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Google suspends worker

Google has suspended ones of its engineers after he claimed that one of the company's experimental artificial intelligences has gained sentience. "If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics," the engineer, Blake Lemoine, told the Washington Post. WaPo's story immediately blew up, drawing the attention from other major outlets including The New York Times, and fanning the flames of a growing debate: are complex language models in the form of chatbots anywhere near actually gaining consciousness? The other possibility, of course, is that the Lemoine was fooled by a cleverly designed algorithm that merely repurposes bits of human language it was previously fed. In other words, maybe he was simply anthropomorphizing the AI. The software in question is called the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), which is based on advanced language...
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A time Robot sacred humans

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Bot in the Mirror Last year, UK-based robotics company Engineered Arts made a huge splash with an impressive demo of its humanoid robot with uber-uncanny expressions. Now, it's back — and it's serving up an even wider range of some of the most realistic facial expressions we've ever seen. In a new video, the Ameca humanoid takes 12 new actuators for a spin as it stares into a mirror, contorting its face into expressions of disbelief, disgust, pain — and even what can only be described as regret. In short, it's yet another fantastical demonstration of the power of cutting-edge robotics, and possibly even a sign of things to come. Robot Awakening Engineered Arts also took the opportunity to take a swipe at Tesla's rather nebulous attempt to build a humanoid robot. In the video, an employee can be seen watching a video of the car company's infamous decision to use a dancer in a stretchy suit sub in for an actual humanoid robot. On its website, Engineere...
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The magic of affection

 As a scholar of medieval magic, passing the magazine stand at the checkout is like stepping back in time. The women’s magazines promise sex tips which will keep him returning for more. The men’s magazines guarantee six-pack abs in only six weeks and surefire techniques for getting commitment-free sex. If this stuff really were surefire, would they need to publish new techniques every month? But it’s not effectiveness that sells these magazines. It’s the hope. Bronislaw Malinowski says that the function of magic is to ritualize optimism, to reinforce “faith within the victory of hope over fear.” By this he means once we perform magic, we ritualize our hopes, albeit that ritual itself produces no effects. This only captures one aspect of magic, but it’s a crucial one. Perfect sex and other miracles There is a huge modern industry that leverages our vulnerabilties. many scientifically unproven techniques offer not only power over love and sex, but health, wealth, good luck, influenc...
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