Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

Monthly Archive August 2022

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Old human skeleton in ancient tomb at archaeological excavation

Human Brain Shape Hardly Changed in 160,000 Years

Faces changed, yes, and researchers think diet may have played a role

The changes in human heads over the past 160,000 years were not driven by a changing brain, researchers say. It was the human face that changed, according to a recent article at New Scientist: Comparing the braincases of early modern human children with adults for the first time allowed the researchers to isolate the brain’s role in the evolution of the skull. The team was surprised to find that while the size and proportions of the skulls of H. sapiens children from 160,000 years ago were largely comparable to children today, the adults looked remarkably different to those of modern adults, with much longer faces and more pronounced features. Human faces continue to grow until the age of around 20, Read More ›

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Macro of a bumblebee collecting nectar on flower

Bees Feel Pain. And Therefore… Insect Rights?

As we learn more from research about how various life forms respond to experiences, a more complex picture may raise political issues

From an online newsletter from Vox writer Kenny Torrella, we learn of a research study confirming that bumblebees feel pain: In a study published last week in the journal PNAS, researchers in the United Kingdom found that bees make trade-offs about how much pain they’re willing to tolerate in order to get better food. The finding suggests bees aren’t just mindless automata responding to stimuli but rather conscious, feeling creatures that can experience pain and engage in complex decision-making. Kenny Torrella, “Can a bee feel,” Vox (August 5, 2022) The paper is open access. Essentially, the researchers offered bumblebees sugar water in color-cued unheated containers, at solutions of 10%, 20%, 30%, or 40%. Then they introduced a catch: They heated Read More ›

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Automotive Engineer Use Virtual Reality Headset for Virtual Electric Car 3D Model Design Analysis and Improvement. 3D Graphics Visualization Shows Fully Developed Vehicle Prototype Analysed Optimized

Why Don’t Some Tech Moguls Like Web3, the New Internet?

Web3 is a decentralized, less controlled version of the internet, as George Gilder predicted in Life After Google

In this week’s podcast, “Web3: The next generation of the internet” (August 4, 2022), Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks interviews graduate student Adam Goad and Dr. Austin Egbert, both in computer engineering at Baylor University, on the coming decentralization of the internet. With developments like the ones they discuss looming, Big Tech may be seeing a waistline trim. This is the Part I of the first of the three discussions. https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/08/Mind-Matters-198-Adam-Goad-Austin-Egbert.mp3 A partial transcript and Additional Resources follow. Dr. Marks began by discussing all the services he gets from Google, confessing that he has not needed to go to a library in over two decades. But… Robert J. Marks: Now, is Google just being nice in giving me Read More ›

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humanoid head as concept for Artificial Intelligence, future generations of humans, technology singularity, cyberlife and digitally created personas

Could We Really Increase Human IQ via Genetic Engineering?

One suggested approach is to only implant “intelligent” human embryos and discard the rest, to avoid editing individual genes

At Big Think, we have been told by the managing editor, in a tone of considerable confidence: Because intelligence is such a strong genetic trait, rapidly advancing genetics research could result in the ability to create a class of super-intelligent humans one-thousand times higher in IQ than today’s most brilliant thinkers. Stephen Hsu, Vice-President for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University, believes we are only a decade away from identifying the many thousands of genetic variants that control for intelligence. These variants, called alleles, could then be selected for by the parents of a soon-to-be-conceived child, and possibly genetic engineering could be done on adults to boost their intelligence. Orion Jones, “Genetic Engineering Will Create Super-Intelligent Read More ›

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Senior woman with dog on a walk in an autumn nature.

Can Old Dogs Learn New Tricks? Scientists Aim To Find Out

Not much is known for sure about how dogs age. The Dog Aging Project aims to change that through systematic research programs

Founded in 2014, the Dog Aging Project has enrolled 40,000 pet dogs in an effort to understand, among other things, when dogs’ mental functioning reaches its peak and how it declines with age. Researchers at the University of Washington and Texas A&M are tackling the question via veterinary records, DNA samples, health questionnaires and cognitive tests on the dogs. Better understanding and care for aged pets is a key goal, of course: “There’s a lot we just don’t know about how dog cognition changes with age,” says comparative psychologist Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a collaborator on the Dog Aging Project. What is normal cognitive aging? Do early Read More ›

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Online news in mobile phone. Close up of smartphone screen. Man reading articles in application. Hand holding smart device. Mockup website. Newspaper and portal on internet.

