CategoryArtificial Intelligence
Is Microsoft’s New AI System Better Than Doctors? Probably Not.
A critic notes that Microsoft’s AI system didn’t solve the problems, but merely repeated the solutions that it was trained on
Preemptive Pardon in “Big Beautiful Bill” Protects Big AI
But is Big AI the new “military-industrial complex”?
The State of Reading in an AI World
Are we heading to a post-literate society?
Is the Reverse Flynn Effect — Declining Intelligence — Real?
IQ tests were never meant to measure memorization or familiarity, yet that’s precisely what’s happening
MIT Study Associates ChatGPT Use with Cognitive Trouble
The ChatGPT users in the study lost major ground in creativity, memory, and deep thinkingA new study from MIT links excessive use of ChatGPT to a decline in critical thinking skills. Instead of making users more productive, the study finds that dependence on ChatGPT is associated with loss of memory and cognitive decline. In short, the AI tool isn’t making us smarter. It’s doing quite the opposite to us. The researchers divided participants into three groups: the LLM group, the search engine group, and the brain-only group. Here is a section of the abstract from the study, Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed Read More ›
Did Orwell’s 1984 Predict the Rise of AI?
A simple act like writing a diary entry emblemizes the struggle to stay humanThree books stand at the top of the dystopian genre, even several decades after their publication: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury; and perhaps supremely, 1984, by George Orwell. Each novel features versions of a futuristic society in which freedom is restricted (through different means) and foresees a bleak existence governed by the basest impulses in the human race. While Orwell’s masterpiece is typically hailed as a warning of the surveillance state, where individuality is erased in favor of group identity, it is also about the rise of technologies that replace human thought. Novelist Walter Kirn points this out in a recent episode of America This Week: 1984 is the story of the extinguishing, the Read More ›
AI Productivity Hype: The New “Cargo Cult Science”?
Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term to describe imaginary scenarios for success based on simple misunderstanding of realities
Ohio State to Require Students to Learn “AI Fluency”
The university is embracing, rather than rejecting, AIIf you can’t beat ’em, join ’em? Ohio State University recently announced that each of its students must take an AI skills class starting in the Fall of 2025. Micaiah Bilger of The College Fix reports, Every undergraduate major at Ohio State will include classes that incorporate “AI Fluency,” NBC 4 WCMH reports. The public university’s leaders have developed a strategy that they believe will equip students to use the technology both creatively and responsibly. As AI continues to shape and disrupt higher education, administrators and teachers have to grapple with how to deal with this powerful technology. Many reports, personal testimonies, and commentary illustrates how much students today depend on AI systems like ChatGPT to do their assignments. Professors, meanwhile, Read More ›
AI Still Can’t Think
It can only create the appearance of thought
The Limits of What We Can Learn From Studying Creativity
In this third and final part of my essay, I look at what sets us apart from machines: Our capacity to leap from commonsense inferences to entirely new ways of understanding reality
If AI Takes Too Many Jobs, Could the Birth Rate Plummet?
AI's potential impact on birth rates and the working class
Stranger Things: Why Mad Scientists Are Mad
At the highest levels, creativity seems to bypass the deliberate, structured thought process altogether
The Slow Decline of a Key Aspect of Creativity
The mechanization of mind is changing how we think about creativity — and not in a good way
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 Can Deceive and Blackmail
Is AI getting out of control?
Philosopher George Gilder Talks About AI and Real Innovation
Host Wesley J. Smith asks, “Should we be excited or fearful, optimistic or quaking in our boots?”
AI’s Contradictory Impact on Productivity: Squeezing a Balloon
AI appears to give support workers a big revolution in productivity. But it is somewhat like a child squeezing a balloon; the air pushes out someplace else
How the Physicalist Theory of Mind Blows Itself Up
If we examine its basic premise that the brain is a computer and the mind is software we come across a startling contradiction
The Fiction of Generalizable AI: A Tale in Two Parts
Why intelligence isn’t a linear scale — and why true generalization remains unsolved