Casey Luskin
Will Digital Inbreeding Be the End of AI?
Without the creative input of humans, AI is doomed to deteriorate.
Does Passing the Turing Test Guarantee We’ve Created True AI?
A true test of AI will be able to distinguish between AI and human intelligence.
At COSM ’23, Futurist Ray Kurzweil Preaches the Gospel of Artificial Intelligence
The technology futurist thinks AI is humanity's destiny.
Big Innovations Can Depend on Really Little Things
Stuff that is far too small to see can change the worldThe opening panel on Thursday morning at COSM 2022 was “The New Nanocosm.” — the world of really small things like molecules. The first panelist to speak was Chris Harrison, CEO of CTEC (“Clean Thermodynamic Energy Conversion”) Energy, a British company which seeks to convert industrial waste into energy. Its basic premise is that there is “an incredible amount of excess heat that was coming off engines and going into the atmosphere,” and this heat could be converted into usable work. The company takes waste materials — Harrison cited municipal solid waste, medical waste, chemical waste, hazardous waste — and uses it to generate electricity. The remaining waste can also be re-purposed. The conversion process yields a “fine ash” which Read More ›
Could AI ever pass the Van Gogh test?
Van Gogh was crazy but he was talented and AI can be neitherThe Van Gogh Test for sheer creativity? Thursday night at COSM presented a live, in-person interview with Federico Faggin, the Italian physicist and computer engineer who co-won the prestigious Kyoto prize in 1997 for helping develop the Intel 4004 chip. Faggin was interviewed by technology reporter Maria Teresa Cometto, who asked him to regale the audience with tales about helping to design early microchips. Eventually Faggin recounted a time when he was “studying neuroscience and biology, trying to understand how the brain works,” and came upon a startling realization: And at one point I asked myself, “But wait a second, I mean these books, all this talk about electrical signals, biochemical signals, but when I taste some chocolate, I mean Read More ›
Experts at COSM Debate Whether Chatbot was Sentient
Turned out quite pleasant. Google fired him in 2022 - but what really happened there?Last Thursday morning at COSM, a panel of experts debated whether truly sentient artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially exist — and even whether it already does. Robert J. Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University, opened by criticizing the Turing test, as a measure of whether we’ve produced genuine AI. Developed by the famous English mathematician and World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, the test holds that if we can’t distinguish a machine’s conversational discourse from that of a real human, then it must exhibit humanlike intelligence. Marks maintains that this is the wrong test for detecting true AI. In his view, the Turing test fails because it “looks at a book and tries to judge Read More ›
Is Information the Future of Medicine and Biology?
University of Washington’s Georg Seelig wants to “design molecules” and “write genetic information”At a Thursday afternoon panel at COSM 2022, pioneers in biology had a chance to talk to the public about the code that is written into our genomes. First up was Georg Seelig, a Swiss synthetic biologist and researcher at the Paul Allen School of Computer Science at the University of Washington (UW). He described his bioengineering research as aiming to learn “to read and write the language of the genome,” which is a “sort of a code” written in a “language.” Popular wisdom might hold that we have fully deciphered this language — and Seelig acknowledges that “over the last few decades, we’ve really learned a lot about the syntax of this language.” But he explains there’s still much Read More ›
Harvard U Press Computer Science Author Gives AI a Reality Check
Erik Larson told COSM 2021 about real limits in getting machines that don’t live in the real world to understand itThe speaker told the audience that although computers can do many impressive things, they will never achieve artificial intelligence. Who is “they” in the sentence you just read? The audience or computers? You immediately know the answer. It’s computers, because we know that researchers are struggling how to figure out how to endow computers with AI. It makes no sense to talk about an audience having artificial intelligence. You intuitively understanding the meaning of “they” in the sentence without even having to think about it. What if the sentence had read: The speaker told the audience that although computers can do many impressive things, they will be sorry if they bought one of this year’s models. Again, it is obvious Read More ›
Flash Graphene: Born Again Plastic Is Planet-Friendly
Chemist James Tour outlined a new approach to carbon waste at COSM 2021: Use electricity to turn it into graphene, to be recycled as new materialsRemember that mindblowing scene in Back to the Future II where Doc Brown shows up in his flying Delorean and throws trash into the “Mr. Fusion” unit in the back — and it’s instantly converted into fuel? We aren’t quite there yet. But if what Rice University synthetic chemist James Tour told COSM 2021 proves right, then we can take current trash — e-waste, food waste, useless wood, discarded plastic, old tires, etc. — and reclaim it at low cost to make materials that we can incorporate into many technologies. Tour and his team have developed methods for turning carbon waste into graphene, an allotrope of carbon that can be stacked to form graphite (best known as the “lead” in Read More ›
Manipulating Molecules: Combining Info + Nano for Better Medicine
At COSM 2021, scientists like Jim Tour and entrepreneurs like Matt Scholz offer a window into how we are learning to manipulate the building blocks of lifeYesterday COSM 2021, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, synthetic organic chemist James Tour, and biotech entrepreneur Matthew Scholz looked at how nanotechnology (working directly with very small things, like molecules) will advance biology and medicine. “Oscar Wilde said nature imitates art,” Meyer opened by saying. And today we’re going to see that “technology is now able to imitate and even in some ways, improve upon nature.” He noted that since the 1960s we’ve been learning that living cells function because of the actions performed by molecular machines—those molecular machines are built using information. For example, consider the cell’s power source: A rotary engine called ATP synthase in the mitochondria of cells produces the energy. As a camshaft with lobes spins Read More ›