Matt Lutz at Persuasion: Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that AI alignment is impossible. How might an AI form a moral sense? There are basically two scenarios. In one scenario, moral facts are the kind of fact that one might simply figure out by thinking about them hard. In such … | Continue reading

Carl Zimmer at the New York Times: On Thursday, a group of researchers reported that the Ugandan chimps are locked in a primate version of civil war. Two factions split about a decade ago and have been engaged in a highly lethal conflict ever since. Scientists have never seen suc … | Continue reading

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian: Thirty-five thousand years ago, in the Ardèche region of France, Paleolithic artists drew a spectacular bestiary on the walls of the Chauvet cave. Their focus was apex predators, so there were lots of lions, as well as mammoths and woolly rhinocero … | Continue reading

Cyriac Roeding in Time Magazine: The core problem in oncology has always been one of discrimination. Cancer cells and normal cells are, at the molecular level, nearly identical. What distinguishes a cancer cell is dysregulation, a set of genetic switches flipped in the wrong dire … | Continue reading

by Dwight Furrow The debate about whether artificial intelligence might one day become conscious is philosophically interesting. It raises age-old philosophical questions in a new form: What is a mind? What counts as experience? What would it mean for something made of code and s … | Continue reading

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Lucy Hughes-Hallett at The Guardian: The narrator of Deborah Levy’s witty scherzo of a “fiction” – “novel” isn’t the word for this uncategorisable book – thinks that Gertrude Stein would have liked Sigmund Freud. She imagines them enjoying a cigar together while their wives make … | Continue reading

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: We are more familiar with ourselves than with anything else in the universe, but we generally don’t come very close to really understanding what our “self” is. That’s not too surprising, as selves are very complicated and we are burdened by … | Continue reading

Charles Lane at Persuasion: After 16 years in power, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has suffered a decisive election defeat, one so overwhelming and undeniable that the self-styled tribune of “illiberal” politics conceded to his opponents—the Tisza party led by 45-year-old … | Continue reading

April Long in Scientific American: On the 11th floor of a nondescript office building on 57th street in Manhattan, pipette-wielding technicians in white lab coats hunch over glass vials and digital scales, carefully concocting perfumes. This is the Experimental Lab at Givaudan, o … | Continue reading

by Christopher Hall The “literary thought experiment” is not a particularly well-explored genre. Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story is of course a famous one; we might say that other examples include Swift’s A Modest Proposal and stories by Borges and Ted Chiang. Like thought experim … | Continue reading

This guy was just walking calmly on the sidewalk. Presumably he could fly to wherever he’s going but he prefers to have a bit of a stroll, I guess. And here is ChatGPT’s comment: “That appears to be a scarlet tiger moth or a very close relative in the tiger moth family (Arctiinae … | Continue reading

Anita Chabria at the Los Angeles Times: The San Francisco technology company Anthrophic announced Tuesday that it wasn’t releasing a new version of its Claude AI super-brain — because it is so powerful that it has the ability to hack into just about any computer system, no matter … | Continue reading

Ari Daniel at Smithsonian Magazine: Snakes bite five million people each year, killing some 125,000 and disfiguring or blinding three times as many. Antivenoms aren’t always readily available where the problematic snakes live. They also can be deadly themselves, as they could ind … | Continue reading

Greg Cwik at the LARB: WILLIAM H. GASS, the portly pontiff of English prose, felt for literature an intense ardor that imbues his audacious fiction and his studious, poetic criticism with almost frightening virtuosity—labyrinthine syntax, a vast vocabulary comprising many arcane … | Continue reading

Aisling Irwin in Nature: Ryan Kelly is in awe of what floats invisibly in the air. “It is completely mind-blowing,” says Kelly, who studies environmental DNA (eDNA) at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We are absolutely surrounded by information in the form of DNA and RNA … | Continue reading

The Great Hall of Mirrors Once I wrote, “On the mule of time we sit backwards. It carries us forward anyway, though things appear a little askew.” Now I walk into a room with a hundred rearview mirrors from lost and forgotten vehicles and think, “At my age, I’m on no mule, but in … | Continue reading

by Claire Chambers My previous 3QD column ‘AI Part 1: What the Story-Writing Machines Are Doing to Us’ was an edited version of a talk on AI I gave at an interdisciplinary webinar for the publisher Taylor & Francis. At this real-world event I came across as a Luddite because STEM … | Continue reading

Jed Perl in the New York Review of Books: Morgan Meis will say anything. He jump-starts complex philosophical ideas with slangy turns of phrase, referring to a “shitshow from start to finish,” a “fuckfest,” and “a real Fuck You painting.” He can also be perfectly sober, inviting … | Continue reading

John Yau at Hyperallergic: Steve DiBenedetto, who began exhibiting in the 1980s, has become one of the best painters of his generation. A bundle of contradictions, restlessly moving between figuration and abstraction, he loves to push the paint around in his work — adding, scrapi … | Continue reading

Bud Smith in The Baffler: We came in just before sunup and heard the plastic plant had to be shut down for emergency repair. The foreman drove us to the control house and then went in to talk specifics with the unit operator. We three mechanics remained in the work truck, cellpho … | Continue reading

Stone Go inside a stone That would be my way. Let somebody else become a dove Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth. I am happy to be a stone. From the outside the stone is a riddle: No one knows how to answer it. Yet within, it must be cool and quiet Even though a… | Continue reading

by Priya Malhotra When I went to Singapore last month, I found myself staring at the streets with a kind of baffled fascination. They were so clean that they seemed almost untouched by human life. There were no half-torn love letters plastered to the pavement by some earlier rain … | Continue reading

Matthew M. Davis at Quillette: Copilot seemed to follow my train of thought. I say “seemed” because I know the received opinion is that AI bots don’t have thoughts of their own and can’t really “follow” other people’s thoughts either: they just regurgitate information and predict … | Continue reading