Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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3D Illustration with exotic deep space formations
Type
post
Author
Adam Nieri
Date
February 15, 2020
Categorized
Arts & Culture
Tagged
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Star Trek: Picard—On Second Thought, Some Serious Quibbles

A Mind Matters review: Now that I’m four episodes in, I’ve gotta say, the “haters” might be onto something. Not everything but something
Adam Nieri
February 15, 2020
9
Arts & Culture

Why does Picard seem to be obsessed with Commander Data? And what happened to The Federation? Star Trek fans are quick to point out that Star Trek: Picard takes an unnecessary malevolent tone towards The Federation. Why do the Romulans look different? I’m still watching but I’d like some answers.

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Scoring the winning points at a basketball game
Type
post
Author
Gary Smith
Date
February 14, 2020
Categorized
Sports
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Is “Hot Hands” Just a Basketball Myth?

Not so fast…
Gary Smith
February 14, 2020
7
Sports

The paper that busted the myth of “hot hands” is justly famous. But statisticians are not prophets. Craig Hodges’ streak of 19 in a row in the 1991 contest is still too incredible to be explained by luck or cherry-picking. The numbers show that hot hands don’t happen every day, but they do happen.

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face recognition technology concept illustration of big data and security in city with crowd
Type
post
Author
Analysis
Date
February 13, 2020
Categorized
Global Technology, Social Media, Surveillance, Technocracy
Tagged

The Danger AI Poses for Civilization

Why must Google be my helicopter mom?
Analysis
February 13, 2020
8
Global Technology, Social Media, Surveillance, Technocracy

If I have a coffee cup with “AI inside,” it’s probably connected to the Internet, which is just another way of saying that my coffee cup is transmitting data to some company’s servers about my coffee drinking habits. Whatever benefit the app provides will come at a cost to my autonomy, privacy, and competence as a person.

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Photo by Eugene Triguba
Type
post
Author
Brendan Dixon
Date
February 13, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics
Tagged
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AI has changed our relationship to our tools

If a self-driving car careens into a storefront, who’s to blame? A new Seattle U course explores ethics in AI
Brendan Dixon
February 13, 2020
4
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics

A free course at Seattle University addresses the “meaning of ethics in AI.” I’ve signed up for it. One concern that I hope will be addressed is: We must not abdicate to machines the very thing that only we can do: Treat other people fairly.

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Photo by Chris Yang
Type
post
Author
Analysis
Date
February 12, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, Technocracy
Tagged
, , ,

Technology Centralizes by Its Very Nature

Here are some other truths about technology, some uncomfortable ones
Analysis
February 12, 2020
8
Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, Technocracy

To see what I mean about centralization, consider a non-digital tool, say, a shovel. The shovel doesn’t keep track of your shoveling, read your biometrics, and store a file on you-as-shoveler somewhere. It’s a thing, an artifact. So you see, the new digital technology is itself the heart of the surveillance problem. No Matrix could be built with artifacts.

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Middle aged Asian man wearing glasses and medical face mask on public train, Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, air pollution and health concept
Type
post
Author
Heather Zeiger
Date
February 11, 2020
Categorized
Medicine and Health, Surveillance
Tagged
, , , ,

Coronavirus in a World Without Trust

In China, medical heroism thrives despite both paranoia and justified mistrust of authorities
Heather Zeiger
February 11, 2020
10
Medicine and Health, Surveillance

While China’s citizens are living in an information vacuum, the government has stepped up its surveillance strategies in order to track people who have been near someone infected with the coronavirus. Some commentators consider these measures disproportionate to the actual risk posed to others and in violation of human rights. Others see them as necessary.

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Sagrada Familia
Spandrels within the interior arches of the Sagrada Familia
Type
post
Author
Michael Egnor
Date
February 11, 2020
Categorized
Philosophy of Mind
Tagged
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Did Consciousness Evolve?: A Darwinist Responds

Jerry Coyne argues that consciousness is a mere byproduct of useful traits that are naturally selected. But wait…
Michael Egnor
February 11, 2020
6
Philosophy of Mind

The critical problem that consciousness poses for Darwinian evolution is that there is no survival advantage for subjective first-person existence over objective third-person existence.

