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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U.S. government’s Global Engagement Center is shuttered
The GEC’s mandate was to work overseas but it ended up doing a great deal of censorship in the United States.
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A brand new type of glitch: Errors that only AI can introduce…
And replicate indefinitely. It’s called a “digital fossil” and it is very hard to just remove from the database, due to large-scale use of chatbots (LLMs).
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A sober assessment of the deadly gain-of-function virus debate
It’s no use demanding that the public trust scientists if they do nothing to deserve trust.
Read More ›Hype despite ongoing failure to build human-like AI = “scandal”
Even if the LLMs could think like humans, they might not be thinking like productive humans. No wonder Big Tech is slow to admit the problem.
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Can AI really decode dead languages? Or is it too late?
It might help. And deciphered writing is one of the few things that can build bridges for our thoughts across time.
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Journalist: Seizures gave me a healthy respect for the brain
Wright learned to see himself not as the conductor, nor as the orchestra, but the music itself, which gave him the confidence he needed to move on with life.
Read More ›Chinese Neanderthal technology raises some interesting questions
The groups that made the distinctive Quina tools lived 7 to 8 thousand kilometers apart. Did they ever meet?
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Science publishers start tackling the photoshopping problem
It’s telling that criminal justice methods should be necessary in a scholarly science system but that at least protects the honest majority of researchers.
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White House media discusses sit-in against seating changes
You know that the media landscape is changing irrevocably when journalists threaten a sit-in against their subjects.
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