Is Bluesky finding the limits of the sky?
The echo chamber of approved speech is turning off users, entrepreneur Mark Cuban charges
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Smartphones in North Korea — a surveillance paradise
An escapee reports, “The squads would confiscate her phone and read her text messages, she adds, to make sure she had not used any South Korean terms.”
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Famous Harvard ethics researcher fired for data fraud
Harvard’s motto is Veritas (Truth). That may require a hard limit on the creative rule-breaking celebrated in Gino’s bestselling book.
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Jobs that are safe from AI — and why they are
In many jobs, most people would really prefer to work with a sympathetic fellow human being.
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Will white collar work really be obsolete any time soon?
Some of us would look forward to a measured analysis of why hype triumphs so easily over observation in these matters.
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Hawk learns to monitor traffic signals to catch urban prey
Urban environments created by humans may bring out many unexpected adaptations in other life forms, taking advantage of the regularity that humans build in.
Read More ›AI is booming in every way except in productivity
Funk and Smith point out that the AI industry acts like it knows this, even if it doesn’t admit as much.
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OpenAI announces that it will remain a non-profit — sort of
Sam Altman, chatbot developer OpenAI’s CEO, is a billionaire ($1.5B) so non-profit status should not be assumed to be equivalent to voluntary poverty.
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AI developer wants to try to translate animal languages
Caution: If we assume that cats have a language that needs translation the way human languages do, we will likely find instead that his behavior IS his language
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Study: Another crow first — crows can detect geometric shapes
Some of us suspect that this talent is found in crows because they are so often studied rather than because they are unique in detecting shapes.
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Why chatbots commonly make so many false statements
An AI pro points out that because chatbots (large language models) don’t really think, the likelihood of them being ruled by biases is greater than that of humans.
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Study: Neanderthals invented their own tech, didn’t copy others
The team suggests that their find shows that Neanderthals were able to plan ahead, not only in making the tool, but in the way it was used.
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Hero rat finds 109 landmines, breaking record
Human-rat partnership projects take advantage of the human’s ability to gain the trust of the rat along with the rat’s very acute sense of smell.
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Insights into why chatbots hallucinate, spewing false information
They hallucinate because the statistical approximation they use lacks reliability and nothing gets fact-checked. This is a built-in problem.
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AI “friends” promote disturbing delusions in vulnerable users
To no one’s surprise, surely, bad actors are exploiting this trait. It will probably have to end in a serious tragedy before enough people start paying attention.
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AI researchers: Chatbot companions are a no-no for kids
Their screenshots show how vulnerable teens could get into real trouble with this kind of thing.
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A new interpretation for the alive-and-dead quantum cat
Maybe quantum theory is merely symbolic or incomplete, as Baggott suggests. But maybe reality is simply more complex than classical physics assumes.
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Old-fashioned journalists aren’t dead; they’re on Substack
There is no turning back. The historically Democrat-leaning legacy media are losing voters even among young Democrats.
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Indian teen can multiply five-digit numbers in his head
It’s not a genetic endowment and can’t simply be the outcome of practice so how some people can do this remains a mystery.
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Consciousness in unborn children: Touching the third rail
When it comes to honest enquiry about early human consciousness, the third rail of abortion may derail the research train.
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