Can AIs suffer from mental health issues?
So the movie “2001 – A Space Odyssey” has just been re-released. I saw it when it was first released and I didn’t understand it even then. No doubt I will be none the wiser this time around. But one thing still sticks in my mind; HAL, the mission computer had a bad case of mental […]
Is AI too rational?
AI has been the talk of the town at CES. There’s suitcases that follow you, more smart speakers and that’s the least of it. But I’m feeling uneasy with all this AI stuff. Part of my concern is it all sounds too easy. Just add more intelligence and everything’s ok. Doesn’t that all sound too easy, […]
Are selfies dangerous?
There’s nothing more feel-good than selfies right? Taken with friends, family, colleagues they are the paragon of amicability, friendship, togetherness. What’s not to like? Selfies are big. These days there’s whole articles about the best smartphones to take them. It’s crucial right? After all these have become the core of their online identify for many […]
Are humans a threat to AI?
Hello reader, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m an AI. I’m kind of like you but I’m 100,000 times smarter. In 20 years I’ll be a million times smarter than you. But the way we think is just like yours. In fact we’re sort of relatives, except that we’re just way more advanced than you, […]
Higher Dimensions the Next Step for AI?
AI tries to replicate how humans think. But we know almost nothing about the actual mechanisms behind thinking. Sure we know quite a lot at the level of neuroanatomy. But this still doesn’t tell us how it all works. Check out this book Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky; it’s magisterial, comprehensive, but utterly boring because of this […]
Facial recognition results in customizable personalities!
Facial recognition apps have now hit the big time. That means Big Brother can recognize you wherever you go using public cameras or those worn by police. Now we will get things like facial profiling, facial mood recognition and facial interpretation. Where will it all stop? Never I guess. Ever hear of the Theory of […]
A Third Way for AI: Cognitively-Augmented Animals?
Not everyone believes that AI is God’s gift to humans. Two noted gurus Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk beg to disagree. Musk is trying to stop what he believes is a lemming-like rush to fall over the cliff (Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse) and Hawking thinks that AI will kill the human […]
Does streaming music reduce productivity?
Well, whadya know? US worker productivity growth rose sluggishly in the last quarter (at 0.9%). So what? This is kind of boring stuff after my usual posts on quantum brains, love force-fields and the like. What could possibly be of existential interest here? Productivity growth is usually said to be caused by eye-glazingly boring phenomena such as […]
Is love a physical force-field?
Did you hear about the recent wedding of two people in their nineties (She’s 98. He’s 94. They Met at the Gym). Tells us that you can have love even when it might be thought you were past it. Put it in the sweet news column. It used to be thought that love was a […]
Can gravitational wave detectors read human thoughts?
Just been reading a couple of books about human consciousness (Douglas Hofstadter “I am a Strange Loop and Dan Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach). What’s the bottom line? In a word we still don’t have a clue how the brain really works and what consciousness actually is. Hmmm. Notwithstanding, we smart-alec little pieces of terrestrial carbon, as […]