Daniel Dennett: 'Why civilisation is more fragile than we realised'

S: random internet denizens were somehow producing more insightful commentary on pretty much every matter than highly credentialed experts and capital-heavy institutions. My question to you is: how is this possible?
E: One of the main things, is that these curated, establishment discourses promoted by the algorithms and sustained by mains... See more

The fear is that if human beings presented an obstacle to achieving one of those goals—reverse global warming, for example—a superintelligent agent could easily, even accidentally, wipe us off the face of the earth. For a computer program whose intellectual imagination so dwarfed our own, this wouldn’t require anything as crude as gun-toting robots

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“There’s this great essay by Hannah Baer in the latest issue of Artforum, where she unpacks why we are so afraid of AI becoming more intelligent than humans. If you look at this historically, humans have positioned themselves as the most intelligent species, even though that’s not true. As the “most intelligent species,” we’ve used this power as an

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In a digitally decentralized world where generative AI can lower the barriers of creation even farther than ever before, and bots can be trained under the perspective of your choosing, an already fractured reality becomes at risk for disintegration. Or, as science-fiction writer and professional futurist Madeline Ashby told us in a recent interview... See more

A superintelligent system could have disastrous effects even if it had a neutral goal and lacked self-awareness. “We cannot blithely assume,” Bostrom wrote, “that a superintelligence will necessarily share any of the final values stereotypically associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans—scientific curiosity, benevolent concern f

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It's becoming increasingly evident that in many circles, AI is not perceived as merely a technology, but as "something else" entirely. This misconception is exemplified by the recurring debate: "Humans vs AI." To illustrate the absurdity of this framing, let's replace "AI" with "technology": "Humans vs Technology" This reframing immediately highl... See more