My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has...
Something radical happened in the 18th century. A motley band of Europeans that had begun to develop a bustling civilization along a stretch of the North American Atlantic coast decided that their way of thinking and doing business no longer needed to reflect European habits and modes of...
As Shoshana Zuboff has warned in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” the great tech giants have built a system people have become dependent on for their social relationships. But this “social” system has been built to...
Some people are concerned that the latest generation of powerful technology tools now being developed and deployed may undermine important features of civilized societies and human life itself. Notably, Elon Musk is so worried about the danger of artificial intelligence (AI) that he invested in...
No one doubts that Elon Musk is rich, which, according to a fundamental axiom of US culture, suggests that he is smart. Everyone knows the proverbial wisdom often directed at a category of humanity called losers: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” Musk himself has...
Multibillionaire and hyperreal hero Elon Musk shocked the world last week when he dramatically tweeted that he is “selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” One of his fans tweeted back with this question: “Are you doing it because you need the cash or is this to protest...
René Descartes famously wrote in Latin, “cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” He believed that the way we think implies an awareness of the act of thinking. In contrast to other living species, this endows us with a sense of “self,” an identity. In other words, what we call...
Ever since the term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined in 1956, it has had a close relationship with neuroscience. Initial concepts of building machines capable of logical thinking were derived from mathematical logic and information theory, but the driving force behind AI was the desire to...
At the end of August, two prestigious names in the technology and business world graced the stage of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The Chinese television station that broadcast the debate between Jack Ma, (CEO of Alibaba) and hyperreal hero Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla,...
Imagine that your government could identify you and track your movements digitally, solely based on your physical appearance and perceived ethnicity or race. This is not the stuff of dystopian science fiction, but is happening now due to the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools....
