A collection of 47 posts
Amid all the overexcitement about artificial intelligence, there is little room for public consideration of mind-blowing findings on natural intelligence.
The hyperbole surrounding AGI misrepresents the capabilities of current AI systems and distracts attention from the real threats that these systems are creating.
Philosopher and programmer Sean Welsh talks with Zoe Booth about AI, colonial history, and why scepticism is the best guide through both technology and politics.
The disillusion produced by GPT-5 is not a technical hiccup, it’s a philosophical wake-up call.
The discipline of English literature seems unlikely to survive the coming technological tsunami—and maybe it doesn’t deserve to. And I say this as a professor of English, who believes in the power of the written word.
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with Washington Post columnist and TED Talker Megan McArdle about the short-term pain—and long-term gain—heralded by the AI revolution.
Automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics are set to redefine the relationship between labour, capital, and production.
Virtual friends are already good enough to engage us and satisfy some of our appetites. They are going to get better, spread into more corners of our lives, and settle in.
AI catastrophe is easy to imagine, but a lot has to go consistently and infallibly wrong for the doom theory to pan out.
Technology steers my life along tracks chosen for my digital double, not for me. But this proxy personalisation wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t play my part.
We hear much talk of “aligning AI with human values” but relatively little delineation of what these values are.
Just because we can imagine something terrible happening, that does not mean it will happen.
This cock-up was not caused by a bug that went unnoticed; it was deliberately engineered.
Explaining the “accel/decel” split at the heart of the OpenAI power struggle.
Human beings need meaning, and a life in which all one’s needs were met by external agents would fail to provide it.