Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryArtificial Intelligence

Tesla Cybertruck

What Can the Cybertruck Tell Us About Silicon Valley?

Does Elon Musk’s view of human beings help account for his new truck’s massive armor?

Pardon me but, while I know that a good truck needs to be tough, I never thought it needed to be a Mad Max-styled warrior vehicle. Apparently, Musk does. Why?

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Tesla Cybertruck

Tesla’s Cybertruck Runs on … Hype?

When planning for the future, Tesla should maybe think reality, not Mad Max

The steel ball thrown at the unbreakable window broke the glass. Twice. Unfortunately, Musk had to spend the rest of the demo with a damaged car in the background.

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hot pizza closeup on a table in the background of a group or company of people friends

Pizza Robots Get the Pink Slip

True, the doughbots didn’t make good pizza. But is the message about them or something else?

I have nothing against robots. (I am against bad pizza.) I do, however, get very tired of the science fiction-fantasy of humanity-squashing robots. And that’s all it is: A fantasy.

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Digital numbers Marcus Spiske Unsplash 1526374870839-e155464bb9b2

Your Computer Is an Autistic Savant

It knows everything except what matters

Computers, like a friend of mine, are great at very narrowly defined tasks, like playing Go, retrieving facts, and calculating correlations. But they are utterly unreliable for anything requiring true understanding, wisdom, or common sense.

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Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism - illustration

Transhumanism—Is It a Dangerous Idea?

Some Silicon Valley greats hope to merge with machines to live forever. But what then?

The late philosopher Jerry Fodor (1935—2017) said that the reason “we’re all materialists” is that the alternatives seem even worse. Transhumanism, had he lived to see it develop, would give him pause for further reflection. 

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Chatbot / Social Bot mit Quellcode im Hintergrund

Should AI-Written News Stories Have Bylines? Whose?

Like it or not, AI is here to stay. So, how do we make the best use of it in writing?

Automation can help some aspects of writing. But media outlets get tech “google”-eyes and too often fail to ask the hard questions about what they are automating, how, and why.

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3D Rendering of abstract binary data in glowing blue and red color. For deep machine learning, crypto currency, hi tech product uses. Big data visualization, artificial intelligence. With copy space

The Greatest Threat We Face From AI—and What We Can Do

Here’s a list of things that have really happened with artificial intelligence (AI), in order of increasing severity.

When we get to the end of the list, we will see that it is like beads connected by a string—revealing the most dangerous threat.

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Quantum computer system. Internet connection. Net system. Modern big data. Magic code. .Techno pattern. Intersect grid. Symmetry lines. Energy blocks. Kaleidoscopic shape. AI. Sci-fi

Google vs. IBM?: Quantum Supremacy Isn’t the Big Fix Anyway

If human thought is a halting oracle, then even quantum computing will not allow us to replicate human intelligence

Google’s quantum supremacy claim is certainly fascinating and controversial, but even if true, it ultimately only amounts to an incremental and even inconsequential improvement in the state of AI and ML, due to the still-unmet need for a halting oracle.

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Beautiful Male Computer Engineer and Scientists Create Neural Network at His Workstation. Office is Full of Displays Showing 3D Representations of Neural Networks.

How Algorithms Can Seem Racist

Machines don’t think. They work with piles of “data” from many sources. What could go wrong? Good thing someone asked…

Some of the recent conflicts around algorithms and ethnicity are flubs that social media entrepreneurs will regret. Others may endanger life.

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Stock market Adobe Stock

Investor, AI Isn’t Your Big Fix

In investing and elsewhere, an AI label is often more effective for marketing than for performance

One company sought to leverage Watson, the AI Jeopardy champ, as a stock picker. But lightning-fast search and response don’t have much to do with predicting whether a stock goes up or down…

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3D Rendering of abstract highway path through digital binary towers in city. Concept of big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, hyper loop, virtual reality, high speed network.

How Do We Know What Superintelligent AI Will Do?

If superintelligent systems existed, logic demonstrates that they would be unpredictable

A lower intelligence can’t accurately predict all decisions of a higher intelligence, a concept known as Vinge’s Principle.

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Digital Neurology

What If Technology Causes Some People to Live Forever?

What would it mean for them and for the rest of us?

The authors also warn, “We can be pretty certain, for instance, that rejuvenation would widen the gap between the rich and poor, and would eventually force us to make decisive calls about resource use, whether to limit the rate of growth of the population, and so forth.”

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Working in harmony wth nature concept

Jay Richards: Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines Is Fiction, like SkyNet

Kurzweil’s vision of computers taking over is “arresting,” Richards admits, but “your mind is running away from you if you think about technology in that way.”

In a recent podcast of ID the Future at the COSM conference in Seattle, Catholic University business studies prof Jay Richards looks at Ray Kurzweil’s “sunny” version of strong AI (computers are smarter than us and will take over but don’t worry), as per his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) vs. the pessimistic version (“Skynet” wakes up). In a discussion with Andrew McDiarmid, Richards argues the opposite view, namely that human beings possess something beyond the purely material, something even the most powerful computers will never possess. Podcast here. Excerpts: Jay Richards: (08:45) If you are a materialist who thinks we are purely the result of these blind, material processes, you have something to worry about [with computers Read More ›

Accountant secretary retro woman vintage office

Alan Turing’s original “computer” was actually a human being…

But will human beings now be thought of as computers?

We should reflect on how unthinking use of technology can shape us, despite our commitments.

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Self driving car on a road. Autonomous vehicle. Inside view.

Elon Musk Walks Back Full Self-Driving Claims

His Q3 earnings call with investors was a stark contrast to earlier claims about a robotaxi fleet

Of course, Musk blames other people for “misconstruing” his claims. This certainly isn't the first time he has palmed off responsibility for his own mistakes onto others.

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Autonomous cars on a road with visible connection

Self-Driving Cars: Florida Lawmakers Speed Through Caution Signs

Legislation seems fuzzy about who accepts responsibility when things go wrong with autonomous vehicles

I believe that most autonomous vehicle manufacturers will exercise an abundance of caution. But if laws are fuzzy, reckless manufacturers may escape blame and innocent riders, drivers, and pedestrians will pay for the resultant mayhem.

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Robots welding in a production line

Robot-Proofing Your Career, Peter Thiel’s Way

Jay Richards and Larry L. Linenschmidt continue their discussion of what has changed—and what won't change—when AI disrupts the workplace

We treat the assembly line as if it has always been here, says business prof Jay Richards, but it only dates back to Henry Ford, a century ago. It’s disappearing but work isn’t disappearing. It’s just changing a lot.

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COSM-3887

Is Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity Now Nearer — or Impossible?

In response to Kurzweil’s talk at the COSM Technology Summit, panelists noted that AI achievements are revolutionary in size but limited by their nature in scope

George Montañez, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College, took issue with Kurzweil’s claim that AlphaGoZero needed no instructions to beat humans at the game of Go: “For a system like this to work, a human must define the incentive structure, also encoding the assumptions.” The sheer power of a computing system does not cause it to do anything at all.

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360 futuristic HDRi map. Fractal environment for 3D rendering or VR.

Why AI Art Is Not Art

Author and anesthesiologist Ronald W. Dworkin reaches back to Tolstoy to explain

The fad may already be peaking. The business case for AI art is not especially compelling because there is already a huge consumer art industry catering to every taste in decor. Producing more merely decorative novelty art faster does not create more customers for it.

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