Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagActon Institute

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Tower of Babel, Abstract Painting. Cubism

A New Review for Berlinksi’s Latest Book

Despite the wonders of the scientific enterprise, it is run by humans, and is thus fallible.

By David Klinghoffer By now the authority of science has been thoroughly abused. For that, you can thank scientists themselves, their promoters in government bodies and in university PR departments, and the legions of loyal pilot fish in popular and social media. Something really came undone in the Covid era. Today, the phrase “science says” or “doctors say” prompts a smirk from about half the population, and rightly so. To capture this reality, mathematician David Berlinski in his latest book, Science After Babel, evokes the image of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel — a bloated, vain enterprise, in denial of its own failings. The ancients saw science, and the other arts, as embodied by muses — beautiful young women. We may picture something more Read More ›

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Prison. Prison wall with barbed wire. Law and justice

Martin Luther King Jr. on the Failures of Communism

The great advocate for justice saw, as George Gilder does, why materialism fails us
The materialistic ideology of a totalitarian state, established at the expense of human freedom and dignity, took hold in multiple countries worldwide following WW II. Read More ›
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Robotic hand study for object manipulation strategy.

Jay Richards Talks Transhumanism and AI

The underlying philosophy of transhumanism should be rejected

Dr. Jay Richards, a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and a friend of the Walter Bradley Center, which publishes Mind Matters, spoke recently at the Acton University conference, discussing both transhumanism and AI. Transhumanists, Richards notes, look at the scope of “cosmic evolution,” see a kind of increasing complexity among the human race, and speculate the next dramatic step: achieving immortality through a mixture of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Richards described the transhumanist ideology as “anti-human,” but cautioned against having a reactionary response to all new technologies that seem to be involved in transhumanism’s vision, noting that some of them, when analyzed specifically, could have benefits (such as AI). The underlying philosophy of transhumanism, however, should be rejected. Read More ›

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Diverse friends in movie theater.

Maybe Hollywood Had it Coming?

When TV production becomes this mechanical and impersonal, why shouldn't studios opt for AI?

The writers’ strike in Hollywood continues. In May, the Writers Guild of America started protesting low wages and the potential threat of artificially generated scripts. Large Language Models (LLMs) have only improved in generating text, raising concerns among writers. However, according to an insightful article from Auguste Meyrat of the Acton Institute, Hollywood has been developing a culture that welcomes AI-generated content with its tendency to pressure writers to fit a formulaic narrative structure instead of encouraging them to pursue real creativity and collaboration. Meyrat writes, All this virtually guarantees the use of AI-generated screenplays. After all, if producing a movie is now effectively the same as producing a widget on an assembly line, the human element can be dispensed Read More ›

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Man Presenting to Group of People

New Review of “Life After Capitalism” Amplifies Book’s Core Themes

Returning to the "mind-centered economy" where knowledge is wealth

A new review of George Gilder’s latest book Life After Capitalism from Samuel Gregg highlights the need for the return of the “mind-centered economy,” in which governmental bureaucracies no longer hamper human creativity and imagination. When capitalistic, democratic societies fall for materialistic presuppositions of the world, they end up resembling socialist contexts in which the state is everything and individual men and women are squelched. Gregg writes at the Acton power blog, [Gilder]takes this notion of the free human mind as the decisive factor in driving economic growth and applies it across the board to economic theory, technology, and our understanding of money. Looking at the question of incentives, for example, Gilder points out that they would yield nothing in Read More ›

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emotional glitchy tetris pattern pixelated Photoluminescence SciFi Otherworldly Realistic

Before the iPhone, There Was Tetris

What was the precursor for the widespread tech addiction we see today, particularly in young people?

What was the precursor for the widespread tech addiction we see today, particularly in young people? Many say it was the iPhone. Peter Tonguette, however, thinks that the game Tetris started the screentime avalanche. Tonguette reviewed the new Apple TV+ film Tetris, which covers the story of the classic game’s development, acquisition, and subsequent popularity in the early nineties. He writes, One might assume this changeover coincided with the rise of smartphones and social media, but a new movie shows that it happened as early as the summer vacation of 1989. During that fateful interregnum between school years, kids were introduced to something that prefigured the electronic devices of the 21st century: a battery-powered, 8-bit handheld videogame device whose two Read More ›