Beyond the Search Engine: Shape Your Own News Feed

A news aggregator keeps you current with news YOU care about or need to know

Recently, we discussed the world beyond Google, in which a variety of easily accessible search engines offers you a choice of different advantages. But now let’s look at something even more focused… A news aggregator collects news stories and other information, sorted by categories and preferences, from across the internet. News Now is one example. Let’s say you want to know more about the asteroid Bennu. You could type “Bennu” into a search engine. But you already know the basic stuff about the asteroid; right now you want to know if there has been any recent news about it. You could go to News Now, choose Science, then Astronomy, then Asteroids, Comets, and Meteoroids, then Asteroid Bennu. You will find Read More ›

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3D illustration, embossed mesh representing internet connections, cloud computing and neural network.

Can Computer Neural Networks Learn Better Than Human Neurons?

They can and do; when artificial intelligence programmers stopped trying to copy the human neuron, they made much better progress

Neural networks are all the rage in computing these days. Many engineers think that, with enough computer power and fancy tweaks, they will become as smart as people. Recent successes playing games and predicting protein folds pour gasoline on the AI fire. We could be on the edge of the mystical Singularity, when humans and computers will merge and we become immortal gods. Or not. Let’s wind the clock back to the beginning of neural networks. In computer science terms, they are actually a very old technology. The earliest version, called a perceptron, (a single-layer neural network) was invented in the 1960s, inspired by McCulloch and Pitt’s early model of brain neurons. But, the perceptron was ignored for decades because Read More ›

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Close-up of a woman's ear and hand through a torn hole in the paper. Yellow background, copy space. The concept of eavesdropping, espionage, gossip and tabloids.

Now the Deaf Can See the Words They Can’t Hear

Speech-to-text technology via cell phone networks and special glasses allow people with hearing loss to see conversations they cannot hear — displayed as subtitles

Dan Scarfe says he first got the idea for eyeglasses that display subtitles (XRAI Glasses) when he watched his 97-year-old grandfather struggle to understand conversations at Christmas last year. For TV, Grandpa had subtitles. The Toronto-based tech entrepreneur realized that speech-to-text and cell phone technology would let him to subtitle everyday conversations and display them on glasses. Here’s how it works: The deaf woman wearing the glasses is reading the subtitles: The AR glasses are connected to a mobile phone which handles the processing and graphics generation. “What our software effectively does is it takes an audio feed from the microphone on these glasses [and] sends it down to the phone,” said Scarfe. “On the phone we are effectively turning Read More ›

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Crystal Prism

Schrödinger Believed That There Was Only One Mind in the Universe

The quantum physicist and author of the famous Cat Paradox believed that our individual minds are not unique but rather like the reflected light from prisms

Consciousness researcher Robert Prentner and cognitive psychologist will tell a prestigious music and philosophy festival in London next month that great physicist Donald Hoffman, quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) believed that “The total number of minds in the universe is one.” That is, a universal Mind accounts for everything. In a world where many scientists strive mightily to explain how the human mind can arise from non-living matter, Prentner and Hoffman will tell the HowtheLightGetsIn festival in London (September 17–18, 2022) that the author of the famous Cat paradox was hardly a materialist: In 1925, just a few months before Schrödinger discovered the most basic equation of quantum mechanics, he wrote down the first sketches of the ideas that he Read More ›

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Cropped image of young beautiful woman working as writer typing on computer laptop with white blank screen while sitting at the wooden working table with sunlight through windows as background.

Four Problems AI Writing Tools Can Create But Can’t Fix

Effective communication doesn’t come in a box or a download. It starts with personal joy and suffering

Recently, we look at what AI writing tools can and can’t do. They might speed up writing your speech, term paper, or pitch by overcoming writer’s block. But they can’t replace creativity. Here are some cautions from the pros — four things that can go wrong: 1. Lack of innovation: Just when you need to sound unique, you risk sounding like one of thousands of people whose output was scarfed into the program. Blogger Bhavya J. Shah notes that an AI program will build in keywords that tend to be picked up by search engines. That said, Al writing tools use algorithms to produce their results. They can’t go beyond that window, therefore the X-Factor which makes writing stand out Read More ›

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heaven cloud sky sunny bright for future wealth fortune day concept

Panpsychism: If Computers Can Have Minds, Why Can’t the Sun?

Sheldrake’s argument that the Sun is conscious cannot be dismissed out of hand by those who insist that computers can become conscious

Recently, biologist Rupert Sheldrake asked at the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Is the Sun conscious?” It’s the sort of question that people might have asked before the dawn of modern science (and the usual answer was yes). Sheldrake is pretty controversial but he is likely right to note a “recent panpsychist turn in philosophy.” Prominent philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the term the “Hard Problem of consciousness,” has also said “We’re not going to reduce consciousness to something physical … it’s a primitive component of the universe.” But Sheldrake might have added that there is a panpsychist turn in science as well. After all, a mainstream neuroscientist recently argued in a science publication last year that even viruses are intelligent Read More ›