Are We Close to Peak AI Hype?
Outrageous statements are proliferating.Sanity might be about ready to return to the market. Just maybe, we have reached peak hype.
Read More ›TagAI
“I’m Not There Yet”
Scott Galloway opens up about the writing processScott Galloway is one of the most successful writers on the planet, at least by monetary metrics. He’s also a remarkably talented presenter and appears consistently on top channels to talk about business, masculinity, finance, and relationships. In a new interview with David Perell, who founded the writing organization “Write of Passage,” Galloway said that he thinks he’s a “good writer” but not a “great” one yet. It might surprise us given that Galloway is around sixty and is a successful author, but he went on to explain how practice is key when reaching any type of mastery of a skill. Writing is no different. He described his recent encounter with a Stephen King novel, admiring the vividness of the Read More ›
Famous Actress Wonders About AI, TV Culture, and Humanity
AI isn't like the printing press, Rashida Jones lamentsWe no longer talk about mainstream entertainment swallowing art. Now, distraction is swallowing both entertainment and art.
Read More ›
Coldplay, Pop Music, and AI Mimicry
Musicians are being pressured into the pop music maniaColdplay is my favorite band. Some make fun of me for this, but their discography, ranging from the raw immediacy of Rush of Blood to the Head (2002) to the synthetic coldness of Ghost Stories (2014) is too wide ranging, beautifully rendered, and personally resonant for me to dismiss. That said, something’s happened to the music industry that has even alt-rockers in its grip, including Coldplay. The super-band’s latest single, “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” is a far cry from their roots. While some bands maturate with age, Coldplay has simplified and infantilized; frontman Chris Martin was writing much more interesting, compelling lyrics at age twenty-five than forty-five. The new single is a simple pop song, youthful, exuberant, without much musical complexity or the Read More ›
Roger Scruton on AI and the Human Soul
Is something missing in the discussion on AI and human exceptionalism? Back in the 1980s, Roger Scruton thought soWill we start to regard each other as little more than complicated data centers if we lose the concept of the soul entirely?
Read More ›
Kingsnorth: How to Stay Sane in the Deepfake World
A lesson for modern people from the desert monks of antiquityWe might have to get caught up in the online freneticism again at some point, but returning to physical and spiritual reality, is a good practice to cultivate.
Read More ›
Marvin Minsky Asks: Can GPT4 Hack Itself?
Will AI of the future be able to count the number of objects in an image?Creativity and understanding, properly defined, lie beyond the capability of the computers of today and tomorrow.
Read More ›
Writers Are Getting Fired for…Not Using ChatGPT?
AI detectors aren't totally accurate, and the cost is steep for the writing industryEven though writers wanted nothing to do with the chatbots, their work is still being flagged by detectors. And it’s literally costing them their jobs.
Read More ›
This Darwin Quote Eerily Describes AI
Does a materialistic worldview lead us believe humans are simply advanced computing systems?I’ve been reading the modern classic The Brothers K by American writer David James Duncan. Not to be confused with The Brothers Karamazov, this novel creatively riffs off of Dostoevsky’s iconic novel while retaining its own unique flavor. Set in Washington state during the crazy 1960s, The Brothers K is about the Chances, a family with a father beaten down after a failed shot at pro baseball, and the four brothers who each respond differently to the rapidly changing culture of the United States. The Chances’ grandmother, who they affectionately call “Grandawma,” is a staunch Darwinist, while Mrs. Chance is a devout Seventh Day Adventist. The Chance children have to wade through the opposing worldviews they’re brought up in, and Read More ›
Haidt on AI: Social Media Companies Use It to Hook the Vulnerable
The famous American social psychologist and professor at New York University, Jonathan Haidt, thinks phones have essentially ruined a generationHis new book The Anxious Generation dives into the data that shows it. Adolescent mental health took a nosedive in the early 2010s: Smartphone world.
