July 19, 2024 This essay falls into three parts. First, I discuss the question of what it is which makes humans unique — that is, irreplaceable. Second, I consider whether machines on balance enhance or diminish humanness. This has become an issue of the moment with the growth of machine intelligence. Finally, I try to answer two questions: how can we secure our survival as human beings? Is it worth trying to do so? A quick preview of my answer to the first question. Some...
Read More »Is it live or is it ChatGPT?
It’s hard to keep generating fresh content every day for your edification and entertainment here at Angry Bear. The temptation is to use Chat GPT to do the heavy lifting, but so far, we’ve foresworn AI to rely on our own in-house I. If you begin to suspect that we’ve betrayed our readers, here are the ten most overused words by ChatGPT*1. Explore2. Captivate3. Tapestry4. Leverage5. Embrace6. Resonate7. Dynamic8. Testament9. Delve10. ElevateWhen these...
Read More »AI and lung cancer prognosis
To follow up on an earlier post on the future of artificial intelligence, AI has been making serious inroads in radiological imaging for a while. Unsurprisingly, histological imaging is the next frontier, and AI is conquering that as well. A subset of lung cancer patients will see metastatic spread to their brains. A recent study reports that deep learning algorithms can distinguish which cancers will, and which won’t, metastasize to the brain based...
Read More »Will AI take all the jobs?
Noah Smith has a blog post arguing that AI won’t take away all the jobs from humans. It’s a clever and well-written post that deserves your attention.Here are some money grafs:“So as AI gets better and better, and gets used for more and more different tasks, the limited global supply of compute will eventually force us to make hard choices about where to allocate AI’s awesome power. We will have to decide where to apply our limited amount of AI, and...
Read More »IPA’s weekly links
They spend the next 45 minutes arguing about Stata vs. R. (In honor of the new Jack Ryan season) Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Dave Evans offers a short PhD in Michael Kremer’s work, with quick summaries of 100+ of his papers. But being a Nobel-winning researcher is only one of his jobs. He’s founded, or been instrumental in, more than one non-profit, and in USAID DIV. As a friend told me this morning, most people who know him from just one facet of his life...
Read More »Jordana Capelewicz — To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future
There are obvious technological applications for GQN, but it has also caught the eye of neuroscientists, who are particularly interested in the training algorithm it uses to learn how to perform its tasks. From the presented image, GQN generates predictions about what a scene should look like — where objects should be located, how shadows should fall against surfaces, which areas should be visible or hidden based on certain perspectives — and uses the differences between those predictions...
Read More »Human Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence and Popper’s Three World Ontology
Long-time commentator Ken B has drawn my attention to this post by Gene Callahan that complains that the Turing Test doesn’t really test for real intelligence.In essence, I actually agree on this point, though I would reject Callahan’s dualism.The endless debates about whether machines or software have real intelligence generally tend to suffer from a shoddy fallacy of equivocation. Generally, people who want to defend the real intelligence of machines make arguments like this: (1) machines...
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