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Photo by Gayatri Malhotra
Type
post
Author
Jonathan Bartlett
Date
February 10, 2020
Categorized
Mathematics
Tagged
,

Why Does Mathematics Interpret Reality?

In the latest issue of Communications of the Blyth Institute, Gordon Mullings presents his account of why mathematics and physics are connected
Jonathan Bartlett
February 10, 2020
4
Mathematics

The amazing applicability of mathematics to the real world has caused many mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists to pause throughout history. How can something as abstract and ideal as mathematics apply to the real world?

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Schrift
Type
post
Author
Roman Yampolskiy
Date
February 10, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence
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Unexplainability and Incomprehensibility of AI

In the domain of AI safety, the more accurate the explanation is, the less comprehensible it is
Roman Yampolskiy
February 10, 2020
20
Artificial Intelligence

With AI decision-making, a non-trivial explanation can’t be both accurate and understandable but it can be inaccurate and comprehensible. There is a huge difference between understanding something and almost understanding it.

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Photo by Hannes Richter
Type
post
Author
News
Date
February 9, 2020
Categorized
Philosophy of Mind
Tagged
, , ,

Bernardo Kastrup: Consciousness cannot have evolved

How many joules of consciousness would make you a human instead of a chimpanzee? How many more joules of consciousness would make you a genius?
News
February 9, 2020
4
Philosophy of Mind

Computer scientist and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup argues that evolution deals with things that can be measured quantitatively but consciousness cannot be quantified. 

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Futuristic and technological scanning of the face of a beautiful woman for facial recognition and scanning to ensure personal safety.
Type
post
Author
Brendan Dixon
Date
February 8, 2020
Tagged
, ,

Teaching Computers Common Sense Is Very Hard

Those fancy voice interfaces are little more than immense lookup tables guided by complex statistics
Brendan Dixon
February 8, 2020
4

Researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) published a paper recently, deflating claims of rapid progress toward giving computers common sense.

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An abstract computer generated fractal design. A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales.
Type
post
Author
Jonathan Bartlett
Date
February 8, 2020
Categorized
Education, Mathematics
Tagged
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Are Divergent Series Really an “Invention of the Devil”?

The real villain in the piece is horrendously non-specific concepts of infinity. But that can be fixed
Jonathan Bartlett
February 8, 2020
6
Education, Mathematics

It turns out that hyperreal numbers (i.e., infinities that obey algebraic rules) resolve many of the paradoxes that previously plagued conceptions of divergent series. It is now possible to assign specific values to divergent series.

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the-expane-new-terra-season-4
Type
post
Author
Adam Nieri
Date
February 8, 2020
Categorized
Arts & Culture
Tagged
, , , , ,

The Expanse, Season 4: The Best So Far?

A Mind Matters Perspective: Unlike critic Zac Giaimo, I preferred Season 3 but it really depends on what you are looking for
Adam Nieri
February 8, 2020
9
Arts & Culture

Season 4 is, as critic Zac Giaimo notes, integral to character building and plot development for the overall series. I gave it 9/10 in an earlier review. However, I don’t know if I completely agree with Giaimo’s Amazonian optimism. Season 3 set up urgent questions that should be answered by the end of the show, preferably beginning in Season 5.

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Two female women medical doctors looking at x-rays in a hospital.
Type
post
Author
Brendan Dixon
Date
February 7, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health
Tagged
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AI Can Help Spot Cancers—But It’s No Magic Wand

When I spoke last month about how AI can help with cancer diagnoses, I failed to appreciate some of the complexities of medical diagnosis
Brendan Dixon
February 7, 2020
3
Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health

As a lawyer with medical training reminded us recently, any one image is a snapshot in time, a brief part of the patient’s whole story. And it’s the whole story that matters, not a single image, perhaps taken out of context.

