Will we start to regard each other as little more than complicated data centers if we lose the concept of the soul entirely?
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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 ›
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.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. [Winston’s] heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him… And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 Read More ›
Imagine people making decisions that are influenced by an LLM that does not understand the meaning of any of the words it inputs and outputs.
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On December 27, The New York Times Company sued Microsoft and OpenAI for violations of their copyright. The Times contends that training chatbots on its content in order to create an information competitor is a violation of its copyright. This suit is sure to bring up a number of old copyright issues that were never resolved, plus some new that need to be worked through. The fact is, the big search engines have been violating copyright from the very beginning. All search engines are in fact derivative works of the sites that they crawl, index, and dish out. Most search engines even provide excerpts from the sites they scan. However, most copyright holders have turned a blind eye to this for two main Read More ›
Can this teleonomic behavior of evolution simply be a byproduct of non-teleological forms of evolution? Information theory suggests that this is not likely.
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Since it doesn’t know anything in the first place, there’s no way to talk it into sanity once it goes insane.
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Ancient philosophy can be extremely useful, and entertaining, even when contrary to modern science! See it in the movies!
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“Virtually just like real life!” as advertisements proclaimed. All it did was give John a headache, and feeling he’d just wasted a couple of hours of his life.
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Why do we feel the drive to make some overarching sense of our lives? You can’t program spiritual longing into a computer, not matter how savvy the algorithm.
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In today’s featured video, watch Sean Lie, Chief Hardware Architect at Cerebras Systems, and Pierre de Rochemont, Founder of Frontier Nanosystems, give presentations on the challenges and promising techniques for advancing computing power into the future. We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues that range from economics, Big Tech, and artificial intelligence. Notable speakers include 2022 Kyoto Prize winner Carver Mead, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and George Gilder, co-founder of Discovery Institute and author of Life After Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money.
Programming practice has gone through several evolutions in its lifespan. The first phase might be considered the “exploratory” phase, where there were no rules but a lot of imagination. People wrote code that was simultaneously amazing and terrible—amazing at what people got their slow computers to do, but terrible in that no one but the author would ever be able to maintain the programs. The lessons learned from the exploratory phase led to what is known as “structured” programming. The goal of structured programming was to be able to write programs that someone else had a chance of reading and understanding. Structured programming favored having really well-documented inputs and outputs to every function, very clear entry and exit points to each function, and Read More ›
As I reported last year, there’s been a lot of talk about a singularity in the last decade. That’s the point when machine intelligence (AI) exceeds human intelligence and begins to rule humanity and eventually the entire universe. It’s a scary proposition to be sure, but we can rest easy on that front, because it’s not going to happen. The futurists assume there’s a bridge between narrow applications of AI and the general intelligence humans possess. But no such bridge exists. As Erik J. Larson explains in his book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, we’re not even on the right road to such a bridge. You can also take George Gilder’s word for it. One of the most influential thinkers on technology and economics Read More ›
For today’s featured video from the COSM 2022, check out this interview between journalist Maria Teresa Cometto and Frederico Faggin. Faggin discussed his background and how he came to design the first commercial microprocessor at Intel. For more similar material, visit the Center’s YouTube page to enjoy more lectures and videos from past COSM conferences.
A new report by Amazon has caused a bit of a stir on the Internet. In it, the Amazon Prime video team reported that changing their architecture from a microservice architecture to a monolithic architecture resulted in a 90% cost savings. While the report itself was very mild (its only claim was that this architecture helped in this specific situation), it has caused the people who disliked the microservice trend to make some noise of their own. Here, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what I see as the benefits of the microservice approach from a software development management perspective. If you are not familiar with microservice architectures, you can find out more information in my book, Cloud Read More ›
For the uninitiated, the Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer that runs the Linux operating system. It can be either operated as a desktop computer or as an embedded system (i.e., a custom electronic device), or both. Historically, computer systems were either general-purpose computers or embedded systems. General-purpose computers required too much hardware, too many chips, and too much power to work inside an electronic device. However, as manufacturers packed more and more functionality into less and less space using less and less power, eventually it became possible to have a computer that was small, cheap, powerful, and not especially power-hungry. The Raspberry Pi came about right as this was happening. A Raspberry Pi is a full computer that is not much Read More ›
AI-generated content has become increasingly common on the web. However, as we enter this new era, we will need to think through the moral and social ramifications of what we are doing, and how we should negotiate the new ethical landscape. But first, a brief recap of recent history. The first major player to pioneer AI-generated content was the Associated Press. AP realized that many market-oriented articles were pretty monotonous and read like templates anyway, so they decided to fully commit and auto-generate many of them. If you read an AP story about a company’s earnings report and it sounds eerily like every other story about other companies’ earnings reports, there’s a reason for that. Templated content, while annoying, provides window-dressing to raw Read More ›
To some extent, ChatGPT is a newer, easier-to-use interface than Google. Unlike Google, it doesn’t make you waste time by visiting those pesky websites. It not only looks into its database for content, but it also summarizes it for you as paragraphs. There is a problem lurking in there, however. Being computers, neither Google nor ChatGPT cares about the truth. They are algorithms, and they merely do as they are told. Additionally, you can’t code the human mind into algorithms. However, there is a fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what Google does that will prevent content generators like ChatGPT from displacing search engines like Google: Google eventually lets you out of its system. Ultimately, the goal of search Read More ›
ChatGPT is a direct descendent of GPT-3, and is a fancy form of a fancy machine learning algorithm called a neural network. For an overview of all of ChatGPT’s neural network complexity, here is a fun article. However, all that is beside the point. The important thing about a neural network: It can only generate what is in its training data. Therefore, ChatGPT can only produce what is in its training data. ChatGPT’s training data does not include the conversation you or I are having with ChatGPT. Therefore, if something novel occurs in the conversation, ChatGPT cannot reproduce it. That is, if ChatGPT is a neural network. Conversely, if ChatGPT reproduces novel text from the conversation, then ipso facto ChatGPT is not a Read More ›