Will we surrender our free will to screens?
We may be surrendering while we aren’t paying attentionIf “the machines” ever do take over, it will be because we have stopped thinking, not because they have started to.
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Amazon pulls out of the New York City deal
Is this a message about the new economy in America?Jay Richards thinks that crony capitalism is a long-term problem but that, in this case, New York legislators showed “staggering economic illiteracy and a disregard for their constituents”
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STEM Education 4: Do STEM Nerds Need to Learn Latin?
Okay, not Latin. But some arts subjects do enhance a STEM careerWell-roundedness is appropriate in applied STEM curricula to the extent that it rounds out the skills necessary for success as a STEM professional.
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STEM EDUCATION 3. Killing People and Breaking Things
Modern history suggests that military superiority driven by technology can be a key factor in deterring aggression and preventing mass fatalitiesToday, better AI is the goal of the arms race. Russian President Vladimir Putin has prophesied: “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [AI] will become the ruler of the world.” Putin’s remarks apply to both economic and military dominance.
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How the Internet Turns Coffee Klatches into Mobs
A philosopher sheds light on how the Covington high school kids became America's Most HatedThe chaos and violence rising in our own country and around the world get much of their fuel from the obscurity and contagion of the internet, which is kerosene sprayed on the sparks tossed up by civilization. If we are to survive this conflagration, we must understand how these fires grow.
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AI as an Emergent Religion
Science philosopher Mike Keas’s new book discusses how AI and ET are merging, to create a religion of futurist magicMany Singulatarians hold that their soon-to-be-realized technology will be indistinguishable by the rest of us from magic. Are they serious? Well, in 2005, Kurzweil said that the magical Harry Potter stories “are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now.” when, due to AI, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.” Keas warns that this type of thing encourages people “to expect the experiential equivalent of occult phenomena.”
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STEM EDUCATION 2. Not Everyone Is Lucky Enough to be a Nerd
How do you identify extroverted nerds? When you are talking to them, they look at YOUR shoesIf I am made to confess that college courses in Shakespearean sonnets will make me a better person, then English literature majors had better confess that calculus makes them better people.
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The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves
The patterns uncovered by machine learning may reflect a larger reality or just a bias in gathering dataBecause Machine Learning is opaque—even experts cannot clearly explain how a system arrived at a conclusion—we treat it as magic. Therefore, we should mistrust the systems until proven innocent (and correct).
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Remember the Luddites!
The Luddites became famous for breaking machinery during the Industrial Revolution. Were they entirely wrong?People often think that the Luddites were merely anti-technology because they opposed automation during the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840). The story is more complex. As we face increasing automation today, we might want to see what we can learn from their history.
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Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Expose a Key Problem
Most moderators are not skilled and have only a few seconds to decide on a postCensorship is part of the larger question of whether social media are the telephone company (a communications platform), the newspaper (a publisher), or unregulated private klatsches. Or something else altogether?
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Research Showing That Fake News Easily Fools Us Collapses
A recent paper claiming that low-quality news (“fake news”) spreads as quickly on social media as accurate news has been retracted by its authors.A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy.”
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It’s 2019: Begin the AI Hype Cycle Again!
Media seemingly can’t help portraying today’s high-tech world as a remake of I, Robot (2004), starring you and me.I have a problem with the possible outcomes when people who don’t know the difference between technology fact and fiction make important decisions based on information from journalists who write as if every computer is a potential personality like HAL from Space Odyssey 2001.
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Can an Algorithm Be Racist?
No, the machine has no opinion. It processes vast tracts of data. And, as a result, the troubling hidden roots of some data are exposedIt’s tempting to assume that a villain lurks behind such a scene when the exact opposite is the problem: A system dominated by machines is all calculations, not thoughts, intentions, or choices. If the input is wrong, so is the output.
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How Can Information Theory Help the Economy Grow?
New information is the true source of new wealth; everyone wins when we learn how to produce it more efficientlyWhat gives humans the ability to increase in prosperity, according to Eric Holloway, is our ability to “read” from Plato’s Library of new ideas, thus providing an ever-growing supply of side information that powers the economy.
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4: Making AI Look More Human Makes It More Human-like!
AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: Technicians can do a lot these days with automated lip-syncs and smiles but what’s behind them?This summer, some were simply agog over “Sophia, the First Robot Citizen” (“unsettling as it is awe-inspiring”)
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5: AI Can Fight Hate Speech!
AI can carry out its programmers’ biases and that’s allPutting these kinds of decisions in the hands of software programs is not likely to promote vigorous and healthy debate.
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9: Will That Army Robot Squid Ever Be “Self-Aware”?
AI help, not hype: What would it take for a robot to be self-aware?The thrill of fear invites the reader to accept a metaphorical claim as a literal fact.
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Google Search: Its Secret of Success Revealed
The secret is not the Big Data pile. No, Google found a way to harness YOUR wants and needsGoogle is one of the most widely misunderstood success stories of our time. Many of us equate Google with “Big Data,” that is, amassing huge quantities of data and then finding useful statistical patterns. But is that how it succeeded? In Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, George Gilder criticizes Google primarily on two fronts: First, it is a “walled garden,” a great platform, but inherently isolated and closed. That is a point worth exploring, but not the focus here. The second point, the one I want to touch on, is that Big Data’s day has come and gone. Because Google is a Big Data company, its brightest days are behind it. Read More ›
Study Shows Eating Raisins Causes Plantar Warts
Sure. Because, if you torture a Big Data enough, it will confess to anythingEnormous data sets compiled by Big Data methods have a higher probability of meaningless correlations than smaller ones compiled by traditional methods. More than ever, common sense is needed. And common sense only comes from programmers writing their own common sense into the software.
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No, Twitter Is Not the New Awful
It’s the Old Awful back for more. It’s the Town Without Pity we all tried to get away fromWe need to decide: Is Twitter the telephone company (a communications platform), the newspaper (a publisher), or interconnected private gossip klatsches where anyone can say whatever they want, whatever ensues?
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