FAIL: AI “Detects” Plagiarism When It Didn’t Happen
Relying on bots alone, without input from experts, has just not worked for science publicationsA consensus is emerging that the system will always need a human in the loop.
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Is Deep Virtual Reality the Next Big Market Disrupter?
When media moves from capturing attention by being different to capturing ever smaller slices of users' time, the market is ripe for disruptionHow can internet-based media consume more user time? First, they will move away from a screen interface to a voice- and face-recognition interface. But the next logical step is probably deeply immersive virtual reality seeping into everyday life.
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True Believer Loses Faith in Fully Self-Driving Cars
Levandowski sees the future—and it is tech aids for safer drivingFully autonomous vehicles—aka self-driving cars—are a techno-utopian fantasy that stands little to no chance of realization in the coming decades. The industry is slowly starting to separate that fantasy from achievable reality.
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Can AI Combat Misleading Medical Research?
No, because AI doesn’t address the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies” that produce the bad dataIn this week’s podcast, Pomona College’s Gary Smith, author of The AI Delusion, talks with Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks about why so many bad research papers are accepted in the science establishment and in media.
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How Can AI Help Us With What We Care About?
Instead of making us part of things we don’t care about?Despite the misguided hype, AI is just another tool. So it is encouraging to read about the ways that Japanese firm Hitachi is using AI as a tool to provide services that would otherwise be difficult or unavailable.
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Winning Tag Lines Are Hard Enough To Write…
But AI really flops at thatAI tools help us do things better, faster, or more efficiently. But they lack the mind needed to know when “I’m loving’ it” is the winning slogan—and stop there.
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Experiment: Journalists’ Reliance on Twitter “May” Lead to Pack Journalism
The odd thing is that Twitter ‘s importance may actually be on the waneMainstream media did not really understand clearly enough how their world was changing to adapt quickly when mass digital media was young.
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Did Big Social Media Kill Traditional Media?
In some ways, traditional media have co-operated with their own demiseThe problems created by new media monopolies won't be resolved by propping up traditional media, any more than modern traffic congestion would be resolved by the horse-drawn wagon.
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Jordan Peterson to Found New Free Speech Platform
Thinkspot is being developed as a free speech alternative to Facebook, YouTube, and PatreonHis proposal coincides with several recent Big Social Media decisions that have raised eyebrows.
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How Much Difference Can AI Deep Fakes Really Make in Elections?
Maybe not much and that truth should make us uncomfortable
Will Facebook’s New Focus on “Community” Groups Prevent Abuses?
When you look a little closer at the proposal, you will see that the answer is noFacebook's move to a more group-focused interface gives the appearance of stronger privacy and community orientation but the structure and logic of social media ensure that these are appearances rather than realities.
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McPathogens: Are McDonalds’ Order Kiosks Clean? Another Look
Can rebuttals exposing fake news be fake news themselves? Judge for yourself
Will Space Aliens Become a New Majority Religion?
Nearly as many young Americans believe in ET as in God, says religion profPopular culture is looking for high-tech ETs to be its saviors and Silicon Valley aspires to become those ETs. What could possibly go wrong?
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In 2018, Sci-Fi Phoned the Seventies, It Seems…
…for high-tech overpopulation scares. How else to explain Avengers’ Thanos?, asks Eric Holloway
How Do You Explain That Machines Won’t Really Think Like People?
Computation cannot become non-computational thought but it is difficult to prove that something can’t happen.
Yes, There ARE Ghosts in the Machine
And one of them is you
How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Our Language
Culture critic Mark Steyn reflects on the Matrix and the red pill, which seems to be everywhere
University Fires Philosophy Prof, Hires Chimpanzee to Teach, Research
A light-hearted look at what would happen if we really thought that unreason is better than reasonDissociated Press – According to sources from the Funny Papers News Collective, officials at the Université Paris Diderot announced today that philosophy professor Justin Smith has been dismissed from his teaching and research duties at the university, following publication of his new book, Irrationality. In the widely acclaimed book, Smith argues forcefully that reason is highly overrated, and generally of less survival value than brute animal instinct. Citing 16th-century diplomat Girolamo Rorario in his treatise “That Brute Animals Make Better use of Reason than Men”, Smith argues: [H]uman deliberation – the period of hesitancy when we survey our various options and eventually select what appears to be the best of them – far from being an advantage over other beings, Read More ›
Silicon Valley’s Strange, Apocalyptic Cult
Key Valley figures hope to beat death the transhumanist way. Oh, by the way, YOU are doomedEverything has a history, including Silicon Valley. According to a new media theorist, an influential Valley philosophy might underlie the current attitudes, values, and beliefs: There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others. Douglas Rushkoff, “The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley” at Medium In an excerpt from his new book, Team Human (2019), Rushkoff traces the history to a post-Cold War collaboration centered on Read More ›
How Did Twitter Become a “Virus of the Mind”?
A libertarian law professor reflects on the poisonous atmosphere and proposed remediesUsing engineering terminology, he makes the point that, whereas the blogosphere has been a loosely coupled system where craziness in one venue had little impact on another, new social media are tightly coupled systems, prone to maximal disruption
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