Tag: Featured | Page 52

A 3D render of a futuristic person made of gold, looking up at the sun

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News
Date
September 7, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Programming, Religion

Tagged
A.I. Jesus, Featured, George Davila Durendal, Rob Sheldon}

A Physicist Weighs In on “A.I. Jesus” Sputtering from the Bible

_{Rob Sheldon explains why the prophecies sound bizarre rather than merely mundane} _{News
September 7, 2020

3

Artificial Intelligence, Programming, Religion}

Last Sunday we reported on the computer program that inventor George Davila Durendal, hoped (or so he said) would—for millennia—be a sort of Scripture for robots and people. The program constructs “prophecies” from the text of the King James Version, a translation of the Bible into English completed in 1611, which has remained influential for centuries. Will the A.I. Jesus version do so well? Not if you go by prophecies like this: “And he shall come against him, and said, As the LORD liveth, that he might be fulfilled which was spoken, he said, Thou are the spirit of your good works that ye have not seen, nor any thing of the service thereof, and a certain censer, and the Read More ›

Creative background, male hand holding a phone with a 5G hologram on the background of the city. The concept of 5G network, high-speed mobile Internet, new generation networks. Copy space,

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News
Date
September 4, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance

Tagged
5G, ACES, Autonomous Vehicles, Bellevue (Washington), Communication, Featured, Jay Richards, Seattle, Transportation}

Seattle Area a Good Site for 5G Development, Says Analyst

_{By increasing bandwidth and reducing slow times, 5G will enable more people to do more online} _{News
September 4, 2020

4

Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance}

At COSM 2019, Jay Richards interviewed Bruce Agnew, Director of the Seattle-based ACES Northwest Network on the collective’s work in bringing ACES (Automated, Connected, Electric, and Shared) vehicle technologies to the Puget Sound region. They discussed, among other things, the role that 5G will play in implementing autonomous vehicles. Since 1993, Bruce Agnew has been the Policy Director of Seattle-based Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center. The Cascadia Center is a strategic alliance from Vancouver, BC, to Eugene, Oregon, promoting high speed passenger rail, Interstate-5 freight mobility, seamless border crossings, bi-national and bi-state tourism marketing, and sustainable community development. Two of his co-chairs, Tom Alberg and Bryan Mistele, were also interviewed in this series (at the links). From the interview: Agnew began Read More ›

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News
Date
September 3, 2020

Categorized
Philosophy of Mind, Religion

Tagged
Bernardo Kastrup, cosmopsychism, Featured, free will, George Berkeley (1685–1753), god, Idealism, Materialism, Michael Egnor, Naturalism}

Does Physics Today Point to Mind Rather Than Matter Only?

_{A cosmopsychist looks at the universe, God, and free will} _{News
September 3, 2020

12

Philosophy of Mind, Religion}

Bernardo Kastrup tells Michael Egnor that he does not think God is self-reflective. That, he thinks, is a unique job for humans.

Does Split-brain Surgery Show That We Have No Real Identity?

_{A prominent philosopher built his career arguing against the existence of personal identity} _{Michael Egnor
September 3, 2020

8

Philosophy of Mind}

One of the most bizarre consequences of the modernist materialist conception of human beings is the notion that personal identity is not real or not continuous. This view is, of course, contrary in every way to the lived experience of each of us. Like everyone else, I am the same person I was as a child, and the same person I will be a moment before my death. I am me, and I am no other. Of course, at different times of my life I have had different memories, experiences, and perceptions, but it is the same I (the only I) that has them. This is so fundamental to reality that it seems beyond question. It is not even clear Read More ›

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Jonathan Bartlett
Date
September 2, 2020

Categorized
Programming

Tagged
___longform, Docker, Featured}

Part 3: Working with Docker: An Interactive Tutorial

_{Docker gives development teams more reliable, repeatable, and testable systems, deployed at massive scale with the click of a button} _{Jonathan Bartlett
September 2, 2020

17

Programming}

As businesses move more and more infrastructure online due to the effects of competition (not to mention COVID-19), finding the best way to manage that infrastructure becomes more and more important. Docker gives development teams more reliable, repeatable, and testable systems that can be deployed at massive scale with the click of a button. In this series (Parts 1 and 2 are linked below), we are looking under the hood at Docker, an infrastructure management tool that has grown rapidly in popularity over the last decade. In this installment, I will walk you through the process of using the Docker command line tools to download, install, and run containers, as well as build your own container. If you’re not a Read More ›

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Eric Holloway
Date
August 31, 2020

Categorized
Philosophy of Mind, Science

Tagged
Complex Specified Information, David Deutsch, Erwin Schrödinger, Featured, Multiverse, Specified Complexity}

Here Is a Way We Can Be Sure If We Are Living in a Multiverse

_{An experiment can test the idea that there is an infinite number of universes} _{Eric Holloway
August 31, 2020

5

Philosophy of Mind, Science}

For our experiment, we need a quantum coin flipper, a disintegration gun, and observers who are sure that there is an infinite array of universes out there.

