Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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Could Huge Chunks of Asteroid Gold Wreck Our Economy?

16 Psyche’s gold illustrates how AI affects jobs. Not the way many think…

“By lowering the price of gold, it would create new, currently nonexistent, markets for other uses of gold,” says Jay Richards. In the same way, AI creates new, currently nonexistent, markets for human time and creativity.

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Students, Don’t Let Smart Machines Disrupt Your Future

Three ways you can avoid life in Mom’s basement and the job pouring coffee

At first sight, the number of options might seem bewildering. The key question is: Will you ignore the coming job disruption, fear it, or treat it as an opportunity?

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George Gilder: Cloud Computing Is Reaching Its Limits

The “cloud” isn’t something ethereal “up there,” Gilder reminds us; it is giant factory floors of computers

Gilder, tech philosopher and author of Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, argues that the regime of huge data centers, all parked by bodies of water, is coming to an end.

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Does Workplace Automation Improve Service or Merely Cut Costs?

Chances are, the CEO won’t know there’s a problem until complaints come in. Elon Musk didn’t
Philosopher jay Richards argues that what really distinguishes humans is our capacity for developing creative freedom. If that capacity is automated out of a system, we can expect to hear about many avoidable failures. Read More ›
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Sorry, Wired: That “Crafty Robot” Doesn’t Write in Languages It’s Never Seen

The artificial intelligence industry is overwhelmed with title inflation and feat hype
Headline hype obscures the researchers’ remarkable accomplishments while luring the unsuspecting to believe AI is more than it is and does more than it does. Read More ›
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Philosopher: Gloom and doom over AI is “silly”

Jay Richards thinks that historian Yuval Noah Harari is wrong to think that AI will necessarily subvert democracy

The idea that machines are capable of replacing us is the topic of many books he has read but, he argues, the thing that really distinguishes us is the capacity for developing creative freedom.

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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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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 reason

Dissociated 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 ›

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Swarm Printing: Are AI Robots Tomorrow’s Construction Workers?

Robotic swarms specially adapted to operate in austere environments could be useful responses to natural and manmade disasters

While many traditional construction jobs will be lost, others will be created. Someone will need to design, build, service, and repair the robots.

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Google’s “Civil War” Is a First For the Big Tech Industry

Not the sort of first to rejoice market analysts’ hearts

If a recent longform article at Fortune is any guide, tech philosopher George Gilder was onto something when he told Steve Forbes recently that the whole Google culture is “kind of self-defeating and wrong.”

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What One Thing Do AI, Evolution, and Entrepreneurship All Need?

They all need an input of creativity to make things happen.

Programs for AI and evolution share the limitation that nothing creative happens without the guidance of a programmer. And a thriving economy based on creative entrepreneurship is one of the things that cannot be automated.

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George Gilder speaking at the book launch of Life after Google

George Gilder: Why Student Debt Should Simply Be Wiped Out

Universities are preparing students to resent, not join, the new decentralized economy

“The colleges that took this money and enriched themselves, and hired hundreds more bureaucrats should have to give the money back.”

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George Gilder seated before speech at book launch

George Gilder: Why Does Google Seem To Be Having a Corporate Nervous Breakdown?

Gilder tells Forbes that its whole culture is “kind of self-defeating and wrong.”

"This whole business of aggregating people by giving them free stuff—in order to collect data to provide guidance for advertisers—it’s just a circuitous means of a business plan that I don’t think will finally prevail."

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Maybe the robot will do you a favor and snatch your job

The historical pattern is that drudgery gets automated, not creativity

Fear of toxic but improbable futures sometimes distracts us from clearly understanding and preparing for the real changes that are happening now.

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What It Really Takes to Build a High-Tech Company, Sell It, and Get Rich

Inventor and entrepreneur Hal Philipp offers a rewarding but cautionary true story

The road to the success that Hal Philipp enjoys today was laced with landmines. When money starts rolling in, entrepreneurs must expect lawsuits. But perseverance and a strong character won the day. 

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Does Automation Target Women’s Jobs?

The assumption that women need special protection from robots underestimates their creativity and versatility

A number of studies have come to the conclusion that automation will hit women harder than men. Some proposed fixes assume that women who lose repetitive jobs to robots would be happier as administrators or dependents. That’s not clear.

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Jay Richards: Creative Freedom, Not Robots, Is the Future of Work

In an information economy, there will be a place where the human person is at the very center

The Officially Smart people are telling us two scenarios, good and bad, about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), says Jay Richards, a research professor at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He disagrees with both.

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Walter Bradley Center Fellow Discovers Longstanding Flaw in an Aspect of Elementary Calculus

The flaw doesn't lead directly to wrong answers but it does create confusion

The lead author, Jonathan Bartlett, noted that the likely source of the bad notation was a philosophical issue. Because no one wanted to give differentials that same ontological status as other numbers, everyone presumed that the notational problems were simply the result of this fact, and no one pursued it further.

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