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.
artificial intelligence
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.
If You’re Driving Off a Cliff, Do You Need a Faster Car?
Either we recover collective wisdom faster than our machines can develop artificial executive intelligence, or it’ll likely be game over.
AI: Storytelling, communication and B.S.
Artificial intelligence is like artificial sweeteners, not as compelling as the real thing and potentially hazardous to our health.
Daniel Schmachtenberger: “Artificial Intelligence and The Superorganism”
On this episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger returns to discuss a surprisingly overlooked risk to our global systems and planetary stability: artificial intelligence.
Dangers from future technologies? It’s the current ones that are killing us
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.
I, ChatGPT: The Case for Climate Action?
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.
Is AI a job killer? What does history say?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now the focus of the most recent automation-is-a-job-killer stories. History suggests an alternate narrative.