Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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How AI and other tech trends are boosting space ventures

Illustration: Blue Origin's Blue Ring transfer vehicle in orbit
The first mission for Blue Origin’s Blue Ring orbital vehicle, set for next year, reflects multiple trends in the space industry. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Artificial intelligence and other technological trends are smoothing the way for commercial space ventures ranging from multibillion-dollar companies to a new wave of startups.

It probably comes as no surprise that Blue Origin, the space company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is taking advantage of AI. “You can imagine this is a favorite area of our founder,” said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn strategy and business operations. “So, just generally, we are using it across the board.”

But other AI-fueled applications might raise an eyebrow. For example, Rebel Space is helping satellite companies generate synthetic data that could point to a potential valve failure long before the spacecraft is launched. “The AI you trained would see it, and you would prevent a massive mission failure in the future,” said Carrie Marshall, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

Cornell, Marshall and other executives reflected on the trends accelerating the space industry this week during the Seattle Space Superiority Summit, presented on Sept. 11 by FUSE VC at the Museum of Flight.

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AI tool is built to boost the hunt for gravitational waves

Illustration: Mirrors and lasers in foreground, colliding black holes and gravitational waves in background
An illustration hints at how LIGO uses mirrors and laser beams to detect black hole collisions. (Google DeepMind Illustration)

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, has already won its researchers a Nobel Prize — and now artificial intelligence is poised to take LIGO’s search for cosmic collisions to the next level.

Google DeepMind and the LIGO team say they’ve developed an AI tool called Deep Loop Shaping that has been shown to enhance the observatory’s ability to track gravitational waves — faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are thrown off by smash-ups involving black holes and massive neutron stars.

The researchers describe the technique in a proof-of-concept study published today by the journal Science. They hope to make Deep Loop Shaping part of routine operations at LIGO’s detectors in Louisiana and on the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.

“Deep Loop Shaping is revolutionary, because it is able to reduce the noise level in the most unstable and most difficult feedback loop at LIGO,” lead author Jonas Buchli, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, told reporters.

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Fiction Science Club

How humans can hold the line against AI hype

Illustration: A squadron of green avatars being held back by a red hand
Strategic refusal is one of the ways to counter AI hype. (Bigstock Illustration / Digitalista)

Don’t call ChatGPT a chatbot. Call it a conversation simulator. Don’t think of DALL-E as a creator of artistic imagery. Instead, think of it as a synthetic media extruding machine. In fact, avoid thinking that what generative AI does is actually artificial intelligence.

That’s part of the prescription for countering the hype over artificial intelligence, from the authors of a new book titled “The AI Con.”

“‘Artificial intelligence’ is an inherently anthropomorphizing term,” Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, explains in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “It sells the tech as more than it is — because instead of this being a system for, for example, automatically transcribing or automatically adjusting the sound levels in a recording, it’s ‘artificial intelligence,’ and so it might be able to do so much more.”

In their book and in the podcast, Bender and her co-author, Alex Hanna, point out the bugaboos of AI marketing. They argue that the benefits produced by AI are being played up, while the costs are being played down. And they say the biggest benefits go to the ventures that sell the software — or use AI as a justification for downgrading the status of human workers.

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Fiction Science Club

Dictators weaponize new technologies in fact and fiction

Illustration: Huge eye formed from ones and zeros
Surveillance tools and artificial intelligence are making life easier for Big Brother. (BigStock Illustration / Valery Brozhinsky)

When Ray Nayler began writing his science-fiction novel about a repressive regime powered by artificial intelligence, he didn’t expect the story to be as timely as it turned out to be. He really wishes it wasn’t.

“This is not a world that I think we should want to live in, and I would love it if it is a world that we completely avoid, and if the book seems in 10 to 20 years to be extraordinarily naive in its predictions,” Nayler says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Nayler’s new novel, “Where the Axe Is Buried,” draws upon his experience working on international development in Russia and other former Soviet republics for the Peace Corps and the U.S. Foreign Service. “I added it up, and I’ve spent over a decade in authoritarian states,” he says. “And so I have, fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of experience with this problem.”

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GeekWire

Prediction: Human-level AI is just a few ‘miracles’ away

Nathan Myhrvold and Todd Bishop on stage at Microsoft@50 event
Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold makes a point during a chat with GeekWire's Todd Bishop. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Will artificial intelligence ever catch up with human intelligence? And if it does, is humanity doomed? Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold, who had the job of predicting the future of tech during Microsoft’s early years, was ready with some answers this week at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 anniversary event.

The feature that AI still lacks is the ability to create a new abstract concept, “imbue it with meaning and then reason about it,” said Myhrvold, who joined Microsoft in 1986 and served as the company’s first chief technology officer.

“I think we’ll get there, but that’s at least one miracle that needs to be figured out, and I variously have thought there was like three to five miracles that need to be done. Who knows?” he said during the March 20 event at Town Hall Seattle. “And that could happen tomorrow, or maybe it already happened tonight, and they just haven’t told us. Or it could take another 10 years.”

GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop returned to the topic a minute later. “Did I hear correctly that we’re three to five miracles away from AI that’s as powerful or as intelligent as humans?” he asked.

“Yes,” Myhrvold replied.

