If we reach the point where most people cannot muster the level of sustained attention needed to read a book, political changes unwelcome to many of us are inevitable.
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Why had no one tried using an AI detector on Orélien’s—and everyone else’s—work as a *condition of entry* into the writing contest?
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In addition to the Doomers, there is the AI rights crowd, worried that we will reduce intelligent AI agents to slavery.
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Perhaps the endless theorizing with so little result reflects what chance can produce. If researchers ever felt they could risk trying design, we could see if more insight follows.
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Instead of claiming, like the eliminationist, that neither humans nor slime molds are really intelligent, the panpsychist will claim that they both are — and then minimize the difference between them.
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Some researchers seem to think that communicating with animals via AI will show that they have minds like human ones. But their behavior does not suggest that.
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Materialists cannot apply common standards for assessing evidence because they must refute all evidence of non-materialism. That makes them hard to argue with.
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In an interesting cultural development, it’s easy to find people on the left and the right who are skeptical of the Doomers’ motives.
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The stifling of creativity that Cancel Culture imposes and the warping of classics that Wokeness inflicts are symptoms, not causes of decline.
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If academic papers in a discipline can be mostly AI written, why credential scholars anyway? Perhaps the discipline itself is obsolete.
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Simmons is, among other things, a disaster preparedness expert. He portrays the growing panic in and around Chicago as word of a potential nuclear blast leaks out.
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If cognition can exist without a specific material substrate, one possible implication is that an underlying force seeks expression by whatever means are available.
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This year, Harvard Magazine featured an article that asserts that the Democrats have lost key tech industry endorsements. Let’s see if that matters.
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It’s easy to see why people might latch onto the idea of a reptilian brain as an explainer for complex topics. But the neuroscience underpinning it is just not that persuasive.
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Community notes are usually the fate of people who pass on debunked or fake news. But Nature took that risk with its surprising approach to the Jason Arday tragedy/scandal.
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The universe contradicts the eliminativist point of view. The laws that govern it are not physical things but they are real.
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The challenge, moving on, is that better scholarship means listening to those who challenge conventional ideas instead of serially editing them.
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At the Brussels Signal, tech analyst Norman Lewis has been discussing a form of indoctrination that is becoming increasingly popular in the European Union, and doubtless elsewhere: prebunking — “a preventative measure that aims to prepare audiences to recognize and resist information risks.” (UNHCR) Prebunking is beloved of bureaucrats and you will hear a great deal about what a good thing it is from many sources — sources that should, under the circumstances, give pause for thought: ● “What Is Prebunking? It’s better to inoculate against disinformation than to debunk later.” (Psychology Today, 2021) ● “False information is everywhere. ‘Pre-bunking’ tries to head it off early” (NPR, 2022) ● “What is Pre-Bunking: The Power of Framing Before the Facts” (Simply Read More ›
Computers are not conscious simply because they are programmed to make decisions; plants are likely in the same position.
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Grieftech poses genuine problems when avatars seem to keep the deceased unchanged in a changing world — or change just when we want them to.
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