News
Consciousness Studies Is a “Bizarre” Field of Science
The question of whether machines can be conscious is bound up with attempts to study immaterial things while denying their existence
Researchers: Deep Learning Vision Is Very Different from Human Vision
Mistaking a teapot shape for a golf ball, due to surface features, is one striking example from a recent open-access paper
What Do Thoughts Weigh?
Robert Marks thrashes out with Michael Medved why our minds are neither meat nor softwareIn a wide-ranging conversation, Robert Marks and Michael Medved tackle questions like what it means for something to be not just unknown but “unknowable.”
Read More ›
Is Salad Murder?
A Darwinian biologist wrestles with the significance of plant intelligenceIf plants can sense things and communicate with each other, even though they lack a mind or brain, should they have rights? In an age of sometimes violent animal rights activism, that’s not an idle question. Plant physiologist Ulrich Kutschera, author of Physiology of Plants. Sensible Vegetation in Action (January 2019, German), talked about it in a recent interview: This is a serious issue which is related to plant intelligence. In April 2009, the Swiss Parliament discussed the topic of “plant ethics” and proposed to attribute to plants a kind of “Würde”, which can be translated as “dignity” (3). As a consequence, some radical plant ethics-activists have distributed T-shirts and other propaganda material with the slogan “Salad is murder”. Despite Read More ›
The Human Mind from a Computer Science Perspective
The Blyth Institute’s new journal will offer a focus on artificial intelligence and philosophy as well as philosophical questions in mathematics and engineering
No, Twitter Is Not the New Awful
It’s the Old Awful back for more. It’s the Town Without Pity we all tried to get away from
If Computers Thought Like Fruit Flies, They Could Do More
But even with more sophisticated buzz, there remain "non-computable" things that a computer cannot be programmed to thinkRecently, researchers discovered that fruit flies use a filter similar to a computer algorithm to assess the odors that help them find fruit, only the flies’ tools are more sophisticated: When a fly smells an odor, the fly needs to quickly figure out if it has smelled the odor before, to determine if the odor is new and something it should pay attention to,” says Saket Navlakha, an assistant professor in Salk’s Integrative Biology Laboratory. “In computer science, this is an important task called novelty detection. Computers use a Bloom filter for that, Navlakha, an integrative biologist, explains: When a search engine such as Google crawls the Web, it needs to know whether a website it comes across has previously Read More ›
Consumers Were Not Buying Robots as Friends This Year
The market for drudgery busters remains strong. For dogs and pals, not so much
That Plant Is Not a Cyborg
Or a robot. The MIT researcher's underlying idea is a good one but let’s not “plant” mistaken ideas
Dogs Are Not as Intelligent as Seals?
That doesn't sound right to you? Putting aside the hoopla around IQ tests for furries and flipperies, there is a serious science question about what “intelligence” really is
Quantity vs Quality: Can AI Help Scientists Produce Better Papers?
What happens when scientists simply can't read all their peers' papers and still find time for original research?
Can the Air Force Create Thinking Planes?
Smart drones? They are working on general artificial intelligence (GAI)