Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Virtually all human and natural systems require feedback to operate properly. Modern global society has been manipulated to prevent effective feedback that could allow us to address the critical environmental problems we face.
Now that AI has made it possible to reproduce anyone’s image and voice for video or audio communications, it is more imperative than ever for the law to give each of us ownership of our own information, image and voice.
We are an environmental humanities researcher and an AI scholar. When we asked ChatGPT if AI systems can help address the environmental crisis, the response unsurprisingly was optimistic. We had reasons not to trust it. Chatbots are not designed for veracity, but for guessing what the answer to a prompt would be based on content that has been previously written by others (humans and machines). The answers tend to favor the most popular, not necessarily the most critical, content.
The information economy was supposed to be light on physical resources compared to the old industrial economy. Turns out it’s not.
Either we recover collective wisdom faster than our machines can develop artificial executive intelligence, or it’ll likely be game over.
Artificial intelligence is like artificial sweeteners, not as compelling as the real thing and potentially hazardous to our health.
On this episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger returns to discuss a surprisingly overlooked risk to our global systems and planetary stability: artificial intelligence.
It is fashionable to be pessimistic about new and emerging technologies. Less fashionable is dealing with the existing technologies that are already killing us and the biosphere.
Perhaps in the AI age, we humans will serve as a check and balance to computer programs capable of fooling us into thinking they speak only truth to power.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now the focus of the most recent automation-is-a-job-killer stories. History suggests an alternate narrative.
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly hoovering up data from social media, online shopping sites, and various other online sources to track suspects and to ‘predict’ crime and unrest. The industry providing the software has every incentive to write code that will exaggerate the threats.
More and more of our daily routine is being turned over to software. Is that wise in every case? Is there a limit to how much power we should give to software over us?