Part 2: A Peek Under the Covers at the New Docker Technology

_{Many advances enable Docker to significantly reduce a system’s overhead} _{Jonathan Bartlett
August 31, 2020

9

Business and Finance, Programming}

As businesses move more and more of their infrastructure online due to the effects of competition (not to mention COVID-19), finding the best way to manage that infrastructure becomes more and more important. As we saw in Part 1, Docker enables development teams to have more reliable, repeatable, and testable systems that can be deployed at massive scale with the click of a button. In this installment, we are going to take a look at the technology behind Docker and how it originated. From Emulators to Virtual Machines Docker allows you to run numerous “containers” at the same time on a single computer. Each of these containers acts as if it were a separate computer. It knows nothing about what Read More ›

Bull market trend, green growth arrow. Stock Exchange and concept of a trading chart. Low poly, wireframe 3d Raster illustration. Abstract polygonal image on blue neon background

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Gary Smith
Date
August 28, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance

Tagged
COVID-19 Recession, Featured, Recession, stock market}

The Stock Market Keeps Rising Despite COVID. Is It Nuts?

_{I’ve been asked whether advanced AI can explain the conundrum} _{Gary Smith
August 28, 2020

7

Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance}

What is going on? Our GDP has collapsed and 16 million people are unemployed. Thousands of small businesses and dozens of billion-dollar companies have gone bankrupt, including California Pizza Kitchen, Hertz, JCPenney, Neiman Marcus, and Brooks Brothers. Yet, the stock market keeps hitting all-time high after all-time high. The stock market is supposed to be related to the economy. When the economy booms, corporate profits explode; when the economy collapses, profits crater. That’s what happened during the Great Depression when stock prices fell 90 percent and the unemployment rate averaged 19 percent for a decade. Now, stocks and the economy are moving in opposite directions. What is going on? A friend who knows that I live, breathe, and teach investments Read More ›

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News
Date
August 28, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance

Tagged
ACES, Autonomous Vehicles, employment, Featured, Jay Richards, Job Displacement, self-driving cars, Tom Alberg, Traffic fatalities}

Autonomous Vehicles Are Not a “Rich Person’s” Technology

_{A transportation expert tells Jay Richards, alternative transport may disrupt the transportation industry but only in the short term} _{News
August 28, 2020

4

Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance}

Jay Richards talked recently with Tom Alberg, Founder of the Madrona Venture Group and Co-chair of the ACES Northwest Network, about ACES’ efforts to bring Automated, Connected, Electric, and Shared vehicle technologies to the Puget Sound region: The Benefits of ACES Vehicle Technology A partial transcript follows: Jay Richards: Well, you were chairing the panel on autonomous vehicles and you’re part of an initiative here in Seattle. What do you think is the most important takeaway from that? Tom Alberg: I think that it’s really a combination of technologies. It’s both new technologies and it’s changed business models. So we formed a group here in Seattle called ACES, Autonomous, Connected, Electric, and Shared. “Shared” is really kind of the Uber Read More ›

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Heather Zeiger
Date
August 26, 2020

Categorized
Data Privacy, Global Technology, Social Media, Surveillance

Tagged
___longform, bias, ByteDance, China, Featured, Intercept (publication), TikTok}

Why Some Nation States Are Banning TikTok

_{The United States is not alone in questioning the social medium’s allegiance to the Chinese government} _{Heather Zeiger
August 26, 2020

10

Data Privacy, Global Technology, Social Media, Surveillance}

Why is TikTok so controversial? It’s the first Chinese technology company that has reached a billion users outside of China. Its main demographic is Generation Z—teens and twenty-somethings. If you take a look at TikTok videos, most are goofy and irreverent. They’re frenetic shorts of everything from fashion tips to pranks and, of course, (bad) dancing. TikTok’s stated mission is to “inspire creativity and bring joy.” What could go wrong? Here’s what. Working with China, as Disney and the NBA can attest, comes with certain strings attached, including acquiescing to the Chinese Communist Party’s rules for acceptable speech. Because ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is a Chinese company (although partly owned by investors from the U.S. and Japan), the Chinese Communist Read More ›

White swan mask on black wooden surface. Empty space.

