Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategorySocial Factors

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Hands of girl sculpt mug with ceramic clay on potter's wheel. close up

The Information Age Has Forgotten Formation

We need more than mere information. We need practices, habits, and experiences that will positively shape who we become.

Oftentimes people try to use the wrong delivery method for the kind of content they are conveying. Here, I am going to talk about three different kinds of content, and how they differ in how best to deliver them. The three types of content we will be discussing are formational, informational, and transformational. Of these types of content, you are probably most familiar with informational content, as we are inundated with it in the information age. In fact, that is probably the primary problem I am addressing here. In the information age, we address all content as if it were informational content that can be delivered by informational means. In fact, we do have the best information delivery systems that have ever existed Read More ›

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Welcoming the Post-Zoom Era

The Zoom era is quickly coming to an end. How should companies re-adjust?

Prior to the pandemic, few outside of technology jobs even knew what Zoom was. Now, everyone is comfortable with video conferencing. However, while the technology works better than ever, I’m starting to sense that people are done with continual video conferencing.  Many people who use Zoom do so on a compulsory basis. They have jobs that require that they Zoom for meetings or they are in classes that require online attendance. Therefore, it is hard to decipher people’s attitudes towards Zoom in those circumstances. They use it because someone told them they must. However, I regularly teach at a homeschooling co-op class. Homeschoolers, especially in Oklahoma, aren’t compelled to do anything that they don’t feel comfortable with. Don’t want to Read More ›

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Arizona Desert Ladscape

The Wild West Seen From Another Cosmos — Sci-Fi Saturday

Jane Montana must rescue a hostage from three villains. But is Montana what she seems?

“Cosmo” at DUST by Thomas Thomas (October 29, 2021, 6:58) Jane Montana, a rough and tough law-woman, is in a pickle. A gang of outlaws led by a man named Buford has kidnapped a helpless damsel. Worse, Jane has two bullets and three bad guys to confront. Review: A Wild West scenario is not usually mixed with sci fi but this short gets the Wild West atmosphere right. Montana (La Trice Harper) and the hostage Gwen (Kaylin Zeren) look very Western and the bad guys — Buford (Jeremy John Wells), Slick (Andrew Stroud), and Bart (Tony Nunes) — are straight out of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly tradition. At least one commenter felt that “Cosmo” wasn’t really sci Read More ›

Introvert concept. The man sitting inside box with glasses of virtual reality. Future technology concept

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 disruption

How 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 driving

Fully 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 data

In 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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Cafeteria tables
Cafeteria tables

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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Just Did It hashtag

Winning Tag Lines Are Hard Enough To Write…

But AI really flops at that

AI 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 wane

Mainstream 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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Adobe Stock Censorship peace cage Adobe Stock 22001967
Adobe Stock Censorship peace cage Adobe Stock 22001967

Jordan Peterson to Found New Free Speech Platform

Thinkspot is being developed as a free speech alternative to Facebook, YouTube, and Patreon

His 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
Lawmakers in a free society who are very concerned about deepfakes might want to specify exactly how they are more dangerous than innuendo and insinuation which, by their very nature, are much harder to detect and address. Read More ›
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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 no

Facebook'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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bacteria E.coli
Bacteria

McPathogens: Are McDonalds’ Order Kiosks Clean? Another Look

Can rebuttals exposing fake news be fake news themselves? Judge for yourself
I snapped a picture of a kiosk screen shown below during a recent visit to a McDonald’s in Waco, Texas. The picture is taken at an angle where smudge leavings are most visible. Read More ›
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Will Space Aliens Become a New Majority Religion?

Nearly as many young Americans believe in ET as in God, says religion prof

Popular 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
In last year’s Avengers movie Infinity War, the main villain is an alien named Thanos who kills half the population on each planet, to enable sustainability. Read More ›
robot sit down and thinking

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.
Jonathan Bartlett notes that some analysts resort to roundabout methods of explaining the problem. Read More ›
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Yes, There ARE Ghosts in the Machine

And one of them is you
You power AI whenever you prove your humanity to the CAPTCHA challenges overrunning the web. AI systems are not some alien brain evolving in our mids. They are machines we build and train by embedding our humanity into their programming. Read More ›
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How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Our Language

Culture critic Mark Steyn reflects on the Matrix and the red pill, which seems to be everywhere
If communication relies so much on a few pop-culture references, it’s “an undoubted achievement” that The Matrix created one of them. Read More ›