on Science & Technology

Can machines be intelligent? Yes, that seems settled; but can machines be conscious? That’s not nearly as clear. The dream of machines that not only think, but feel and experience consciousness as humans do has been a canvas of fantasists, a goal of technologists and a conundrum to philosophers for decades. Here in this brief collection are...

All my life, I’ve been tripping over jaw-dropping, fascinating ideas that few people have ever heard of.

This started happening in my early 20s, when I learned of Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘strange loops’ in Gödel, Escher, Bach. It continued with Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, where all possible books reside. John Searle’s Chinese Room; the...

The Library of Babel blew my mind. The idea of a ‘library of all possible books’, generated by an algorithm that can be written on a napkin – it’s a jaw dropper! That’s what it’s supposed to do, of course; it’s a consciousness-expanding thought experiment, one that rips the lid off many disciplines, from semantics to the theory of algorithms to...

Artificial Intelligence, long present in our cultural awareness and musings of the future, has finally arrived - and hasn’t taken the stage with any subtlety. From generative AI chatbots to disturbingly good deepfake art and video to breathtaking medical accomplishments, AI is here to stay - and now we have to figure out how to deal with that.

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AI is moving forward at breakneck speed. Even in the short months since the first volume of this series was published, we’ve seen stakeholders lobbying the White House and Congress for regulatory action; AI doomers have gotten louder; breakthroughs in processing power and speed have been announced; and Hollywood writers and actors have even gone...

This most recent collection of Scott Robinson’s essays gathers together work from a number of previous collections, spanning many disciplines: artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, paleontology, and cognitive science, to name a few. Specific topics are equally diverse, including dissipative adaptation, humanism, feminism,...