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News
Date
August 25, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence

Tagged
Big Data, Featured, Gary Smith, Jay Cordes, Phantom Pattern Problem (book)}

New Book Takes Aim at Phantom Patterns “Detected” by Algorithms

_{Human common sense is needed now more than ever, says economics professor Gary Smith} _{News
August 25, 2020

3

Artificial Intelligence}

Pomona College economics professor Gary Smith, author with Jay Cordes of The Phantom Pattern Problem (Oxford, October 1, 2020), tackles an age-old glitch in human thinking: We tend to assume that if we find a pattern, it is meaningful. Add that to the weaknesses of current artificial intelligence and “Houston, we have a problem,” he warns: The scientific method tests theories with data. Data-mining computer algorithms dispense with theory and search through data for patterns, often aided and abetted by slicing, dicing, and otherwise mangling data to create patterns. Gary Smith, “Phantom patterns: The big data delusion” at IAI News (August 24, 2020) Many of the patterns so detected are obviously spurious, for example: A computer algorithm for evaluating job Read More ›

Aerial view of New York downtown building roofs. Bird's eye view from helicopter of cityscape metropolis infrastructure, traffic cars, yellow cabs moving on city streets and crossing district avenues

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Jonathan Bartlett
Date
August 25, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture

Tagged
Big Data, Featured}

Microsoft Flight Simulator: Promise and Problems of Big Open Data

_{For some software, bad data doesn’t matter; for other software, working off of month-old data could be life-threatening} _{Jonathan Bartlett
August 25, 2020

5

Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture}

Last week, Microsoft released its critically acclaimed Microsoft Flight Simulator, to much cheering and applause. The game creates a photorealistic journey across the planet. Artificial intelligence combines multiple data sets to create a magnificent virtual experience of flying through the world. The data comes from satellite maps for terrain and texture information and OpenStreetMap to add three dimensional information to city data, such as building heights and other information. Combining all these data sources generates a 3D world using a variety of AI photogrammetry techniques. The program then streams this world to you as you fly through it. Additionally, the system streams in real-world weather data, so that the weather experienced in any part of the world is transmitted to Read More ›

Graphene molecular nano technology structure on a green background - 3d rendering

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News
Date
August 23, 2020

Categorized
Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
brain, Brian Greene, Edward Feser, Featured, Materialism, Mind Brain, Reductionism}

Why the Brain Can’t Be Understood Simply in Terms of Particles

_{For the same reasons as a basketball cannot be understood wholly as a “sphere,” the brain is more than particle physics in action} _{News
August 23, 2020

4

Philosophy of Mind}

In a review of theoretical physicist Brian Greene’s latest book, philosopher Edward Feser explains why mathematics can’t capture all of reality.

After Thursday’s Dogfight, It’s Clear: DARPA Gets AI Right

_{In the dogfight Thursday between AI and a pilot, AI won. But what does that mean?} _{Robert J. Marks
August 23, 2020

4

Artificial Intelligence, Military}

AI prevailed against a human in DARPA’s recent AlphaDogfight trials. Given that DeepMind’s AI achieved the level of grandmaster in the StarCraft II video game, AI beating a human in a simulated closed world contest is not impressive. What is impressive is AlphaDogfight’s role in DARPA’s overall plan for the development of AI in the military. DARPA, the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been called the US military’s “Department of Mad Scientists.” Its mission is to prevent strategic military surprise by supplying fertile ground where new and revolutionary ideas can sprout and grow. DARPA founded the internet and gave us the GPS (Global Positioning Satellite system) that guides our Google map directions. Less well known is DARPA’s Read More ›

Genetic engineering and gene manipulation concept. Hand is replacing part of a DNA molecule.

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News
Date
August 21, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health

Tagged
COSM 2019, Featured, Jay Richards, Matt Scholz}

Gene Therapy: IT Meets Medicine, But Who Is In Charge?

_{A biotechnology CEO would like to see patients have more power in determining advanced treatments} _{News
August 21, 2020

6

Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health}

Jay Richards talked recently with Matt Scholz, Founder & CEO of Oisín Biotechnologies, about the challenges and promises of the information theory of biotech, especially as related to medicine: The panel in which Scholz participated at COSM 2019 focused on how artificial intelligence can make a difference in medicine: From the interview: Jay Richards: So how would you distill this panel? It was you and Babak Parviz, formerly of Google Glass and now from Amazon (and formerly Google Glass) and Lindy Fishburne, who’s on the funding side of information technology and biology. Matt Scholz: The panel was put together ranging from the computational side of it to the actual therapeutic side and finance. So I think that made it a Read More ›

Glorious Sky - Elements of this Image Furnished by NASA

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News
Date
August 20, 2020

Categorized
Philosophy of Mind, Science

Tagged
___longform, Bernardo Kastrup, Consciousness, cosmopsychism, Featured, Michael Egnor, Panpsychism, Sabine Hossenfelder}

Bernardo Kastrup Argues for a Universal Mind as a Reasonable Idea

_{The challenge, he says, is not why there is consciousness but why there are so many separate instances of consciousnesses} _{News
August 20, 2020