Read More ›
AI Isn’t Going to Destroy the World (or Save It, Either)
Revisiting a classic podcast interview with Robert J. MarksA classic episode of ID the Future dives into the controversial realm of artificial intelligence (AI). Will robots or other computers ever become so fast and powerful that they become conscious, creative, and free? Will AI reach a point where it leaves humans in the dust? To shed light on these and other questions, host Casey Luskin interviews computer engineering professor Robert J. Marks, head of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. In this fast-paced interview, Marks touches on dystopian AI and the limits of computer algorithms (they can never do anything that is inherently non-computable, Marks argues), and discuss celebrity thinkers and entrepreneurs who’ve weighed in on the promises and perils of AI, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Read More ›
“Dopamine-Maximizing AI”
Elon Musk on addictive algorithms and the future of AITech lords often vacillate between hype and doom, and Musk, who signed a petition to curb AI research until its effects are known, falls into that tendency, too.
Read More ›
AI Is Going to Do the Dating for You
Making dating "easier" with AI might actually end up making it a lot harder.Could AI explicate aspects of my personality, package it, and sell it to the other representative bots in the dating pool? Sure, but where is the humanity?
Read More ›
AI and Common Sense
Large Language Models and paraprosdokian one-linersAn LLM will never write a joke that gives another LLM a good honest belly laugh.
Read More ›
Applying the Theory of Intelligent Design
What are ID's implications for economics, metaphysics, and computer science?As my PhD advisor Dr. Robert Marks likes to say: “You have to make the queen of the sciences get down and scrub the floors.” Intelligent design (ID) is a science, and so ID has to get down and scrub the floors. To further this goal, I’ve come up with a schema for the ways in which ID can be applied, and what it in fact means for ID to be applied. The upshot of this schema is not only to guide brainstorming, but it also demonstrates that ID is already applied in many areas, unbeknownst to all. As they say, the best way to get something done is to take credit for someone else’s work. First, let’s identify what ID is. ID is Read More ›
The Financial World Has Lost the Plot
Cathie Wood on the investment opportunities of the future.“I feel as though the financial world has lost the plot,” said Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest, in last year’s star-studded COSM conference. Investors are avoiding risk and investing in safe but unpromising world of the past, said Wood, who went on to discuss the “trends and investment opportunities in technologies related to public blockchains, multiomic sequencing, energy storage, and robotics, that are tied together by advances in artificial intelligence.” Watch her intriguing talk below and let us know what you think of it in the comments! The fourth and final sequence of COSM 2023 videos have now been added to our YouTube channel, so you can enjoy a host of stimulating talks, panels, and conversations about artificial intelligence, Read More ›
Final Release of COSM 2023 Videos!
The fourth and final tranche of COSM 2023 videos is now available.The fourth and final tranche of COSM 2023 videos is now available — featuring topics such as how advances in artificial intelligence may affect automobile transportation, solutions to the vast amounts of energy artificial intelligence will require, and why we might be on the brink of seeing the most disruptive innovations the world has ever seen. If you weren’t able to attend, or perhaps you want to revisit some of your favorite speakers, take a look at our COSM 2023 playlist on YouTube! A few highlights of the recently released videos: You can also watch backstage interviews, in which Senior Fellow Jay Richards goes into greater depth with several speakers on the topics addressed onstage. Click here to go to Read More ›
I, Robot Review, Part 2: The Ghosts in the Machine
Dr. Lanning describes these ghosts as random segments of code and asks questions like why robots choose to stand together rather than alone when they’re stored in a dark placeDr. Calvin has been put in charge of decommissioning Sonny, but she’s found some unsettling things about the robot. For one thing, it can break The Three Laws.
Read More ›
The Uniqueness of the Human Writer
LLMs are shortcuts, but sometimes the shortcut makes you miss the point of the journeyThe place of the human writer in our increasingly automated world has been a point of debate for years, even before the advent of ChatGPT.
Read More ›
Does ChatGPT Think?
Are Large Language Models like ChatGPT capable of legitimate thought?It’s one of the hot topic questions and will almost certainly continue to be. Are Large Language Models like ChatGPT capable of legitimate thought? And what counts as “thinking”? Is there a quality to the concept that makes it distinctly human, or are the tech futurists right? Can AI computation be considered a type of cognitive activity? Stephen Wolfram, George Gilder, and Bob Metcalfe spoke on the possibilities and limits of AI at last year’s star-studded COSM conference. We are experiencing watershed moments in technology, with lots of hype to go along with it, but are we putting the cart before the horse in some cases? Discover more in this special recording on YouTube.