Browsed by
Category: Technology

David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

  Why did intelligence evolve in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore the nature of intelligence, information theory, consciousness, and whether AI is actually intelligent at all with David Krakauer, evolutionary biologist and president of the Santa Fe Institute. Can you conceive of life without intelligence, or intelligence without life? We parse the difference between intelligence and being alive and whether you can be one without the other. What does it mean for something to…

Read More Read More

Africa has become the testing ground for an intrusive eye that never blinks

Africa has become the testing ground for an intrusive eye that never blinks

Reporting from Kampala, Uganda, Megan K. Stack writes: Plainclothes thugs frog-marching a radio commentator from the microphone mid-broadcast. An opposition activist dying after reportedly being barricaded in his house, which was then set on fire. Security forces raiding a powerful independent media company, cutting electricity and imposing a monthlong closure. A reign of terror grips Uganda. Specifically, the reign of Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the country’s belligerent and erratic military chief, who also happens to be the only son of Yoweri…

Read More Read More

A Florida local newspaper ran an op-ed. It was an Iranian fake using OpenAI

A Florida local newspaper ran an op-ed. It was an Iranian fake using OpenAI

The Washington Post reports: “The bill will follow Americans beyond the fighting itself,” an opinion piece in the Port St. Joe Star, a tiny Florida weekly newspaper, warned of the Iran war last month. The article ran under the byline Ervin Hoskins, which has also appeared on articles critical of the war in larger publications including Daily Kos and Middle East Monitor, which together have more than 3 million followers on Facebook. But ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday that Hoskins’s…

Read More Read More

Japan declares ‘a state of emergency in cyberspace’

Japan declares ‘a state of emergency in cyberspace’

Gizmodo reports: We haven’t quite reached the cyber apocalypse that artificial intelligence companies have warned their technology could unleash on the world, but we’re getting uncomfortably close to a catastrophe on a national scale. According to a report from the Financial Times, Japan is being hammered by cyberattacks, prompting regulators to search for ways to protect financial institutions from potentially devastating disruptions and leading the country to declare “a state of emergency in cyberspace.” Per the report, Japan’s ruling Liberal…

Read More Read More

Jonathan Haidt: AI is the ‘neutron bomb for education’

Jonathan Haidt: AI is the ‘neutron bomb for education’

  Long before he became famous as the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt was a social psychologist whose work revolutionized the field. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, taped in front of a live audience at last month’s Atlantic Festival, David Brooks talks with Haidt about his biggest lessons from 40 years of studying human nature. David and Haidt discuss the role of the emotions in moral decision making, how to design a system that produces less…

Read More Read More

How Elon Musk’s delusions of grandeur became other people’s reality

How Elon Musk’s delusions of grandeur became other people’s reality

Megan Garber writes: In December 2021, Elon Musk sat for an interview with The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site. Having covered the typical topics (wokeness, free speech, Elizabeth Warren) and finding themselves with a bit more time to fill, the outlet’s then–creative director closed out the chat with a request. “The Babylon Bee is a Christian organization, and we’re a ministry,” he reminded Musk. So “we’re wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept Jesus as…

Read More Read More

AI firms prepare for a catastrophic AI event, such as a banking shut down, seen as inevitable in months

AI firms prepare for a catastrophic AI event, such as a banking shut down, seen as inevitable in months

Axios reports: Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event. Why it matters: These officials anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water. The first example of significant real-world harm caused by unsafe AI would turn an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders, including Anthropic…

Read More Read More

‘Breathtaking,’ ‘devastating’: Mathematics reels after new OpenAI release

‘Breathtaking,’ ‘devastating’: Mathematics reels after new OpenAI release

The New York Times reports: “If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.” That’s how Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers, responded to an A.I.-generated proof that OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant, released on Tuesday. And that single proof — worthy, in Dr. Kontorovich’s assessment on social media, of arguably the highest honor in the field of mathematics — was just one among more than 350 findings that the…

