Washington denials and AI bailouts
The AI industry is fishing for a federal bailout. Why?
artificial intelligence
AI vs humans: The ‘singularity’ keeps getting postponed
AI boosters keep postponing the advent of artificial general intelligence.
“Better” AI has more “hallucinations”
As AI is “improved,” it has more “hallucinations.” When will the public and investors realize that reliability will always be a problem when there is no judgement based on lived experience?
DOGE and (mis)understanding AI
Will AI solve all of our major problems or cause the extinction of the human race? Extreme views can lead to extreme and unwarranted actions.
After DeepSeek, AI developers are wrong that The Jevons Paradox will bail them out
The dramatic drop in the cost of AI demonstrated by Chinese upstart DeepSeek is great for buyers of AI tools, but very bad for the incumbent developers of those tools.
Democratization of AI spurts ahead: More power to individuals for mischief
Empowering the individual has become a frequent slogan for today’s tech pioneers. As that empowerment grows, it makes it possible for an individual or a small group to threaten all of society. I have now posted my most
AI + synthetic biology: What could possibly go wrong?
Modern humans have come to believe that new technology is better and also benign. The downsides of AI and synthetic biology are already visible. Now, they are being combined.
From Plato to AI: Are we losing our minds?
Each step in human evolution has brought inventions that threaten to weaken our innate abilities.
The short-circuiting of societal feedback mechanisms
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.
Owning your own information revisited
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.
ChatGPT says AI can help the planet. Experts disagree
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.
AI: The information economy becomes ever more energy and resource intensive
The information economy was supposed to be light on physical resources compared to the old industrial economy. Turns out it’s not.
