Category: Technology
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Robotic Gallbladder Removal
The shape of things to come. Will human surgeons be out of a job? "This advancement moves us from robots that can execute specific surgical tasks to robots that truly understand surgical procedures." Axel Krieger, Johns Hopkins medical roboticist. Truly understand?
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AI and the Unity of Consciousness
Top AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI," hold that advanced AI systems are conscious. That is far from obvious, and may even be demonstrably false if we consider the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness. I will first explain the phenomenon in question, and then conclude that AI systems cannot accommodate…
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Is A.I. Killing the World Wide Web?
From The Economist: As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web…
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Intelligence, Cognition, Hallucination, and AI: Notes on Susskind
Herewith, a first batch of notes on Richard Susskind, How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oxford 2025). I thank the multi-talented Brian Bosse for steering me toward this excellent book. Being a terminological stickler, I thought I'd begin this series of posts with some linguistic and conceptual questions. We need to…
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The Universe Groks Itself and the Aporetics of Artificial Intelligence
I will cite a couple of articles for you to ponder. Malcolm Pollack sends us to one in which scientists find their need for meaning satisfied by their cosmological inquiries. Subtitle: “The stars made our minds, and now our minds look back.” The idea is that in the 14 billion years since the Big Bang,…
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Biometric Authentication
I use multifactor authentication for access to many of the sites I visit, but conservatives are cautious by nature. So I am not inclined to spring for biometric authentication, some of the hazards of which are discussed here. The alacrity with which the young adopt the latest trends is evidence of their inherent excess of…
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Jews, Muslims, Science and Technology
Which group has contributed more to science and technology? Jews or Muslims? And why? Question prompted by this: Today, Jewish and Israeli MIT students were physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students that call themselves the CAA [Coalition Against Apartheid, apparently].
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More on the Dumbassery of ‘Smart Homes’
Here: Amazon locked a Microsoft engineer out of his smart home devices for nearly a week after a delivery driver accused him of uttering a racial slur. Via Malcolm Pollack, who is always worth reading.
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The Biden Maladministration is Placing Us in Grave Danger
No, you useful idiots, white supremacy is not the greatest threat we face: it is no threat at all since it doesn't exist. A real threat we face, and a very serious one, is posed by an EMP directed against our unprotected grid. HT to JSO for the following two videos. How would a nuclear…
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The Ultimate Replacement
I am not referring to the ethno-masochistic self-replacement of whites who have lost their 'mojo,' but the replacement of humanity by soulless robots. I speak not merely of the replacement of a uniquely clever species of land mammal. I speak of the erasure of spirit in the material world by the elimination of those spirits…
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A Warning from Elon Musk
Here There is no political solution, not only for the reasons that Musk gives, but also because it is not the best who rise in politics but often the very worst. That is certainly true in the USA at present. The current administration is characterized by blatant mendacity, corruption, sheer stupidity, and mental incompetence.
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Technology is not Wisdom
A short column by Victor Davis Hanson. It nicely complements what I said last night about the widespread paucity of phronesis and the obsession with the calculable.