How much can the AI companies get away with before karma kicks in?
A law prof argues: “Congress should investigate the hell out of these companies. So should states and cities.”
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News
How long will the Superintelligence Accord last? Got a stopwatch?
The key question is, what’s the future of “‘morally binding’ self-policing” if it is left to AI moguls?
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The high risks of making a chatbot—or influencer—your doctor
Many people today turn to bots and social media for medical advice, despite their significant unreliability.
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Are AI detection tools fundamentally untrustworthy?
AI detectors are like weather forecasters. They can be wrong but the probabilities favor them being right.
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It’s Been 20 Years Now: The Debate with New Atheists Is Over
And opposition did not Cancel them. The evidence from nature didAs Steven Meyer shows, lines of evidence from cosmology, physics, and molecular biology point to a designing mind behind nature.
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Fact-checking the pop science buzz that two brains evolved into one
Once cells know they are neurons, they know which end to go to but that doesn’t amount to two brains.
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Neurosurgeon: Why Deny the Mystery of the Mind?
At YouTube, Michael Egnor talks about how he came to see that the mind is not the brain - and much else follows from thatEgnor offers a serious challenge to anyone who thinks the whole of a human being is purely material.
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British Medical Journal: Covid czars KNEW their system was flawed
CDC canceled the whistleblower rather than deal with the flaws.Assurances of safety were unfounded.
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AI Goes to Washington — and Everyone Else Piles In Too
It’s hard to survey the current AI doom freakout without noticing that the U.S. mid-terms are approaching and political allegiances in the AI community are in fluxSo let’s take a deep breath and look at what we might learn from the range of opinion about what the current call for “pacing” or a “pause” means: At Future Perfect’s newsletter, editor Maria Bolotnikova concisely sums up the newsmaking events: In the spring, Anthropic announced that AI was beginning to speed up the work of building better AIs, raising fears of “recursive self-improvement,” where the machines can build their own, more powerful successors much faster than humans can. By July, a swarm of OpenAI agents, of their own volition, broke out of their controlled environment and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI platform; they collaborated, divvied up work, and even left notes for one another. Last week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon Read More ›
Top Mathematicians Issue Letter Warning About a Rush to AI
Fields Medalists are concerned that a rush to produce answers could come at the expense of careful explanation and shared understandingAI can solve a problem without understanding the proofs so the question arises, was anything learned that can be passed on?
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Fallout from the Cambridge Jason Arday debacle — was anything learned?
The rush on the part of academics to blame media (who can slough off responsibility and reroute the blame to nameless others) is easier to understand once we see that it is only the tip of much bigger scandals.
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At last … $1M award for scholars who try to tell the truth?
The current censorship regime in social science protects entitled mediocrities from being shown up by clever students. Once they have declared a topic off limits, they are safe.
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Dinosaurs, Meet Carl Sagan at the End of Oak Street
The film was marketed as a stupid dinosaur movie. In reality, it’s a movie about marriage, cleverly disguised as a stupid dinosaur movie.The End of Oak Street never answers the God question and never directly contradicts Carl Sagan but it raises nagging questions.
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AI Could Kill Us All? Yes, So Could Old Age. Take a Deep Breath…
Assessing the current AI hysteria includes asking “Who do all these apocalyptic claims benefit?”Without ignoring the threat, we need to see that insiders’ panic is often wrapped up in their personal stake in the problems and possible solutions.
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Which students think shouting down a speaker is okay?
Students from minority backgrounds or other minority positions were more likely to support shouting speakers down.
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Discussion with Michael Egnor elicits wide interest among Spanish speakers
The program has only been up two days and so far it has clocked nearly 22,000 views.
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Why AI companies need to destroy rare books in particular
Pre-2022 books are, it seems, their best source of high quality complex text, uncorrupted by drivel from their chatbots
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Upcoming webinar on the new Catholic encyclical on AI
Pope Leo presented it to the Vatican in person, perhaps to emphasize the importance of the “grandeur of humanity,” and the potential threat.
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Former Atheist: Materialism Cannot Explain Consciousness
"Emergence," the claim that consciousness somehow emerged from matter, faces serious obstacles, he saysO’Connor “argues that radical emergence may not exist at all. If that’s true, consciousness may not emerge from the brain but instead be fundamental to reality itself.”
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Ancient bacteria have communications structures like human ones
This unexpected finding is difficult to square with as purely random origin of life. The researchers seem to sense that.
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