Tag: natural selection
Conscious AI Is the Second-Scariest Kind
Everyone knows AIs are dangerous. Everyone knows they can rattle off breakthroughs in wildlife tracking and protein folding before lunch, put half the workforce out of a job by supper, and fake enough reality to kill whatever’s left of democracy itself before lights out.
Fewer people admit that AIs are intelligent—not yet, anyway—and even fewer, that they might be conscious. We can handle GPT-4 beating 90 percent of us on the SAT, but we might not be so copacetic with
‘Supergenes’ Bend the Rules of Evolution
This article was originally published by Quanta Magazine.
Thousands of miles from home in the steamy Amazon rainforest in the mid-1800s, the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates had a problem. More than one, really: There were thumb-size biting insects, the ever-present threat of malaria, venomous snakes, and mold and mildew that threatened to overtake his precious specimens before they could be shipped back to England. But the nagging scientific problem that bothered him involved butterflies.
Bates had noticed that some