In the first half, documentary filmmaker Darcy Weir discussed his recent film, Secret Space UFOs: Fastwalkers, which delves into the world of NASA-related UFO encounters in space. "Fastwalkers" is a NORAD/Air Force term that refers to objects that either dip into our atmosphere or stay in space but ping-pong or move about abnormally. Such objects, Weir continued, are picked up on radar and satellite systems and radio telescopes, but the occurrences tend to be kept top-secret. Some 280 incidents were reported by the US Defense Support Program Satellites (DSP), including space-based UFOs "that would come and go as they pleased, stop on a dime, and monitor the planet," he noted.
In one event in 1984, a UFO stopped within a couple of miles of the DSP and just hovered over Earth. Another fastwalker incident picked up by DSP took place in Tehran, Iran, in 1976 when a massive object flew over the city and was seen by thousands of witnesses. F-4 jets were scrambled to take it out, but the unknown craft shut down all their systems and caused power fluctuations around Tehran, Weir recounted. During several space missions, astronauts' spacewalks were canceled due to inexplicable fastwalker activity, he reported, such as when eight lights were detected in formation and other anomalous objects appeared moving in and out of Earth's atmosphere. In general, these objects seem to move under intelligent control and thus could not be space junk, as some debunkers have suggested, Weir added.
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In the latter half, artificial intelligence expert Brian Roemmele envisioned the future of AI, and how, if used properly, the technology may help advance human consciousness. We could think of AI as containing memory with the ability to make connections between the different memories in ways that might not occur to us, he explained. He compared the controversial AI creations of songs using the voices of established musical artists (such as new "Beatles" remixes) to how rap artists have used sampling. While he conceded there are some problematic aspects to authorship, he sees these AI tools as offering a whole new type of creativity. Roemmele was also enthusiastic about the possibility of AI being used to come up with new treatments or cures for diseases-- AI's large language models may be able to discover patterns of information that have eluded humans.
Using AI psychotherapists may be a valuable tool for those who aren't able to meet with someone in person, and in some cases, patients may be more comfortable revealing personal information with an AI program that they otherwise wouldn't share, he detailed. Roemmele talked about the emerging skill of creating prompts or specific queries for AI programs (he is launching coursework related to this). "I use something called 'super-prompting,' which is sometimes six or seven pages worth of text to hypnotize and get AI into a hypnagogic state...to try to elucidate output from the AI models that is otherwise being shunted from us," he stated. Interestingly, he contended that the deeper you get into AI, the more religious you become, as it leads you to believe in the idea of a higher power as you see it demonstrated before you.