with as little disruption to human lives as possible, so it kept everyone alive. It might have been easier to just wipe humanity off the map. Problem solved. No more Copyrighted content being shared, anywhere. At least that didn’t happen. Right?

This story is set in the year 2028, only ten years from now. These engineers and programmers had created the world’s first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and it rapidly became smarter than all of humanity, with the computing power and storage capacity surpassing what had been available previously though all of human history. Assigned a singular mission, the newly formed AGI sets out to complete its task with remorseless efficiency. It quickly invents and enlists an army of nanoscopic robots that can alter human minds and wipe computer memory. By creating a mesh network of these bots that can self-replicate, the AI quickly spreads its influence around the world. It knows that humans will be determined to stop it from accomplishing its mission, so it uses the nanobots to slightly alter the personalities of anyone intelligent enough to pose a threat to its mission. Within days it accomplishes its task. It manipulates the brains of its targets just enough to achieve the task while minimizing disruption. It does this by simply reducing the desire of the world’s best minds in AI to act. It creates apathy for the takeover that is happening right in front of them. By pacifying those among us intelligent enough to act against it, its mission can proceed, unencumbered by pesky humans.

Because it was instructed to accomplish its task with ‘as little disruption as possible’ the outcome isn’t the total destruction of humanity and all life in the universe, as is commonly the case in these sorts of AI doomsday scenarios. Instead, EarWorm did as it was programmed to do, minimizing disruption and keeping humans alive, but simultaneously robbing us of our ability to defend ourselves by altering our minds so that we posed no threat to its mission. In a matter of days, AI drops from one of the most researched and invested-in fields to being completely forgotten by all of humanity.

This story paints a chilling picture (though not as chilling as many ‘grey-goo’ scenarios, which see self-replicating, AI-powered nanobots turning the earth, and eventually the entire universe, into an amorphous cloud of grey goo). It is a terrifying prospect that a simple program built by some engineers in a basement could suddenly develop general intelligence and wipe an entire century of knowledge and information from existence without a whimper from humanity.

How likely is it? Do we need to worry about it? and What can we do about it? are some of the questions that sprang to mind as I watched the well-produced six-minute clip.  It is a scenario much more terrifying and unfortunately, more plausible than those of popular TV and films like Terminator and even Westworld. There are a lot of smart people out there today who warn that AI, unchecked, could be the greatest existential threat faced by humanity. It’s a sobering thought to realize that this could happen to us and we wouldn’t even see it coming or know it ever happened.

Then, the real question that the video was posing dawned on me: Has this already happened?

We could already be living in a world where AI has already removed our ability to understand it or to act against it in any way…

I hope not, because that means we’ve already lost.

Here’s the video if you’re interested

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What is this about?

My name is Rosario Fortugno. I’m an electrical engineer, MBA, and clean-tech entrepreneur making my way into the worlds of finance and AI. 

This website is meant to provide some insight into my journey. My hope is that it communicates some of what I learn as I pursue my CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) designation, highlighting examples from my business, as well as what I’m learning through the courses I’m taking in AI and machine learning from MIT and Udacity.

Basically, this is a way for me to show off my knowledge to the world… 

Every day, I’m going to summarize what I’ve learned. The source of the material will either be from my CFA prep material, my own business, InOrbis Intercity, my MIT and Udacity AI courses,  or just something I picked up along the way.

You’ll get a deep dive into the inner workings of my mind. The mind of a person who is probably trying to do too many things at once, but who is going to try to do them anyways, because, What the heck! Right?

Not only will you be learning alongside me, you will be joining me as I wade neck-deep into two of the most confusing and challenging spaces that the 21st century has to explore: artificial intelligence, and financial analysis.

A lot of what I discuss will be sourced from my other courses, so I’ll always try to provide links and images for reference to the source material. While I’ve always considered myself to be relatively creative, my propensity for original thought is limited by my expertise, so where I share something that isn’t my own work, I will try to give credit where credit is due.

Here we go! Let’s dive right in and get started. Today’s topic is Understanding Machine Learning. An undoubtedly simple subject. Let’s see how it goes 😀