Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Mind Matters
Around 170 million Americans have TikTok on their phones. Whether or not TikTok was originally designed to spy on its users and spread propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party, it can be co-opted to do so. A bipartisan bill passed by Congress and signed by President Biden on April 24 calls on ByteDance Ltd., the company that owns TikTok, to sell the app in the next nine months. Otherwise, TikTok will be banned from Google and Apple app stores. Read More ›
The Impact of AI on Society
The fourth and final tranche of COSM 2023 videos is now available — featuring topics such as how advances in artificial intelligence may affect automobile transportation, solutions to the vast amounts of energy artificial intelligence will require, and why we might be on the brink of seeing the most disruptive innovations the world has ever seen. If you weren’t able to attend, or perhaps you want to revisit some of your favorite speakers, take a look at our COSM 2023 playlist on YouTube! A few highlights of the recently released videos: You can also watch backstage interviews, in which Senior Fellow Jay Richards goes into greater depth with several speakers on the topics addressed onstage. Click here to go to Read More ›
The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence
Many years ago, I too worked in AI. Compared with today’s Large Language Models (LLMs) — such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and others — our work was embarrassingly primitive. We were building Expert Systems to help with the diagnosis of software issues. They were called expert systems because we hoped to tease out of human experts their problem-solving rules that we could then encode and apply. The challenge expert systems faced, in fact the challenge all AI systems face, was how to capture, encode, and apply knowledge. We failed. Miserably. Or spectacularly, depending on how you look at it. Where chatbots (LLMs) have succeeded This compound challenge — capturing, encoding, and applying knowledge — is the specific problem LLMs (chatbots) have Read More ›
The Influence of AI in Legislation
Robert J. Marks, the director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence and Baylor University Professor, is an expert on artificial intelligence and had the chance recently to share his thoughts on the topic with congressmen in Washington D.C. Marks met with Congressmen Dunn (Fla) and Murphy (NC) during his visit to the nation’s capital. Dunn sits on the House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and so was interested in speaking with Dr. Marks for his insight and expertise on the topic. Dunn also co-sponsored legislation aimed at curtailing deep fakes with mandatory watermarking, which is highly relevant to current copyright lawsuits and companies like Getty Images who are having their material “scraped” by AI. Marks was also able to share his insights. Read More ›
Uncovering the Origins of Cosmology
Editor’s note: Discovery Institute Press is delighted to announce the publication of The Big Bang Revolutionaries: The Untold Story of Three Scientists Who Reenchanted Cosmology, by Jean-Pierre Luminet. The book has received rave reviews including from three Nobel Prize winners. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1. The purpose of this book is not to exhaustively survey the history of cosmology through the centuries, nor that of the few decades that saw the development of relativistic cosmology. The available studies on the subject are numerous, and some are of high quality. I propose instead to present and analyze the texts that originated the three main ideas of relativistic cosmology: These texts are the work of three pioneers who, armed only with Read More ›
Redefining the Narrative of the Big Bang Theory
Many widely read scientific writers of our day mistakenly attribute the concepts of the expanding universe and the Big Bang to Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein. Hubble did provide evidence of an expanding universe, but he neither discovered such evidence nor accepted the radical idea that space itself was expanding. As for Einstein, he held out against the idea of an expanding universe for more than a decade, and ceased working in the field as soon as he had to amend his view. The real heroes of the Big Bang revolution are the Russian Alexander Friedmann and Belgian priest Georges Lemaître. That they are virtually unknown to the general public is one thing. That their contribution is underestimated by astrophysicists Read More ›
Financial Trends in Artificial Intelligence
“I feel as though the financial world has lost the plot,” said Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest, in last year’s star-studded COSM conference. Investors are avoiding risk and investing in safe but unpromising world of the past, said Wood, who went on to discuss the “trends and investment opportunities in technologies related to public blockchains, multiomic sequencing, energy storage, and robotics, that are tied together by advances in artificial intelligence.” Watch her intriguing talk below and let us know what you think of it in the comments! The fourth and final sequence of COSM 2023 videos have now been added to our YouTube channel, so you can enjoy a host of stimulating talks, panels, and conversations about artificial intelligence, Read More ›
