Category: ideas

In the twentieth century, natural quiet—or, rather, the absence of radios and car horns and the presence of honking geese and howling wolves—became central to the conservation movement and the creation of natural parks. One founder of the Wilderness Society suggested in 1932 that designated wild areas would “interest the folks in the inexpensive joys of nature in lieu of the jarring jams of jazz.”

Humble people don’t focus on their flaws – not exactly, anyway. It’s more that humble people don’t focus on themselves very much at all. ‘This is not to say that a humble person fails to care about her own welfare or pursue her own interests – it is simply that she sees these as being deeply intertwined with the welfare and interests of others,’ write the authors of a 2017 paper in The Journal of Positive Psychology.

Encountering an alien AI would not only point to our own possible future, but also prompt a curious shift in our worldview. When Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in the 1500s that the Earth was not central in any way to the Universe, he set in motion the development of a critical scientific idea: that there is nothing cosmically special or significant about us. But meeting an ET-AI could turn that realisation on its head: if the only intelligence we meet is machine in nature, then we would be special, after all.

If a computer is sentient, then it can feel pain. If it is conscious, then it is self-awareness. Just as we have human rights and animal rights, as we explore building conscious computers, must we also consider the concept of robot rights?

“Although no one knows math’s exact origins, modern mathematicians … know that spoken language precedes written language by scores of millennia. Linguistic clues show how people around the world must have first developed mathematical thought.”

“Stories seem to me to be the key to education, to social organization, to creativity, learning, consciousness, self-awareness — the whole works. I think it’s a fundamental differentiating capability of us humans. And machines don’t have it yet.”

People can be skeptical or distrusting of science for different reasons, whether it is about one specific finding from one discipline (for example, ‘The climate is not warming, but I believe in evolution’), or about science in general (‘Science is just one of many opinions’). We identified four major predictors of science acceptance and science skepticism: political ideology; religiosity; morality; and knowledge about science. These variables tend to intercorrelate – in some cases quite strongly – which means that they are potentially confounded.

Collaboration tools are opening up space for manager-free forms of work. And contracting costs are likely to fall markedly thanks to the advent of blockchain protocols – algorithms that replace trusted third parties, and instead automatically verify transactions using a huge digital ledger, spread across multiple computers. As a result of these innovations, a new way of working is emerging: a series of interactions that are open, skills-based and software-optimised. Where once we had the ‘corporation’, instead we are witnessing the ascendancy of the ‘platform’. The question is: should we see this as a promise, or a threat?

The latest enthusiasm for eternal life largely stems not from any acid-soaked, tie-dyed counterculture but from the belief that technology will enhance humans and make them immortal. Today’s transhumanist movement, sometimes called H+, encompasses a broad range of issues and diversity of belief, but the notion of immortality—or, more correctly, amortality—is the central tenet. Transhumanists believe that technology will inevitably eliminate aging or disease as causes of death and instead turn death into the result of an accidental or voluntary physical intervention.

In a paper published in Nature Physics on Monday, Patla’s team reveal a profound result from an exceedingly monotonous experiment. The ticking of the clocks, Patla says, actually illustrates one of the most fundamental principles in the laws of physics: that no time or place in the universe is special. It’s one of the basic ideas in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a set of rules that correctly describes how the planets orbit the sun and how neutron stars collide to produce gravitational waves. The laws of physics apply in the same way today as they did 4.5 billion years ago when the moon formed, or in 2000 when you were listening to Creed.