ArchiveArticles
Time Machine (1960) Back to the Past, and Then Fast Forward Again
In Part 4, we look at why the movie was, in many ways, better than the book
Xi and Putin Are Transhumanists – Are You Surprised?
Transhumanism is mostly a materialistic wail of despair in the night, a desperate quest for hope for those who are terrified that death leads to obliteration
Wide AI, While Still Just Automation, Is a Genuine Advance
Part 2: Truly general intelligence is still a mystery. In fact, it’s more mysterious now than it was in 2016
Consciousness Can’t Be Uploaded as AI? — Of Course It Can’t!
Converting ideas and memories into bits in a computer program does not recreate in the computer the person whose minds and memories they are — only a simulation
Surprise: Artificial intelligence Is Still Just Automation
I wrote this in 2016. And it is still true in 2025. A reflection in three partsWhen I first wrote this almost a decade ago, “AI” was already a cultural Rorschach test. To some, it was exciting and futuristic. To others, it was ominous, Orwellian, or just marketing spin. Automation, by contrast, was the unglamorous cousin that conjured images of soulless machines taking over the last shreds of human purpose. But from the start, my view was simple: what we call “AI” today is still just automation. And automation is not a mind. That argument has aged better than I expected. In the years since, we’ve seen an explosion of so-called AI — from self-driving cars to ChatGPT — yet the distinction between AI and automation remains almost universally misunderstood. Recently, computational linguist Emily Bender and Read More ›
Michael Egnor at The Stream: How Materialists Refute Themselves
In Part 3, he also talks about how fellow health care personnel and patients have responded to The Immortal Mind, which makes a case for the immortal soul
At COSM 2025: When AI Meets Tinseltown… Look Out!
Superagent Ari Emanuel will be back at COSM this year, to talk about how AI is reimagining Hollywood
Where X Went Wrong in Dealing with Links to Independent Media
Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed it to X, and made it a nightmare for writers trying to share their work
GPT 5.0 Doesn’t Understand But Is Eager to Please
Over a number of tries, it couldn’t get the labels on an illustration right because it does not understand what the words mean and how they relate to the image
In Connecticut, the Horrors of AI Descend with Full Force
AI as “friends” and “confidants”? David Klinghoffer warns that this way of talking and thinking needs to be recognized as encouraging delusion
Michael Egnor at The Stream: How the Mind Transcends the Brain
In his interview with John Zmirak, Dr. Egnor points out that epileptic seizures do not involve abstract thought because that type of thought is not simply a product of the brain
Thanks to Our Screens, We’re Heading For a Post-Literate Culture?
Whatever one’s opinions regarding solutions for declining literacy rates, people can always start to brew change in their own lives and communities
Will “Citation Justice” Be Fair to Science?
Should scientists cite sources for the purposes of social justice or should they cite for information purposes alone?
Podcast: Mind Before Matter: How an Idealist Looks At the World
Bruce Gordon argues that mind is basic to reality and that materialist views of consciousness do not explain what we know about experience or the world
Monday Micro Softy 42: Bacteria Multiply by Dividing
But our puzzlers must solve this math question without doing either. And no calculators allowed.
Winds of Change: Skeptic Mag Defends Sex Binary Nature of Humans
It's not Skeptic Magazine that has changed. Rather, a change in our society created a need for a psychologist to come forward there to defend so obvious a proposition
Fiction: AI Can Even Turn Ghosts Into Glitches
Ken Francis’s short stories provide snapshots of a dystopian urban world that proves hard to distinguish from an AI hallucination
The Time Machine (1960): The History of the Eloi and the Morlocks
In Part 3 of my four-part review, we look at the difference the Cold War made to how the Eloi and the Morlocks are portrayed