In a move clearly inspired by the hyperrealistic movie Armageddon , NASA has decided to attack an asteroid.

The space agency, however, has recklessly overlooked Michael Bay’s ingenious idea of training oil drillers to become astronauts . Nor will the NASA nerds follow the director’s advice of blasting the rock with a nuclear bomb. Instead, they want to smack it with a spacecraft.

Life disregarding art

Smaller asteroids frequently strike Earth , but most burn up in the atmosphere before they reach our planet’s surface.

That doesn’t mean we have nothing to fear, however. Just try telling the dinosaurs that space rocks aren’t dangerous. You can’t — because they were wiped out by an asteroid around 66 million years ago. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.

And if you think that asteroid sounded bad, remember that it was only about 10 km wide. The comet in Armageddon , meanwhile, was “the size of Texas” — around 1,000 km wide. Given Bay’s reputation as a cinematic soothsayer , it’s a relief that NASA is finally taking action.

The agency’s mission, superbly acronymized as DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), will test a novel method of averting future collisions.

“DART will be the first demonstration of the ‘kinetic impactor’ technique in which a spacecraft deliberately collides with a known asteroid at high speed to change the asteroid’s motion in space,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, who will presumably play the role of Billy Bob Thornton .

The spacecraft will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It will then zero in on its target: the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms.”)

The spacecraft can direct itself to hit an asteroid at a speed of up to roughly 24,000 kmph. If all goes to plan, the impact will force Dimorphos to change its orbit.

NASA says the asteroid is the ideal target as it presents no threat to Earth. Scientists will also be able to measure changes in Dimorphos’ orbit with ground-based telescopes.

The agency did not, however, reveal why they chose the kinetic impact technique over Bay’s proven H-bomb method. I presume they just didn’t have the director’s $140 million budget.

Show time

DART’s launch window opens at 1:21AM EST on Wednesday — and you can watch the action live.

NASA’s coverage begins at 12:30PM EST (9:30PM PST on Tuesday), on NASA Television, the NASA app , and the agency’s website .

Unlike Armaggedon , the launch is unlikely to be the highest-grossing film of the year. But at least it won’t replicate Bay’s tendency of giving viewers brain damage.

Facebook’s chief AI scientist says GPT-3 is ‘not very good’ as a dialog system

The GPT-3 language model has inspired both awe and fear since OpenAI unveiled the system in June. But one person who isn’t overly impressed is Facebook‘s Yann LeCun.

In a Facebook post published Tuesday, the social network’s c hief AI scientist said the text generator is “not very good” as a question-answering or dialog system, and that other approaches produce better results.

“It’s entertaining, and perhaps mildly useful as a creative help,” LeCun wrote. “But trying to build intelligent machines by scaling up language models is like building high-altitude airplanes to go to the moon. You might beat altitude records, but going to the moon will require a completely different approach.”

To support his claims, LeCun pointed to a new study of the model’s performance in healthcare scenarios by Nabla, a medtech firm cofounded by two of his former colleagues at Facebook.

The researchers note that Open AI’s GPT-3 guidelines put healthcare “in the high stakes category because people rely on accurate medical information for life-or-death decisions, and mistakes here could result in serious harm.” In addition, diagnosing medical or psychiatric conditions are unsupported uses of the model.

Nonetheless, Nabla tried it out on a range of healthcare use cases.

How did GPT-3 perform?

The researchers found that GPT-3 seemed helpful in finding information in long documents and in basic admin tasks such as appointment booking. But it lacked the memory, logic, and understanding of time for many more specific questions.

Nabla also found that GPT-3 was an unreliable Q&A support tool for doctors, dangerously oversimplified medical documentation analysis, and struggled to associate causes with consequences.

The model also made some basic errors in diagnosis and provided some reckless mental health advice.

The researchers do see some potential for using language models in medical settings. But they conclude that GPT-3 is “nowhere near” ready to provide significant help in the sector:

Their findings won’t shock OpenAI, given the firm’s warnings against using GPT-3 in healthcare. But they do show that many expectations for the model are wildly unrealistic.

Google blames faulty algorithm for blurring Hong Kong protest graffiti on Street View

Google has blamed an algorithmic error for blurring out protest graffiti on the Street View map of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) reports .

The news site reported yesterday that two spray-painted slogans on Nathan Road, the main thoroughfare in the urban area of Kowloon, had been obfuscated on Google Street View, which was updated in Hong Kong last year.

According to HKFP, one read “Xi Jinping must die for the sake of the world,” while the other said “liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” However, both of the messages could be visible when viewed from further down the road.

TNW confirmed that the messages remained blurred from certain views today, although we’ve had to rely on HKPF for the translation.

Google said the blurring wasn’t intentional, but merely the result of an algorithmic flaw.

“Our automatic blurring technology aims to blur faces and license plates so they can’t be identified, but it looks like we didn’t get it right in this instance,” a representative for the Big G told HKFP in an email.

In Google‘s defense, the vast majority of protest graffiti in Hong Kong remains visible on Street View, and the service’s algorithm often inadvertently blurs street signs . But the reports of it obfuscating political slogans will further fears that western tech firms are bowing to Beijing’s censorship demands.

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