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Young birch with black and white birch bark in spring in birch grove against the background of other birches
Type
post
Author
News
Date
February 6, 2020
Categorized
Natural Intelligence
Tagged
,

Researchers: Trees “sense” their height and weight

We have only recently discovered how complex plant communications are
News
February 6, 2020
3
Natural Intelligence

Trees rarely just fall over but we seldom stop to think about why they don’t. Manipulating the weight of downy birch trees, the team discovered that a tree can adjust its stem thickening in relation to its height, especially if the stem is free to move a bit. They were able to test this thesis by studying a mutant tree that sadly lacks that ability.

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Citation
Type
post
Author
News
Date
February 6, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture, Machine Learning, Peer Review
Tagged
,

Anti-Plagiarism Software Goof: Paper Rejected for Repeat Citations

The scholar was obliged by discipline rules to cite the flagged information repetitively
News
February 6, 2020
3
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture, Machine Learning, Peer Review

Not only was Jean-François Bonnefon’s paper rejected by conventional anti-plagiarism software but the rejection didn’t make any sense. Bonnefon, research director at Toulouse School of Economics, was informed of “a high level of textual overlap with previous literature” (plagiarism) when he was citing scientists’ affiliations, standard descriptions, and papers cited by other—information he was obliged to cite accurately, according to a standard format. “It would have taken two [minutes] for a human to realise the bot was acting up,” he wrote on Twitter. “But there is obviously no human in the loop here. We’re letting bots make autonomous decisions to reject scientific papers.” Reaction to the post by Dr Bonnefon, who is currently a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute Read More ›

バイナリーコードの背景
Type
post
Author
Analysis
Date
February 5, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Intelligence
Tagged
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Superintelligent AI Is Still a Myth

Neither the old classical approaches nor the new data scientific angle can make any headway on good ol’ common sense
Analysis
February 5, 2020
11
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Intelligence

The official Winograd Schema Challenge, organized by Levesque and friends to see if AI could learn common sense, was retired officially in 2016 for the embarrassing reason that even the well-funded bleeding age Google Brain team performed poorly on a test set of a few hundred questions.

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A concept of a city being hit by a weapon of mass destruction suffering terrible consequences caused by terrorism or an act of war by a hostile country launching a devastating attack with atomic bomb
Type
post
Author
Bradley A. Alaniz and Jed Macosko
Date
February 5, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Military
Tagged
,

What Can We Learn from History About Stopping AI Warfare?

International agreements can work, but only under certain circumstances
Bradley A. Alaniz and Jed Macosko
February 5, 2020
5
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Military

Historically, the key difference between the international weapons ban agreements that have been honored and the agreements that have not been honored is that the honored ones involved weapons of mass destruction (WMD). An effective ban on malicious AI requires the global community to first agree that such a form (or use) of AI would be a WMD.

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Fake News on TV. The correspondent as the doll controls the puppeteer. Lying information to trick people on TV
Type
post
Author
Denise Simon
Date
February 4, 2020
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Military
Tagged
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AI in War Means Deepfakes as Well as Killerbots

In its Gerasimov and Primikov doctrines of warfare, Russia makes this clear
Denise Simon
February 4, 2020
4
Artificial Intelligence, Military

In 2013, Russian Army General Valery Gerasimov published a strategic doctrine (the Gerasimov Doctrine) where he described applying non-military activities, including false or fake stories and publications, trolls, gas-lighting and technology generally as a form of warfare, like combat. The use of audio and video deep-fakes is expanding in Ukraine, the Baltic States, Western nations, and Africa.

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Profile photo of it specialist guy lady two business people night coworking watch together indicate monitor testing debugging java script code smart professionals office indoors
Type
post
Author
Jonathan Bartlett
Date
February 4, 2020
Categorized
Programming, Work
Tagged
, , ,

What To Ask a Programmer in a Job Interview

Does your candidate have the inner attributes needed to grow as a developer and face new challenges? Key questions can help you find out
Jonathan Bartlett
February 4, 2020
7
Programming, Work

Good computer programmers are very opinionated people. If you find a computer programmer who is not opinionated, that’s usually because the programmer hasn’t taken the time to think about the task. Those types of people tend to be order-takers, not inventors.

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