Jonathan Bartlett

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. Quite the opposite, our writers include professors at the forefront of AI research. But we do have something against AI hype. Media seemingly can’t help portraying today’s high-tech world as a remake of I, Robot (2004), starring you and me. One result is that some members of the public may completely misunderstand what AI is and does.… TechCrunch published an article on December 31, 2018, Read More ›

The Blyth Institute’s new journal will offer a focus on artificial intelligence and philosophy as well as philosophical questions in mathematics and engineering The Blyth Institute, a think tank that explores the relationships between biology, cognitive science, and engineering, has launched a new journal, Communications of the Blyth Institute with Eric Holloway as Managing Editor and Jonathan Bartlett as Associate Editor. Communications is intended as a discussion forum for fresh ideas in a variety of areas, including philosophy of mind as seen from a computer science perspective. It is open to ID-friendly ideas. The inaugural issue covers such topics as Eric Holloway, Creativity and Machines, 13 Jonathan Bartlett, Simplifying and Refactoring Introductory Calculus, 17 T. M. Koch, Recategorizing the Human Read More ›

Researchers tried modeling intergroup anxiety but look what the public heard about the results, instead of the facts: In fact, nearly every claim about the paper seems to misunderstand how computer models work generally and how they worked in this paper in particular. First, there is nothing particularly “religious” about the criteria used in the model. In computer models, you can name the pieces of the model however you wish. The authors of the software simply happened to assign religious names to the components of the model. There was hardly anything religious about it apart from that. According to the BBC article, the study shows that “The most risky situations are when the difference in the size of two different Read More ›

The more that software encompasses the whole of life, the more it needs to take into account the whole of the person using it: In the early days of computing, software developers could completely ignore the spiritual needs of users. Computers were a tool—usually a business tool, used for brief periods to accomplish a task. They were not the backdrop of our lives. Today, however, users are practically attached to their computers—sometimes day and night. More and more human interaction takes place digitally. As the percentage of time that users spend with computers increases, the amount of humanity that software developers need to take into consideration increases as well. In short, because humans are spiritual beings, software needs to start Read More ›

It is very interesting to study a technology that doesn’t rely on trust. However, in the end, the most interesting thing it tells us is not how we should build a network but rather the social value of trust in society. More than economic power, more than scientific advances, trust is really what builds wealth in a society. When you can trust your neighbor not to steal, not to lie, not to try to ruin you, the increases in efficiency are gigantic. In the comparison between Bitcoin and the Visa network, the performance gain in efficiency of trust vs. lack of trust is 400,000x. My hat is off to Bitcoin. Not only for developing an interesting technology, but also for Read More ›