From Jonathan Bartlett at Mind Matters Today: Bitcoin solves a lot of tough problems in very ingenious ways. Unfortunately, however, those benefits don’t tend to translate well for end users, who are not nearly as ingenious as the people developing the system. More. Readers will recognize Johnny Bartlett Jonathan Bartlett, Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute, as a longtime author here.
From Mind Matters Today: A recent conference raises concerns, according to Science Magazine, that our machines may never be able to get wise to human deviancy. So-called “white hat” hackers who test the security of AI have found it surprisingly easy to fool. Matthew Hutson reports, Last week, here at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), a group of researchers described a turtle they had 3D printed. Most people would say it looks just like a turtle, but an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm saw it differently. Most of the time, the AI thought the turtle looked like a rifle. Similarly, it saw a 3D-printed baseball as an espresso. These are examples of “adversarial attacks”—subtly altered images, objects, or sounds Read More ›
… maybe by changing the landscape in ways we might not like. Referring to a mathematical concept discussed by Bertrand Russell, he calls it “theft” vs. “honest toil.” From Bill Dembski at Mind Matters Today: AI (artificial intelligence) poses a challenge to human work, threatening to usurp many human jobs in coming years. But a related question that’s too often ignored and needs to be addressed is whether this challenge will come from AI in fact being able to match and exceed human capabilities in the environments in which humans currently exercise those capabilities, or whether it will come from AI also manipulating our environments so that machines thrive where otherwise they could not. AI never operates in a vacuum. Read More ›
From Mind Matters Today: Succinctly, researchers using Bell’s theoretical insight into quantum entanglement have shown that there are no deterministic local hidden variables. This means that the final state of entangled quantum particles is not determined by any variables in the initial state. Nature at its most fundamental level is indeterminate. The states of bound particles are not determined by any local variable at the moment of separation. Bell’s inequality and the experimental work that has followed on it conclusively demonstrate that quantum entanglement, and thus nature, is not determinate, at least locally. There remains the remote possibility of non-local determinism, but that view is considered fringe and is rejected by nearly all physicists working in the field. It is Read More ›
From Ryan Whitwam at Extreme Tech: Scientists have known for years that our Neanderthal cousins made use of fire to cook and make tar from birch bark, but we didn’t know much about where they got the fire. Were they simply at the mercy of mother nature, collecting fire from lightning strikes, or could they start their own fires whenever they needed it? Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen and his colleagues now say Neanderthals knew how to make fire, and they came to that decision after making fire themselves. Sorensen and his team at Leiden University suspected that flint tools often found at Neanderthal dig sites held the answer to early humanoid mastery of fire. Any place Neanderthals lived, archaeologists are likely Read More ›
… in a science and technology culture in which it is otherwise axiomatic that humans are merely evolved animals. So, can we cheat death by uploading ourselves as virtual AI entities? Cheating death is a serious goal of some transhumanists. Futurist Ray Kurzweil(now a Google innovator) calls such a digital fate the Singularity, as in his book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Published in 2006, it is still in the top ten in artificial intelligence and biotechnology. In 2017, he announced, 2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence Read More ›
. . . given what it takes for us to be here as credibly responsible, rational, morally governed creatures. This is of course my response to UD News’ recent articles on the challenge to “prove” the existence of God, as was recently issued by the President of the Philippines, His Excellency Rodrigo Roa Duterte. Of course, much hinges on the meaning of “proof,” and so I first pause to note a point made by Simon Greenleaf in his treatise on Evidence: >>Evidence, in legal acceptation, includes all the means by which any alleged matter of fact, the truth of which is submitted to investigation, is established or disproved . . . None but mathematical truth is susceptible of that high Read More ›
The one that was supposed to waste traditional philosophy? At Mind Matters Today, Back in 1992, philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor said, “…we’re all materialists for much the reason that Churchill gave for being a democrat: the alternatives seem even worse. The new research project [science of mind] is therefore to reconcile our materialism to the psychological facts: to explain how something that is material through and through could have whatever properties minds actually do have…. Thinking of philosophical materialism as a science must have seemed like a step forward at the time. Over twenty-five years later, there have been dozens of theories of consciousness jostling for the podium, most of them “worse than wrong,” even in the eyes of Read More ›
From Michael Egnor at Mind Matters Today: The hallmark of human thought is meaning, and the hallmark of computation is indifference to meaning. That is, in fact, what makes thought so remarkable and also what makes computation so useful. You can think about anything, and you can use the same computer to express your entire range of thoughts because computation is blind to meaning. Thought is not merely not computation. Thought is the antithesis of computation. Thought is precisely what computation is not. Thought is intentional. Computation is not intentional. A reader may object at this point that the output of computation seems to have meaning. After all, the essay was typed on a computer. Yes, but all of the Read More ›
From design theorist William Dembski at Mind Matters Today: The computational literature on No Free Lunch theorems and Conservation of Information (see the work of David Wolpert and Bill Macready on the former as well as that of Robert J. Marks and myself on the latter) imply that all problem-solving algorithms, including such a master algorithm, must be adapted to specific problems. Yet a master algorithm must also be perfectly general, transforming AI into a universal problem solver. The No Free Lunch theorem and Conservation of Information demonstrate that such universal problem solvers do not exist. Yet what algorithms can’t do, humans can. True intelligence, as exhibited by humans, is a general faculty for taking wide-ranging, diverse abilities for solving Read More ›
Via Chad at Truth Bomb, quoting Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland, …you can’t get something from nothing…It’s as simple as that. If there were no God, then the history of the entire universe, up until the appearance of living creatures, would be a history of dead matter with no consciousness. You would not have any thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sensations, free actions, choices, or purposes. There would be simply one physical event after another physical event, behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry…How then, do you get something totally different- conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures- from materials that don’t have that? That’s getting something from nothing! And that’s the main problem…However…if you begin with an infinite mind, then Read More ›
Physicist Stephen Hawking warned humanity that “the development of artificial intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race… Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” To meet the challenge of AI, Hawking urged the creation of “some form of world government.” But will AI really spell the doom of the human race? Is it truly capable of making humans obsolete? Or could it provide an opportunity for greater creativity and productivity based on a renewed understanding of human uniqueness? Join us in Seattle on Wednesday, July 11 for a fascinating evening exploring these questions as part of the launch of Discovery Institute’s new Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, Read More ›
From Peter Gooding at The Conversation: A recent study showed that it is possible to diminish people’s belief in free will by simply making them read a science article suggesting that everything is predetermined. This made the participants’ less willing to donate to charitable causes (compared to a control group). This was only observed in non-religious participants, however. … It may therefore be unsurprising that some studies have shown that people who believe in free will are more likely to have positive life outcomes – such as happiness, academic success and better work performance . However, the relationship between free will belief and life outcomes may be complex so this association is still debated. … People using a philosophical definition Read More ›
From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog Back(re)action: It occurred to me some years ago, however, that there is a much simpler example for how reductionism can fail. It can fail simply because the extrapolation from the theory at short distances to the one at long distances is not possible without inputting further information. This can happen if the scale-dependence of a constant has a singularity, and that’s something which we cannot presently exclude. With singularity I here do not mean a divergence, ie that something becomes infinitely large. Such situations are unphysical and not cases I would consider plausible for realistic systems. But functions can have singularities without anything becoming infinite: Read More ›