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Amazon Web Services aims to optimize AI in space

Illustration: D-Orbit satellite platform in orbit
Amazon Web Services tested orbital data processing in 2022 on D-Orbit’s ION satellite carrier, shown in this artwork. (D-Orbit Illustration)

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are turning into requirements for space operations, and Amazon Web Services is optimizing its products to reflect that view, according to the former Air Force major general who’s now in charge of AWS’ aerospace initiatives.

“AI, ML, generative AI have become table stakes for our future on-orbit systems and capabilities,” Clint Crosier, director of aerospace and satellite solutions at AWS, said today during Booz Allen Hamilton’s annual Space + AI Summit. “We have reached the limit of human capacity to digest petabytes and petabytes of data in real time and make any sort of intelligent decisions about them. We’ve culminated, so we must further embrace AI, ML and generative AI capabilities for the future.”

Crosier and other speakers at the summit, conducted at the headquarters of the Air & Space Forces Association in Virginia, pointed to the rapidly rising number of satellites in low Earth orbit as a major factor behind the need for more sophisticated AI tools. Over the past decade, that number has risen from about 1,300 to more than 10,000. Keeping track of all those satellites is challenging — and it’s just as challenging to send all that data down to Earth for processing.

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GeekWire

How digital tools can help heal political divisions

Audrey Tang flashes Vulcan salute
Audrey Tang, who served as Taiwan’s first minister of digital affairs, flashes a Vulcan greeting. (Photo © 2025 Danny Ngan / dannyngan.com)

This is a story about how digital tools helped government officials regain the trust of the electorate — but it’s not a science-fiction tale about a future Reunited States of America. Instead, it’s a story about Taiwan, as told by Audrey Tang, the country’s first minister of digital affairs and first transgender cabinet minister.

“It is not inevitable for social media to polarize people,” Tang, who now serves as Taiwan’s cyber ambassador-at-large, said this week at Town Hall Seattle. “It is a consequence of the design of the platform. So, we began bridging systems using our own pro-social media tools.”

Tang traced Taiwan’s moves toward pro-social digital governance during a Seattle Arts & Lectures presentation that also featured a follow-up fireside chat with Ted Chiang, a Seattle-area science-fiction author who has written commentaries on the social impacts of technology for The New Yorker and The New York Times.

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How to tame AI: More regulations, or maybe a boycott?

Gary Marcus and Ted Chiang on stage
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, left, chats with science-fiction author Ted Chiang at Town Hall Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Have the risks of artificial intelligence risen to the point where more regulation is needed? Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus argues that the federal government — or maybe even international agencies — will need to step in.

The Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Aviation Administration could provide a model, Marcus said last week during a fireside chat with Seattle science-fiction author Ted Chiang at Town Hall Seattle.

“I think we would like to have something like an FDA-like approval process if somebody introduces a new form of AI that has considerable risks,” Marcus said. “There should be some way of regulating that and saying, ‘Hey, what are the costs? What are the benefits? Do the benefits to society really outweigh the costs?’”

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NASA and Microsoft team up on AI guide to Earth data

Screenshot of Earth Copilot interface with image of hurricane
A screenshot shows Earth Copilot in action, guiding a computer user to data about Hurricane Harvey. (Image via Microsoft)

Microsoft and NASA have joined forces to develop Earth Copilot, a software tool that uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing to simplify the process of searching and analyzing Earth science data.

The collaboration is part of NASA’s Transform to Open Science Initiative, which aims to make more than 100 petabytes of satellite imagery and other Earth science data more readily available to scientists, educators, policymakers and the general public.

“The vision behind this collaboration was to leverage AI and cloud technologies to bring Earth’s insights to communities that have been underserved, where access to data can lead to tangible improvements,” Minh Nguyen, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, said today in a blog posting about the project. “By enabling users to interact with the data through simple, plain language queries, we’re helping to democratize access to spaceborne information.”

Tyler Bryson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for U.S. health and public sector industries, said Earth Copilot lets users interact with NASA’s data repository conversationally.

Bryson noted that the sheer scale and complexity of the information gathered for NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program can sometimes make finding the right information a daunting task. Earth Copilot doesn’t require users to navigate highly technical interfaces or master the intricacies of geospatial analysis.

“Instead, they can simply ask questions such as ‘What was the impact of Hurricane Ian in Sanibel Island?’ or ‘How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect air quality in the U.S.?’” Bryson said. “AI will then retrieve relevant datasets, making the process seamless and intuitive.”

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Fiction Science Club

Why it’ll get harder to draw the line between AI and us

Scene from "Blade Runner 2049"
The movie “Blade Runner 2049” blurs the line between humans and machines. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Some say artificial intelligence will be humanity’s greatest helper. Others warn that AI will become humanity’s most dangerous rival. But maybe there’s a third alternative — with AI agents achieving the status of personhood alongside their human brethren.

The potential for that scenario is the focus of a newly published book titled “The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood.” The author, Duke University law professor James Boyle, says the book has been more than a decade in the making — which suggests more than the usual prescience about the tech world’s current fascination with AI.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, he recalls the reaction he received when he shared his early ideas about the book with federal judges more than a dozen years ago..

“They’re like, ‘Rights are reserved for humans, naturally born of women!’ OK, well, not necessarily a great crowd,” says Boyle, founder of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “Obviously, things have changed since then. The book seems perhaps less unhinged now than it did then.”

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