
Readers may recall him from the four levels of multiverse he advocated in Scientific American in 2003. But forget that. He now thinks there is too much bias in American media and he is working on an AI program to combat it:
Recently, he was interviewed at New Scientist about his thoughts about AI and the current focus of his work, which is using machine learning “for good” to identify news bias, which he feels that humans flub…
From a news writer’s perspective, it’s hard to see what use his program would be. The advent of concepts like fake but accurate, “truthiness,” and “post-truth” in this decade signals intractable differences of opinion about what truth even is. An algorithm is not going to solve that.
Analysis sites like Snopes tend to get captured by one side in political controversies; indeed, last year, Snopes declared a ridiculous war on the Christian satire site, The Babylon Bee, apparently taking the satirical sketches for news items. Similarly, the process of assigning “Pinocchios” when questioning statements by public figures is easily corrupted. Political statements are full of ambiguities and nuances. Only those on the other side of an issue typically perceive a statement to be a “lie.”
The risk with well-intentioned ideas such as Tegmark’s is that power brokers may push to treat an AI-based fact/bias checker as infallible when it simply reflects the shared philosophical biases of its programmers.
Denyse O’Leary, “Multiverse physicist Max Tegmark seeks AI that checks news bias” at Mind Matters News
See also:
Consciousness is two hard problems, not one. Psychology prof Gregg Henriques argues, consciousness “plays by a different set of rules than the language game of science”
China: Sophisticated surveillance decides who gets sent to Uuyghur camps. The leak of documents from police in Karakax County in Xinjiang reveal the details of everyday life that can send a Uyghur to the camps.
and
Is Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon right re the multiverse? Robert J. Marks comments: Sheldon Cooper insists that in no universe would he dance with Penny.“Some claim, there is an infinite number of universes in the multiverse. That is ludicrous because there are no infinities in the physical world. Even if there were, Cantor’s theory of the infinite shows that, if there were an infinite number of contingencies, not all contingency combinations could be accounted for by an infinite number of universes.”