Category: Spurious investigations
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Here is a simple test to apply to any project that you are asked to participate in, or that is proposed for your review: ask what the difference will be in two years time if we engage in this project and then ask what will happen if we do not…
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This vacation I have spent some time with Anscombe’s reading of Parmenides. It is a dense text, and I have enjoyed reading and re-reading her formalisation of his argument as well as the logical clarity she tries to impose on the argument. Her writing is compressed and compact, unpacking a…
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Having just finished Kurzweil’s latest, interesting , book The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) I am still left with some unease about the argument in it, and I think it has to do with something very simple – baselines. When ever we are asked to predict something, Tetlock teaches us to…
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In this recent paper the authors discuss public attitudes to technology as sentient or conscious. The overall take away is well summarized in the abstract: Future developments in AI capabilities and safety will depend on public opinion and human-AI interaction. To begin to fill this research gap, we present the…
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In 2018 Sandra Wachter and Bernt Mittelstadt published a really interesting article about the role of inferences in data protection law. Their conclusion was that there is a need for a right to reasonable inferences, and that with the current data protection law, the legal standing of inferences remains uncertain.…
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In this paper, the authors ask if we can obtain real mathematical knowledge from opaque models. It is the continuation of a discussion about truth in mathematics, and if an exhaustive search can be considered a proof or not — and it connects to a broader set of problems about…
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In many ways ChatGPT was less of a technical breakthrough than a user interface breakthrough. By organising and configuring the capabilities of the model in a novel way – chat – the implications of the underlying technology became more accessible and open to analysis and understanding. This seems to suggest…
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Can space save the economy from secular stagnation? That is the hypothesis explored in this paper by Matthew Weinzierl. The way you react to papers like this is interesting – there are, I find, two typical reactions. The first is an enthusiastic “Yes!” and the other is a deep sigh, followed…
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One of the key features of interaction is the sense of presence. We immediately feel it if someone is not present in a discusison and we often praise someone by saying that they have a great presence in the room – signalling that they are influencing the situation in a…
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One of the things that generative AI will enable is the summarisation of the growing flows of information that we all live in. This is not surprising to the reader of Herbert Simon, who suggested that with a wealth of information comes a poverty of attention and a need to…