Tag: real science
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
American Science Is Broken. Here’s How We Can Fix It.
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In April 2020, when the coronavirus first swept across the United States, many of America’s top scientists struggled to get funding to answer basic and urgent questions about the disease it caused. Patrick Collison, the chief executive of the payment-processing company Stripe, spied an opportunity in this market failure. He co-founded a program called Fast Grants, which raised more than $50 million that was quickly distributed to hundreds of projects. In its first