Mary Martin

The idea that all our choices are determined by past events may seem dispiriting – but it can be emotionally liberating

recent research offers a reassuring perspective—that AI-delivered therapeutic interventions have reached a level of sophistication such that they’re indistinguishable from human-written therapeutic responses.

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more

One might point out that movie characters or videogame NPCs give off a similarly deceiving impression of being conscious, and yet it would surely be extreme to condemn this. However, what makes the illusion particularly worrying in the case of AI companions is that it involves an interaction that is direct, mutual, and persistent: the feigned... See more

In February, scientists formed a new field, called organoid intelligence (OI), which is now considered the next frontier of biocomputing. To meet AI's growing computational needs, there's a shift away from traditional Von Neumann architecture towards more innovative approaches. One is neuromorphic computing, inspired by the brain's structure, which

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