Growing Up on the Internet is Like Growing Up on Mars
We need to come back to EarthNot only is the online world making us angry and sad. It’s also causing our character to atrophy.
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Study: Writing by Hand is Good for the Brain. What Does that Say About ChatGPT?
Nothing can replace pen and paperIt 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 ›
Ban the Phones and Bring Back the Books
It's time for the book, a time-tested vehicle of delight and instruction, to make a comeback in the classroomThis summer, several states have proposed banning smartphones in public schools or introducing programs that will limit kids’ phone use during school hours. So far New York, Indiana, Ohio, California, and Oklahoma have proposed bans or restrictions, showing rare bipartisan concern over the issue. The impetus for this movement came in May when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a letter to every fellow governor in the United States with a complimentary copy of The Anxious Generation, a new book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt shows how starting in the early 2010s kids’ mental health steeply declined. The main culprit? The smartphone, which soon became an ensnaring substitute for “real life.” Gen Z, those born after 1995, were the first Read More ›
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.
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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.
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Musk and LeCun Have a Superficial Debate About Science
What would have been a better debate?Elon Musk tweeted the following: “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.” Yann LeCun, chief scientist at tech giant Meta, could not resist responding. Musk claims to “want a maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.” It escalated quickly, with Musk questioning what science LeCun had done in the past five years, and LeCun replying: “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?” LeCun then said: “If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not science”. So the most successful engineer over the last ten years criticizes academic 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.
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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.
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Does AI Make Immortality Possible?
Ray Kurzweil speaks outTechnology futurists are confident that artificial intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence, but will it enhance human longevity too? Computer scientist and pioneer Ray Kurzweil addresses this question in his fascinating lecture at COSM 2023, the national tech summit that witnesses the best minds on tech, AI, and its intersections with society. See Kurzweil talk about the direction he thinks AI is currently headed, and how our longevity could be affected as a result. See also a number of other exciting and timely videos from the most recent COSM conference for more material on these topics!
Anti-Aging: Is it Possible or a Pipe Dream?
A brand-new video on the topic of anti-aging technologies from the 2023 COSM conferenceThe Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence is pleased to be able to share the videos from the 2023 COSM conference, now available on YouTube. This annual conference explores the status and the future of our era-defining technologies, from artificial intelligence to electric vehicles to new developments in biotech. Today’s video features a discussion on anti-aging, and whether this is even a possibility. Matt Scholz, CEO of Oisin Biotechnologies, leads a discussion with Vered Caplan, CEO of Orgenesis, and Elena Sergeeva, Neuroscientist at Tufts and Harvard and co-founder of Tiamat Labs, about anti-aging biotechnologies — how genetic reprogramming of cells could negate the effects of aging and even allow a person to stay in perfect health indefinitely, essentially Read More ›
COSM 2023 Now on YouTube!
COSM 2023 explored the nature of artificial intelligence, as well as its future potential and risks.You can now watch the 2023 COSM Technology Summit on YouTube. If you weren’t able to attend, or perhaps you want to revisit some of your favorite speakers, we are now releasing the second tranche of videos for your enjoyment. Click here to go to the COSM 2023 Playlist on YouTube! COSM 2023 explored the nature of artificial intelligence, as well as its future potential and risks. Stephen Wolfram spoke about his efforts to make the world more computable so that computers can help us understand the world. Afterward, George Gilder and Bob Metcalfe joined him in a fascinating discussion about Turing machines, neural networks, and AI-driven language models. A panel featuring William Dembski, Robert Marks, and George Montanez offered Read More ›
The Backdoor to Control the Internet
We almost lost the Internet last week, but open-source developers saved the day.Few people are aware, but over the last several days, a perceptive developer foiled a multi-year plot to install a remote backdoor into the entire Internet.
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Sundar Pichai Says AI Will Be as Big as Fire
The AI bubble is going to pop.Ask someone how big AI will be, and the answer is likely huge. But how big is huge? Why does this matter? Because big forecasts encourage big investments, trials, and purchases. After big consulting companies predicted eight years ago that AI would have economic gains of about $15 trillion by 2030, many countries and companies felt the need to pay for their own reports from those same consultants. Of course, those consultants said that those countries could experience rapid productivity gains and those companies could experience rising profits if they implemented AI in the right way, which was of course under the guidance of the consulting companies! Eight years later and few of their predictions have come true. But their Read More ›
Escaping the Dopamine Cartel
We can't even be bothered with "entertainment" anymore.Ted Gioia investigates the impact of the “dopamine culture,” our modern tendency to flit among tabs and scroll endlessly through fifteen-second-long video clips.
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AI and Wall Street’s Hype Curve
Almost all new tech has a hype curve. Here are the stages.Technologies that have surfed the hype curve include superconductivity, the Segway, cold fusion, information theory, Theranos, Piltdown man and string theory.
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Artificially Smart: Artificial Intelligence and Higher Education
Understanding needs to remain the metric by which students are evaluatedIf steps aren’t taken to ensure that conceptual mastery remains the standard for higher education, most students will complete their degrees as technicians.
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Alien 3 Review, Part 4
Ripley's curtain callIn the third article, Ripley woke up in an all-male prison after surviving a shuttle crash. A parasitic alien tagged along and implanted an embryo in an inmate’s dog. The embryo breaks out of the animal and begins killing people until everyone figures out what’s going on, then they hatched one of the dumbest plans I’ve ever seen in cinema. After that, Ripley begins feeling sick. She goes to her still fully intact cryobed and scans herself. She finds that the parasitic alien has also planted an embryo inside her. The fact that Ripley had an embryo in her the entire time is ridiculous for a number of reasons. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, her cryobed wasn’t broken, so Read More ›
Alien 3 Review, Part 3
Aliens vs. Looney TunesIn the previous reviews, we talked about how Ripley is once again the sole survivor. Her ship crashed because, somehow, the alien queen she killed in the second movie managed to lay an egg in the five minutes before it died. That egg hatched, attacked Ripley and the other’s cryobeds, and some of its acidic salvia melted its way into the ship’s wiring, causing the spacecraft to crash. To make the situation even more ridiculous, the escape shuttle the cryobeds were moved into crashed as well, and everyone expect Ripley was killed. Ripley wakes up in an all-male prison. Superintendent Harold Andrews is concerned for her safety, so he does his best to keep Ripley in the medical wing. Ripley Read More ›
You Can Be Social and Still Be Very Lonely
Machines can't meet our need to be known and understood.Technology speaks to efficiency and convenience but ultimately can’t know you like a person could.
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This New Year, Resolve to Stay Human
This year, we will continue to declare that human beings are unique and exceptional.The transhumanist vision of life seeks to supplant our human limits with endless knowledge and longevity through the collective online database of humanity.
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