Richard W. Stevens
The Human Body From an Engineer’s Perspective
My late father was a naval engineer. There are fundamental ways an engineer must think about any designed system. Let’s apply them to the body
TikTok Is Not Just Overgrown Chatting and Email
Foreign adversary’s AI-empowered threats to national security tip Supreme Court scales against TikTokSocial media like TikTok today interconnect active speakers and active viewers in all directions. The system monitors and stores all the communications, extracting volumes of data for each individual user. In China where the law allows it, the government can scan and analyze not only the speakers and viewers but can also retrieve specific facts about all of them. The government can restrict messages based upon speaker, viewer, and content — and use AI to craft and send personalized, tailored messages aiming to influence users’ buying and voting decisions, not to mention their psychological well-being. TikTok and the First Amendment Broad-band internet services, multi-billion-dollar social media, and expanding central government are merging into a muscular octopus of surveillance, data Read More ›
Can AI Really Code the Value of Humans?
The new book Soulless Intelligence urges that we program all AI systems to treat all humans as infinitely valuable – the only exceptions being criminals and aggressors
First Federal Report on Drone Sightings Flunks Credibility Test
Whether reports are human- or AI-generated, they need careful scrutiny
Sci-Fi Becomes Real: Killer Robot Dogs
They are just one manufacturing cycle away
How To Sue A Chatbot For Causing Suicide
If your child committed suicide because an online chatbot effectively encouraged him to do so, could you sue the chatbot makers?
California Censorship Law Loses First Round in Legal Battle
Court zeroes in to protect First Amendment rights to vigorous political speech and expression
California: The New “Deepfakes” Ban Violates the First Amendment!
Outrage over the AI-generated imitations of Kamala Harris’s voice distracts from the issues around the state’s power grab over media
Yes, the Billion-Records Data Breach Is Real
My family and I were victims. Here’s how to find out if you are too and what you can do about it
Google Decision Challenges Trillion-Dollar Internet Gatekeeper
How one company cornered the market for the human mind
The Dark Art of Online “Nudging”: How to Protect Yourself
Organizations of all kinds use psychological tricks to move our minds as we browse — but a handy acronym helps detect them
Attention: Mind Matters News Has Been Prebunked!
ChatGPT-4 produced attacks on Mind Matters News, aimed at people who had never heard of it (prebunking), based only on the About page and the Introduction
Economics Assumes Human Beings Have Free Will
Every waking moment we humans live out a constant fact underlying all economic science: we act.“Free will denial is a cornerstone of materialist–determinist ideology,” wrote Dr. Michael Egnor here in February 2024. The deniers say we are “purely physical machines, meat robots.” Dr. Egnor cited well-known people who have prominently denied humans have free will. Dr. Egnor challenged deniers to demonstrate through their own actions that they truly have no free will. They will fail for Dr. Egnor’s stated reasons, plus one more: economics. The science of economics describes the behaviors of individual humans as they pursue their lives. Economics has discovered certainties, such as the Law of Supply and Demand, that describe how people produce, consume, trade, save, invest, and anticipate the future. Economics succeeds because it grasps certain universal truths about free-will, non-material, Read More ›
Deep Fake Videos Can Upgrade Political Humiliation and Rule by Fear
AI human impersonation video technology promises rule by terror to degrees never before imagined
Are Chatbots Biased? The Research Results Are In
The results are obvious and dramatic. Inject the preferred training materials and the chatbot will “believe” whatever the post-trainer intendedPeople have noticed political biases in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot systems like ChatGPT, but researcher David Rozado studied 24 large language model (LLM) chatbots to find out. Rozado’s (preprint) paper, “The Political Preferences of LLMs,” delivers open access findings from very recent research, and declares: When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. The Chatbots’ Landslide of Opinion As reported in the New York Times, the paper restates that “most modern conversational LLMs when probed with questions with political connotations tend to generate answers that are … left-leaning viewpoints.” Using the verb “tend to” makes the conclusion appear tepid. The Read More ›
EU’s Massive New AI Law Won’t Stop Worst-Case Systems
The Act is drafted using legal language that confers broad additional power to governments
Cyber Plagiarism: When AI Systems Snatch Your Copyrighted Images
Outright copying of others’ images may put system’s owners in legal jeopardy. Let's look at U.S. legal decisions
Human Impersonation AI Must Be Outlawed
I didn't used to think that AI systems could threaten civilization. Now I do.