Are the benefits from generative AI really hundreds of times higher than those from Microsoft Office?
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What do we lose when we’re never quiet with our own thoughts, always checking our phones, always listening to Spotify or a podcast in the background?
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I’ve never driven my car into a lake screaming “the machine knows!” like Michael Scott did but the temptation to use technology like this loom in everyday life.
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It might be time to get the pens and notebooks back out and shut off the keyboard for a while. Just pretend you’re back in the first grade and don’t have a minicomputer in your back pocket. Writing by hand can help stimulate the whole brain and stave off cognitive decline, according to a study by Van der Weel and Van der Meer (2024), as reported by Pamela B. Rutledge in Psychology Today. Using a more personal note, she writes, I’ve never been one to keep a journal, but I now wonder if the exclusive use of computers and the lack of handwriting practice is doing my brain a disservice by decreasing the activity of cortico-subcortical components of the writing Read More ›
Sanity might be about ready to return to the market. Just maybe, we have reached peak hype.
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Scott 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 ›
Creativity and understanding, properly defined, lie beyond the capability of the computers of today and tomorrow.
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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 ›
His new book The Anxious Generation dives into the data that shows it. Adolescent mental health took a nosedive in the early 2010s: Smartphone world.
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A 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 ›
Tech 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.
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One reason there wasn’t an emphasis on reducing hallucinations is because the problem is hard. Some argue that hallucinations are “baked into” AI chatbots.
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Altman said her voice could be “comforting” to people. She declined at the time, and so was naturally surprised to find that the new program, which was just released, sounded eerily similar to her own voice.
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An LLM will never write a joke that gives another LLM a good honest belly laugh.
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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 ›
The place of the human writer in our increasingly automated world has been a point of debate for years, even before the advent of ChatGPT.
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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.
A man broke into an old woman’s house recently, and after being described to the police in Kent, England, an AI image of the fellow was rendered. Usually, of course, an artist will sketch the profile of the criminal suspect based on details provided by the witness, but now AI is having its shot; only, the result was laughable. The profile looked like it could have come from the 2008 version of the Wii. It isn’t detailed, the neck and head aren’t ratioed like a real person’s would be, and it just simply came out cartoonish. Frank Landymore reported on the incident over at Futurism, writing, The suspect is described as being a white man around five feet, five inches Read More ›
In the midst of all the chatter surrounding AI and chatbots, one might be led to believe that the concepts of consciousness or even the soul, let alone the afterlife, are simply relics of outdated beliefs. This sentiment is often echoed by some scientists, raising the question: Is this truly the case? And should we readily accept this perspective? In a recent episode of Mindscape, renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist Raphael Millerie, who boasts an Oxford education and is now a fellow at the Center of Science and Society, teamed up with Sean Carroll, a prominent theoretical physicist known for debunking notions of the soul and the afterlife, to delve into the world of chatbots and AI (see episode 230). Read More ›
We all know Babel (no, not the language learning company). It’s in Genesis. The Biblical story about God making so many languages and dialects and (let’s add) opinions that no one could understand each other or effectively communicate. One legacy of the triumph of digital technology and AI in every corner of our existence is that we’ve recreated this Babel. Let me try to unpack this, and bear with me if it seems I’m saying something derogatory about one belief or another — my aim is to avoid that game and try to explain the mechanism, the social and cultural story, by which our new Babel is ascendant, and the old ways of arguing and understanding each other are on Read More ›