Tag: self-aware
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
10 Reader Views on the Varieties of Anti-racism
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I wrote, “A child born today will turn 18 in 2040. What attitudes and actions toward race and ethnicity would we adopt today if we had the best interests of that rising generation in mind?”
Bekke writes, “We … Read more
‘How You React Is the Only Thing You Can Control’
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
In my last newsletter, I asked readers, “What norms should govern jokes in our society? What, if anything, makes a joke harmful? What harm, if any, is there in punishing people for jokes or chilling the expression of jokes? How
Why Fangirls Scream – The Atlantic
On the morning of August 25, 2014, a 16-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition, and no abnormal sounds in her breathing. But when the emergency-room doctor on duty pressed on her neck and chest, he heard noises like Rice Krispies crackling in a bowl of milk—spaces behind her throat, around her heart, and between
Emily Oster on How Parents Became Obsessed With Data
Emily Oster is a popular target for irrational hatred. When I was reporting a story on how progressive communities have approached COVID-19 lockdown restrictions this spring, she showed me an email she got from a random person who had written to all of her bosses at Brown University, accusing her of promoting genocide. To be clear, Oster does no such thing: She’s an economist who has become semi-famous for her books on data and parenting decisions. Recently, she has also