And the science paper that claimed so has been retracted. A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy”: “The paper found that even though individuals may […]
Mind
Be more afraid of the hype vendors than of the AI
The release of the Top Ten over hyped AI stories of 2019 has led the way for further promising ones, including this one, says engineer and philosopher Jonathan Bartlett: Was the machine cleverand sneaky or was it just programmed wrong? You decide. First, just to be clear, at Mind Matters we have nothing against AI. […]
Artificial intelligence: Machines do not see objects as wholes
Mistaking a teapot shape for a golf ball, due to surface features, is one striking example from a recent open-access paper: The networks did “a poor job of identifying such items as a butterfly, an airplane and a banana,” according to the researchers. The explanation they propose is that “Humans see the entire object, while […]
But if humans are meat machines, how do ethics come into the picture?
Montanez: The AI and ML systems we have in place today are not sentient, but they are still dangerous. I am not worried about the future of AI, but I am concerned about the dangers artificial learning systems currently pose.
Real Intelligence Can Never Be Matched by the Artificial
Scary predictions are a thriving business but that does not make them a road map to the future.
Will artificial intelligence design artificial super-intelligence?
Current indications are that Moore’s law’s speed has already slowed or even ceased to be a true description of the information technology (IT) industry today…
Rob Sheldon: Did humans see the color blue before modern times?
Perhaps we should say, we cannot discriminate “blue” without a word for it? For sure. This is the property of language. As linguists will say, a word excludes more than it includes. And if we don’t have a word, we lack the ability to discriminate (or, as Aristotle shows us, we make up a word on the spot, we “categorize”.)
Why artificial intelligence (AI) cannot produce a Universal Answers Machine
Okay, let’s start with Can an algorithm be racist? Well, the machine has no opinion. It processes vast tracts of data. But, as a result, the troubling hidden roots of some data are exposed.
A definition of consciousness: “The intentional power of the mind”
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers this definition by way of explaining that there is one sense in which consciousness IS an illusion: We are not aware of our consciousness; only of its objects. I believe that the most satisfactory definition of consciousness is the intentional power of the mind — the ability of thought to be “about” […]
Theoretical physicist takes on panpsychism. Bam! Pow!
It’s the basic problem of the coffee mug. If naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” is true, either you and the mug are both conscious or neither of you is. The comments at BackRe(Action) illustrate the difficulty many have grasping that that is a serious problem.
“But it can’t be design, M’sieur. Design is an illusion.”
If there is no design in nature, then it is an illusion and Macron will have to settle for minimizing the influence of the people he doesn’t like, without claiming that there is some “meaning” or “design” behind their actions.
Plato’s Library: Why information is the true source of new wealth
Jonathan Bartlett explains the relationship between information and prosperity as set out in Eric Holloway’s new paper: our ability to “read from Plato’s Library” of new ideas provides us with an ever-growing supply of
side information that powers the economy.
Top Ten AI Hype 2: AI Can Write Novels and Screenplays Better than the Pros!
AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: Software can automatically generate word sequences based on material fed in from existing scripts: In 2016, Ars Technica was proud to be sponsoring “the first AI-written sci-fi script:” As explained in The Guardian, a recurrent neural network “was fed the scripts of dozens of science fiction movies […]
Michael Egnor on the immateriality of the mind – more
It is much easier to talk about the mind as a “meat robot” than about the reality, especially these days, when a Twitter putdown or TED talk is all you need by way of an argument. Few will bother to seek out someone who knows why it’s absolute nonsense.
Can Big Data beat the humans who compile it? A computer pioneer bet No
Fred Brooks says that human intelligence augmented by artificial intelligence will always beat artificial intelligence alone. Is he right? Jed Macosko, an assistant prof at Wake Forest University, explains: Before we envision scary scenes from The Matrix, we need to remember that Zor, Deep Blue, and any future AI systems are inevitably designed by humans. […]