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Technology

Technological Metamorphosis

Botany is genetically one of the oldest natural investigations undertaken by humankind, for what could be more useful than being able to identify which plants are nice to eat, which are poisonous, and which can treat illnesses? It is useful not only to have this power of identification but also to be able to pass it on. Hence, traditions and folklore, and later, treatises and compendiums have passed down our classifications of plants to us from time immemorial.

Benjamin ScottSeptember 4, 202618 min read
Technological Metamorphosis

Technology

Artificial Everything

We are makers of things. We are all artists. The child who ties a kitchen towel around her neck to be a superhero is perhaps the purest artist of all. They create artificial worlds, words, and whimsy. The artificial can of course be beautiful, magical, imaginative, and even intensely helpful to mankind. We would not cut short a child’s play simply because they are not living in “reality.” Neither would we sneer at an artificial limb for not being “the real thing.” The artificial worlds of the artist inspire awe, introspection, and a sense of the transcendent.

Kollin FieldsAugust 28, 202613 min read
Artificial Everything

Technology

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

The machines we dreamed of always kept their distance. They hovered, they whirred, they did the dishes — but they stayed on the other side of the room, chrome and separate, things we could switch off and walk away from. The technology that actually arrived provides no such distance. It does not sit across from us; it watches us, learns us, and reaches steadily inward — first into how we behave, then into what we want, and at last toward the parts of us we cannot consciously control. The question is no longer what our machines will do for us. It is whether, by the end of it, any part of the self is left that they have not touched.

Kayla-Megan Burns and Tilda NilssonAugust 7, 202613 min read
Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

Technology

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Make no mistake, AI agents are the newest species on Earth, and we have attempted to replace millions of years of natural selection with a few months of internet-based human history training, and then unleashed them into the world. In a rush to be first, and in the spirit of competition, AI companies have inadvertently created the Meeseeks Problem, and it’s not a problem that’s going away any time soon, but unlike climate change, this is a problem that could end human civilization in less time than it takes to say, “Maybe we should pump the brakes on this AI thing.”

Roli RivelinoJuly 31, 202620 min read
Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Technology

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

When an individual begins grafting a new object into their experience, the first thing that happens is a recall. The individual, encountering something novel and unfamiliar, has no recourse other than to appeal to memory and to supplement the present perception with already experienced images of other objects and actions. We say here that the process of recall happens before the process of direct perception, counter to what most people would think.

Benjamin ScottJuly 17, 202615 min read
Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects