Do Big Brains Matter to Human Intelligence?
We don’t know. Brain research readily dissolves into confusion at that pointWe also know very little about the human brain. Take this controversy about why the large human brain evolved...
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Why machines can’t think as we do
As philosopher Michael Polanyi noted, much that we know is hard to codify or automate
Why Can’t Machines Learn Simple Tasks?
They can learn to play chess more easily than to walk
Boy loses large hunk of brain
And is “doing just fine”
GIGO alert: AI can be racist and sexist, researchers complain
Can the bias problem be addressed? Yes, but usually after someone gets upset about a specific instance.From James Zou and Londa Ziebinger at Nature: When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become ‘he said’ or ‘he wrote’. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. Now where, we wonder, would a mathematical formula have learned that? Maybe it was listening to the wrong instructions back when it was just a tiny bit? Seriously, machine learning, we are told, depends on absorbing datasets of Read More ›
Jay Richards asks, can training for an AI future be trusted to bureaucrats?
We hear so much about how the AI revolution gobbles industrial era jobs that we don't notice the digital era jobs unfilled.On Tuesday, entrepreneur Ivanka Trump told Wall Street Journal readers, The assembly line, energy plant and retail store have changed dramatically in the past 25 years—and the jobs have, too. Nearly 1 in 5 working Americans has a job that didn’t exist in 1980, many in technology, the fastest-growing segment across all industries. Such rapid change is one reason 6.6 million U.S. jobs are currently unfilled. More. Currently unfilled? We hear so much about how the AI revolution is gobbling industrial era jobs that the shortage of people trained for digital era jobs takes a while to register. Trump goes on to discuss new legislation to address the shortage by providing more relevant education to future jobseekers (paywall). Meanwhile, from the Read More ›
Neurosurgeon Outlines Why Machines Can’t Think
The hallmark of human thought is meaning, and the hallmark of computation is indifference to meaning.
AI machines taking over the world?
It’s a cool apocalypse but does that make it more likely?Doomsday thinking is easily mocked. The character marching hairy and barefoot under his “End Is Near” sign, is a staple of cartoons in middlebrow mags. Yet when media magnets market doomsday scenarios—like the late Stephen Hawking (“worst event in the history of our civilization”) and Elon Musk (“an immortal dictator from which we would never escape”) — it’s a Cool apocalypse.
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