He believes that the merger will eventually make the whole universe intelligent. Kurzweil’s critics believe that the superintelligent computers he needs can’t exist. If the critics are correct, we have misread the AI revolution.
Read More ›
The teens' project, Critics Company, has alerted people to the possibilities of digital media like YouTube to tutor themselves in skills that can fetch money or jobs or even help them start their own businesses.
Read More ›
As Gioia says, jazz depends on the “personality of the individual musician.” And the blindspot of AI creativity is: There’s no one home.
Read More ›
Will the predicted tsunami of fake news and advertising make much difference? Possibly, but in ways that might surprise you.
Read More ›
Unfortunately, patterns are not always a source of information. Often, they are a meaningless coincidence like the 7-11 babies this summer.
Read More ›
Is there evidence that human minds function like computers and can soon be reproduced in software, as Hofstadter believed?
Read More ›
“The trouble is," says Brendan Dixon, "any technique that works by searching ‘to the end of the game’ will not help self-driving cars (as an example) one bit…unless they have also mastered predicting the future. There is no ‘end of the game’ for nearly all decisions we make.”
Read More ›
The convincing film was great for Tom’s Twitter feed but less great for what it says about our judgment as viewers. We believe too much AI hype.
Read More ›
As Ted Gioia makes clear in his discussion of jazz, swirling a bit of randomness into the mix will not help.
Read More ›
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.
Read More ›
In a wholly materialist environment, science and other disciplines have, by preference, ceased to explore anything but their own ideas.
Read More ›
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.”
Read More ›
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.
Read More ›
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.
Read More ›
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.
Read More ›
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
Read More ›
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.
Read More ›
Artists have nothing to fear from AI if, as philosopher of mind Sean Dorrance Kelly says, creativity does not follow computational rules.
Read More ›