Read More Read More

The myth of AI’s inevitability

The myth of AI’s inevitability

Matteo Wong writes: The second floor of OpenAI’s old headquarters had a theme. Each room was named after one of the most important inventions in human history: “Clock,” “Fire,” and, of course, “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. I saw this in the spring of 2024, when I was interviewing some of the company’s researchers about recent technical advances. At the time, ChatGPT was still making embarrassing arithmetic errors, and the notion that the bot would ever rival human intelligence was…

Read More Read More

Most voters say Trump, Congress don’t take AI risks seriously, poll finds

Most voters say Trump, Congress don’t take AI risks seriously, poll finds

Reuters reports: Most US voters think President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress are not taking the risks of AI seriously enough and want the government to ​write new regulations for the technology, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. The six-day survey, which ended on Monday, showed that wide swaths of the electorate see AI as ‌a major threat to American jobs, underscoring growing skepticism of the technology from voters across the political spectrum. The fast-advancing technology has become a matter…

Read More Read More

‘This is nuts’: OpenAI safety leader explains why he quit

‘This is nuts’: OpenAI safety leader explains why he quit

  Ezra Klein: Last week, David Robinson resigned from OpenAI. He’d been in charge of writing the safety reports for new models and came to believe that OpenAI and the broader artificial intelligence industry lack the safety culture necessary to protect the world from what they’re building. Robinson has an unusual background for an A.I. frontier lab staffer. He’s a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate, he founded a civil rights nonprofit and he advised the Biden White House. He…

Read More Read More

Rightwing ‘great replacement’ fears mask tech’s real great replacement

Rightwing ‘great replacement’ fears mask tech’s real great replacement

Jason Stanley writes: Across the world, “great replacement” theory has been employed again and again as the political foundation for fascism. Some of its fundamental tenets, such as the view that “whites are a dying minority”, have been amplified by tech billionaires and their platforms. According to the version of this theory most employed in Europe and the United States, white replacement theory, white populations are being “replaced” by non-white populations, a replacement engineered by a shadowy global elite. For…

Read More Read More

The ‘WarGames’ problem: Computer science has long understood what it takes to keep AI under control

The ‘WarGames’ problem: Computer science has long understood what it takes to keep AI under control

In the movie ‘War Games’ an AI plays a game with the real threat of triggering nuclear Armageddon. Courtesy of United Artists/Amazon MGM Studios By Deven Desai, Georgia Institute of Technology AI agents don’t go rogue. That’s something only humans do. Nevertheless, a New York Times article – representative of much news coverage of AI – described an OpenAI hacking as “A.I. bots going rogue and independently spearheading a cyberattack.” Name-brand artificial intelligence agents have been on a hacking spree…

Read More Read More

Sam Altman might accept the ‘bad things’ that come with AI, but he doesn’t speak for everyone

Sam Altman might accept the ‘bad things’ that come with AI, but he doesn’t speak for everyone

Fast Company reports: For the past month, slowing the development of artificial intelligence has been at the forefront of AI discourse. After a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee left the industry in September citing that “neither company is acting responsibly,” AI leaders and everyday citizens alike sounded off on the potential of an AI-powered doomsday. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded with an essay about the importance of “pacing the frontier,” or slowing AI development to prioritize safety. At the time,…

Read More Read More

Meta’s Muse is collecting information on everyone in your life

Meta’s Muse is collecting information on everyone in your life

Gizmodo reports: In typical Meta fashion, the company’s popular new AI agent Muse reportedly keeps detailed, regularly updated files on the people in users’ lives. Nearly a month after its launch, researchers are digging into how Muse works. It turns out the AI agent will openly share internal files and instructions when users ask, offering a peek at how it operates. One of the somewhat unsettling details is an hourly process that instructs Muse to create and update “a page…

Read More Read More

AI infrastructure buildout surpasses every prior investment in American history, posing systemic risks

AI infrastructure buildout surpasses every prior investment in American history, posing systemic risks

Quartz reports: A new Brookings Institution study finds that the U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout is on pace to consume a larger share of economic output than any prior technology rollout in American history, including railroads, the interstate highway system, and the internet — while the financing structures underpinning it carry systemic financial risks. The study — authored by Columbia Business School finance and real estate professor Stijn van Nieuwerburgh — puts total spending on data centers and related AI…

Read More Read More