9

Philosophy of Mind, Science}

In a recent podcast, Michael Egnor continued his discussion with philosopher and computer programmer Bernardo Kastrup; This week, the topic was panpsychism and cosmopsychism. (Last week, the topic was why consciousness couldn’t just evolve from the mud.) https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-096-Bernardo-Kastrup.mp3 A partial transcript follows: (The complete transcript is here. The Show Notes and Resources are below.) Dr. Kastrup made clear that he is not a panpsychism but rather a cosmopsychist. He explains the difference, defining panpsychism as follows: Bernardo Kastrup (pictured): Panpsychism, well, to be more accurately called constitutive panpsychism, it’s the notion that at least some of the elementary particles that constitutes the universe, at least some of them, are fundamentally conscious. In other words, they have experiential states, fundamental experiential Read More ›

Female student holding pencil and examination paper

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Gary Smith
Date
August 19, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Education

Tagged
Featured}

Don’t Blame AI for the British A-Level Test Scandal

_{When 39 percent of the final grades assigned during COVID-19 were lower than teacher predictions, it was headline news. But what happened?} _{Gary Smith
August 19, 2020

7

Artificial Intelligence, Education}

Many years ago, when I was a young assistant professor of economics, I had to endure a minor hazing ritual—serving for one year on the admissions committee for the PhD program. As a newbie, I was particularly impressed by a glowing letter of recommendation that began, “This is the best student I have had in 30 years.” The applicant’s test scores were not off-the-charts but the letter was number 1. A dean who chaired the admissions committee year after year advised me to calm down because this professor wrote a recommendation that celebrated “the best student I have had in 30 years” every year. The committee had a chuckle at my expense. I’ve now been teaching for nearly 50 years Read More ›

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Gary Smith and Jay Cordes
Date
August 17, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics

Tagged
Electromagnetic fields (EMFs), Featured, Power lines, Probability, Statistics}

In Science, We Can’t Just “Settle” for Data Clusters

_{The board game, Settlers of Catan, offers a clear illustration of what can go wrong when we are duped by data clusters} _{Gary Smith and Jay Cordes
August 17, 2020

7

Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics}

Settlers of Catan is an incredible board game created by Klaus Teuber, a German game designer. It has been translated into dozens of languages and tens of millions of sets have been sold. The basic four-player board consists of 19 hexagons (hexes) representing resources: 3 brick, 4 lumber, 4 wool, 4 grain, 3 ore, and 1 desert. Players acquire and use resources based on dice rolls, card draws, trading, and the location of their settlements and cities. Part of the game’s seductive appeal is that there are many, many ways to arrange the 19 hexagons and successful strategies depend on how the hexagons are arranged. The rules are simple but winning strategies are complex and elusive. The official rules of Read More ›

A fish with wide open mouth and big eyes, Surprised, shocked or amazed face front view

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Eric Holloway
Date
August 17, 2020

Categorized
Information Theory

Tagged
Communication, Cryptography, Design Inference (book), Explanatory Filter, Featured, Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies, William Dembski}

Is Dembski’s Explanatory Filter the Most Widely Used Theory Ever?

_{It turns out that legions of critics of the Filter use it all the time, without noticing} _{Eric Holloway
August 17, 2020

5

Information Theory}

William Dembski created quite a stir in the world of information theory with his book The Design Inference. For the first time, he outlined a rigorous method for identifying design, which he called the explanatory filter. Since then many critics have claimed that Dembski’s proposed filter is without merit due to the lack of application in the couple of decades since its invention. But, are the critics right, or are they wrong—wrong in the way that a fish doesn’t recognize water because water is the very atmosphere of the fish’s existence? Let us first remind ourselves of Dembski’s explanatory filter. His filter proceeds in three main steps. Eliminate events of large probability (necessity) Eliminate events of medium probability (chance) Specify Read More ›

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Robert J. Marks
Date
August 14, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Military

Tagged
DARPA, Donald Knuth, Featured}

DARPA Has Scheduled AI vs. AI Aerial Dogfights for Next Week

_{A round robin tournament will select the AI that faces off against a human pilot Thursday} _{Robert J. Marks
August 14, 2020

4

Artificial Intelligence, Military}

Forbes reports a simulated aerial dogfight will be held next week and we can watch it live: “The action will kick off Tuesday with AI vs. AI dogfights, featuring eight teams that developed algorithms to control a simulated F-16, leading to a round robin tournament that will select one to face off against a human pilot Thursday between 1:30 and 3:30 p.m. EDT. You can register to watch the action online. DARPA adds that a “multi-view format will afford viewers comprehensive perspectives of the dogfights in real-time and feature experts and guests from the Control Zone, akin to a TV sports commentary desk. “With remarks from officials including USAF Colonel Daniel “Animal” Javorsek, head of the ACE program, recaps of Read More ›