ArchiveArticles
Why Do We Think Money Is Real?
It is actually a constantly shifting network of agreements to trust othersIt is actually a constantly shifting network of agreements to trust others. Maria Bustillos, editor of Ethereum’s culturemag, Popula, asks us to think about just what money is before we make up our minds about Bitcoin.
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Screenwriters’ Jobs Are Not Threatened by AI
Unless the public starts preferring mishmash to creativityAn AI-generated film is not an altogether new idea. Rule-based expert systems were used to write short plays over a half century ago, in the early 1960's. Then, as now, don’t expect creativity. That is not what AI does.
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Could One Single Machine Invent Everything?
The king’s perpetual innovation machine was all ready to roll but then a skeptic butted in
George Gilder: Life after Google Will Be Okay
People will take ownership of their own data, cutting out the giant “middle man”In his new book, he calls the successor era he envisions the “cryptocosm,” referring to the private encryption of data, represented by technologies such as blockchain.
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Who Creates Information in a Market?
Do exchange-traded funds (ETFs)' algorithms make personally gathering information obsolete?Algorithmic strategies can only be as good as the information that goes into them. Ignoring how the information is created causes us to misunderstand the dynamics of value creation. Algorithms can leverage information, they can’t create it.
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Why machines can’t think as we do
As philosopher Michael Polanyi noted, much that we know is hard to codify or automate
Why Can’t Machines Learn Simple Tasks?
They can learn to play chess more easily than to walk
The New Politically Correct Chatbot Was Worse?
If you are a human being who talks to people for a living, don’t quit your job
The Brain Is Not a “Meat Computer”
Dramatic recoveries from brain injury highlight the differenceThe brain looks like a computer only if we analyze it as if it were a computer. Our analysis does not mean that it is a computer, and it does not mean that computation explains the mind or even that computational approaches to neuroscience provide genuinely meaningful insight into neurophysiology.
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A Wallet You Can’t Feel?
Will Bitcoin change the rituals around money?It’s tempting to assume that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will succeed because social media did. But digital doesn’t mean magic. Cryptocurrencies will work if the needs met are more significant to most people than the problems created are.
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Boy loses large hunk of brain
And is “doing just fine”
AI That Can Read Minds?
Deconstructing AI hypeThe source for the claims seems to be a 2018 journal paper, "Real-time classification of auditory sentences using evoked cortical activity in humans." The carefully described results are indeed significant but what the Daily Mail article didn't tell you sheds a rather different light on the AI mind reader.
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Is Bitcoin Safe?
Why the human side of security is criticalBitcoin solves a lot of tough problems in very ingenious ways. Unfortunately, however, those benefits don’t tend to translate well for end users, who are not nearly as ingenious as the people developing the system.
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Claim: Yes, you can upload your brain
Fine print: They might have to kill you first
How to hack your unconscious mind
Assuming it exists
Better medicine through machine learning?
Data can be a dump or a gold mine
AI Has a (Wonderful) Plan for Your Life
Tech-savvy religion scholars play with reshaping societyThe team is pessimistic about getting politicians on side and hopes to persuade policy analysts to convince the politicians to adopt the policies their model suggests instead. Wildman predicts, “We’re going to get them in the end.”
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AI Is Not (Yet) an Intelligent Cause
So-called “white hat” hackers who test the security of AI have found it surprisingly easy to fool.
The driverless car: A bubble soon to burst?
Car expert says journalists too gullible about high techWhy do we constantly hear that driverless, autonomous vehicles will soon be sharing the road with us? Wolmar blames “gullible journalists who fail to look beyond the extravagant claims of the press releases pouring out of tech companies and auto manufacturers, hailing the imminence of major developments that never seem to materialise.”
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