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...
Since people invented writing, communications technology has become steadily more high-bandwidth, pervasive and persuasive, taking a commensurate toll on human attention and cognition. In that bandwidth war between machines and humans, the machines’ latest weapon is a class of statistical...
A new machine learning approach to COVID-19 testing has produced encouraging results in Greece. The technology, named Eva, dynamically used recent testing results collected at the Greek border to detect and limit the importation of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases among arriving international...
Wired this week features a story by Will Knight with the title, “Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech.” It highlights the curious relationship between the natural behavior of human beings and the sophisticated but fundamentally unnatural logic of artificial intelligence...
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...
