Last night I dreamt I stood at the edge of the forest again. Everything from the trees to the grass was covered in frost and glittering in the pale moonlight. As I entered the forest I felt as if some unseen force was leading me along the path. I could feel a sense of unease as the moonlight disappeared behind the trees, leaving only darkness. I ( Read more... )

Robot rights - a legal necessity or ethical absurdity?

( Read more... )

people dont want to recycle ( Read more... )

Why do machines "learn" in maladaptive ways ( Read more... )

Machines don't learn, as I've previously mentioned.
https://philosophy.livejournal.com/2045332.htmlThen what are they doing when they appear to be learning ( Read more... )

Personification of non-humans is best understood as a strategy of dealing with the uncertainty about the identity of the other, which moves the attribution scheme from causation to double contingency and opens the space for presupposing the others' self-referentiality. But there is no compelling reason to restrict the attribution of action ( Read more... )

A general "Language Room".

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612960/an-ai-tool-auto-generates-fake-news-bogus-tweets-and-plenty-of-gibberish/

The researchers set out to develop a general-purpose language algorithm, trained on a vast amount of text from the web, that would be capable of translating text, answering questions, and performing other ( Read more... )

I've had the displeasure of reading various genes-as-programming-code and genes-as-programming analogies.

If gene expression pokes a gaping hole in those analogies, new scientific findings absolutely obliterate them:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests-that-all-genes-affect-every-complex-trait-20180620/Show me a program in ( Read more... )

Let's try this theoretical thought exercise. You memorize a whole bunch of shapes. Then, you memorize the order the shapes are supposed to go in, so that if you see a bunch of shapes in a certain order, you would "answer" by picking a bunch of shapes in another proper order. Now, did you just learn any meaning behind any language? Programs ( Read more... )

Machines don't actually "learn ( Read more... )