In 1949, Huxley thought he was closer to the mark than his former student Orwell was. Later generations have tussled over the question, with revealing results.
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In a wholly materialist environment, science and other disciplines have, by preference, ceased to explore anything but their own ideas.
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By the very nature of collaborative work, if simple fraud for financial gain is not in question, many much harder questions remain, questions where AI might provide information that enables better judgment. But it’s hardly the stuff of “AI Is Taking Over.”
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Vivid imagination doesn’t explain human consciousness (or the ability to abstract); they are one of its characteristics. The second film in the Science Uprising series mocks the prejudice that is always looking for "explanations" of consciousness that really aim at explaining it away.
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Viewers may find the attitudes to experts and to computers shown in the video both quaint and disturbing. For that reason, the video is a helpful reminder of the limits of both.
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Du Sautoy believes that AI will “in the distant future” achieve consciousness. For that, we have no evidence. It is a statement of religious faith akin to that of Anthony Levandowski's AI Church.
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Du Sautoy’s fourth trait—“originality of a truly independent nature”—is a useful part of the definition of creativity. It is, however, the one trait that he admits is missing from AI’s “creative” attempts
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Our surprise at AlphaGo’s move says more about our inability to predict what a program will do than about any creative effort of the program. We’ve known for decades that we cannot predict the results of any moderately complex computer program.
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Artists have nothing to fear from AI if, as philosopher of mind Sean Dorrance Kelly says, creativity does not follow computational rules.
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This week, check out a sci-fi short reminiscent of Wall-E and learn why letting an AI raise your child might not be the best solution to parenting.
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This week, watch a collaboration between deep learning and human creativity produce something far more coherent than Sunspring. And check out an animation on the pitfalls of emotional intelligence.
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One of the factors contributing to fear of AI is the Frankenstein Complex.1 The term, coined by sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov2, originally described fear of the “mechanical man” in the science fiction of old. The complex is named for the young scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, protagonist of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. He stitches human body parts together to create a monster. There is no AI in the story; he brings the monster to life based on an intelligence that was assumed to be resident in biology. “Frankenstein’s monster” later came to be called simply “Frankenstein.” Thomas Edison first filmed the story as a silent movie in 1910 but Boris Karloff’s depiction of the monster in Read More ›
Creating art begins by fully absorbing what makes art good and then extrapolating outward. AI selectively absorbs and “creates” by remixing what’s left. Thus AI is the perfect kitsch creator
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Love, Death, & Robots is rather ambiguous. Perhaps a more descriptive title would be Blood, Butts, and Some Sci-Fi Thrown In.
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Looking for a good “robots, AI, ‘n sci-fi” fix to round out your weekend? Mind Matters has you covered for animations and shorts. For starters, check out DUST, a YouTube channel dedicated to short sci-fi. Its recent AI WEEK (February 11–18) offered “A collection of curated short films dedicated to artificial intelligence and its connection with humanity.” When I say “short,” I mean that the longest is about 30 min; the others are much shorter. So if you have just a few minutes to kill while downing a bowl of spicy curry ramen, I would recommend giving them a watch. For AI narratives, they’re not as clichéd as you might fear. Sunspring | DUST AI Week Runtime | 8:15 Cleanliness Read More ›
Zoe is a great film but it presents a storyline often used to show how inexplicable and ineffable love is in order to get me to believe that it isn’t.
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Looking more closely, we can see that the stupidity and insignificance of human beings is a central dogma in the AI religion.
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Although it doesn’t strictly feature AI, Alita invites us to ponder what it means to be human. Are we defined by a human brain? Or are there aspects of being human that are not solely associated with the brain?
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In the game, Detroit has transcended its current economic despair, emerging as the epicenter of the android revolution. Cyberlife, headquartered there, has become the first company to engineer and produce fully autonomous, general purpose AI androids for consumers.
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Rather than announce that human artists are now doomed, software engineer Ben Dixon interviewed a number of them and came away with a rather different picture, that “AI-generated art will improve, but artistic creativity will remain a human discipline.”
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