Children born without brain hemispheres are conscious; only a dualist or idealist perspective on the brain-mind relationship can explain that fact. | Continue reading
While Schrödinger’s Mind first! approach earns wide support, his view that there is no individual consciousness entails problems when we consider good and evil. | Continue reading
The scary part: Intelligent, well-meaning people think that bail, sentencing, and parole decisions should be based on what may well be statistical coincidences. | Continue reading
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Prolific science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) developed the Three Laws of Robotics, in the hope of guarding against potentially dangerous artificial intelligence. | Continue reading
Human data collectors (HDCs) have been able to evade responsibility for the preventable harms they cause by blame shifting and transferring risk to users. | Continue reading
Some of Yung Lin Ma’s suggested reasons are ones we had not considered before, including flow of time and communication differences. | Continue reading
The Tractable Cognition Thesis puts us between a rock and a hard place until we look outside of natural processes for a source of this information. | Continue reading
The researchers point out that life forms that show minimal consciousness have very different brains. Behavior, not brain anatomy, is the signal to look for. | Continue reading
It used to be that a one-time investment would last for at least a decade. But with Facebook, you have to rewrite your app every few months. | Continue reading
The evidence is strong that bitcoin prices have been manipulated by dishonest trading and boisterous rumors, then sold to the naive. | Continue reading
Dr. Paul Werbos called Minsky’s involvement in artificial neural networks “a soap opera you wouldn’t believe.” | Continue reading
Eric Holloway has some fun with the difference between the demands of proof and those of disproof. | Continue reading
Contrary to the claims of futurist alarmists, AI is a tool meant to enhance human performance, but is wholly incapable of surpassing human ability. | Continue reading
At a certain point, it may be worth asking whether they — essentially — do us a favor by not really existing, not getting in the way of our imaginations. | Continue reading
Philosophers and scientists who champion emergence over reductionism argue that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. | Continue reading
It may be that early enthusiasm for Level 5 self-driving was motivated primarily by a misunderstanding of the relationship between humans and machines. | Continue reading
Our senses don’t actually work quite the way we think. Frankenstein-type experiments could have awful real-world consequences. | Continue reading
With all the concern about major social media companies deplatforming those they disagree with, there is a concern that these companies' monopoly on social media will eliminate free speech. | Continue reading
This problem in artificial intelligence research goes back to the 1950s and is based on refusal to grapple with built-in fundamental limits. | Continue reading
Computers are much better than humans at curve fitting but still far worse at devising models that help us understand and predict the world. | Continue reading
Most mathematics topics teach a specific logical skill that will help students solve problems on any career path. | Continue reading
About math drills: Every algebra teacher I’ve ever met will tell you that instant recall of math facts is the best predictor of algebra success. | Continue reading
More people are starting to ask the question and they are realizing that what the technology can deliver is not living up to either the hype or the cost. | Continue reading
Waymo, by contrast, aims only at Level 4 self-driving where—under specific circumstances—the car does not need you. | Continue reading
Fortunately, with Docker, it is hard to go too wrong but the more you know about your tools, the better they work for you. | Continue reading
Pull-up and pull-down resistors protect interrupted circuits by setting them to either the source voltage or zero voltage. | Continue reading
Knowing about voltage dividers will not only help you with projects, it will help you recognize this pattern on schematics you might find on the internet. | Continue reading
Difficulty sponsoring true innovation sounds like a disaster for the future of Microsoft as its legacy software loses favor to more innovative competition. | Continue reading
Perpetual Innovation Machines tend to wind down because there is no universally good search. Computers are powerful because they have limitations. | Continue reading
By splitting the app into different containers for each service, we can choose how our app scales and even scale different parts in differing amounts. | Continue reading
Electronics for Beginners follows in Mims’ footsteps as it shows the budding electronics enthusiast the many new components now available and how to use them. | Continue reading
For our experiment, we need a quantum coin flipper, a disintegration gun, and observers who are sure that there is an infinite array of universes out there. | Continue reading
Docker, over and above the basic container technology, also provides a well-defined system of container management. | Continue reading
By posing relevant questions, DARPA’s overall AI strategy accurately embraces both the capabilities and limitations of AI. | Continue reading
The Explanatory Filter often goes unnoticed but it is essential to internet communication, cryptography, and communication. | Continue reading
With GPT-3, much of the AI industry is backing off from the usual reckless hype, perhaps because the program makes the limitations of neural nets obvious. | Continue reading
Entirely virtual and entirely in-person meetings are both much easier to handle than mixed-mode meetings but here are some tested strategies for mixed-mode. | Continue reading
The systems of trust meant to protect users can be turned against them at a moment’s notice. | Continue reading
As we have reported before, the security within Bitcoin actually seems to facilitate scams. | Continue reading
With the “tactile web,” instead of having to manually install apps, launch apps, search for websites, etc., the phone will automatically carry out the job. | Continue reading
An image cannot be sharpened using only the information in the image itself. But there are AI-driven ways around that. | Continue reading
The USAF will pit an autonomous drone against a fighter pilot in July 2021. But future warfare is more likely to be robotics controlled by humans than AI alone. | Continue reading
Michael Crichton’s 2003 warning about corrupt peer review in science has proved true during the COVID-19 crisis. | Continue reading
Stephen Hawking was a genius in theoretical physics but he did not know much about computers and his fears of an AI takeover were unfounded. | Continue reading
A programming language creates a middle space between the way humans think and the way computers think. What’s the best compromise point? | Continue reading
At first, “shirts without stripes” might not seem like much of an issue but it turns out that many important and interesting problems for computers fundamentally reduce to this “halting problem.” And understanding human language is one of these problems. | Continue reading