The boy, whose liver cancer had spread to his lungs, suffered no dangerous side effects and remained cancer-free a year later.
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Can an AI feel pain? It can at least act like it does
“Can the new cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models feel pain? They at least behave as if they do, according to a recent study. By peering inside 25 AI models whose internal workings are publicly available, researchers found a pattern of activity specifically associated with the concept of pain. What’s more, when given the opportunity, some AIs switched off the pattern as a form of ‘pain relief.’”
Study reignites debate over what, if anything, machines can feel.
The World is Transformed by Asking Questions
Back in 2013, I wrote that the moment we stop having questions is the moment we become stupid robots.
Thirteen years later, machines hand out answers faster than we can read them. Which makes me wonder whether I was describing the robots, or us.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: answers have always been cheap. Politics, religion, and philosophy have given them away for millennia, and each came with an expiry date.
So what actually moves the world forward? And what happens to a civilization that outsources its thinking to #AI and quietly forgets how to doubt?
In the piece, I also proposed a Turing Test for #ArtificialIntelligence years before ChatGPT existed, and I think it holds up even better now. It’s not the one you’d expect.
Voltaire, Nietzsche, Einstein, Mark Twain, and a certain Greek sage all show up to argue the case for #CriticalThinking over comfortable certainty.
Fair warning: it won’t give you answers.
A blueprint for keeping humans in control of AI
Even as Overman began enlisting AI for his research, he grew wary of where the technology was headed. “This isn’t only about the apocalyptic potential of what could happen; I’m also thinking a lot about the future of human flourishing,” Overman says. He fears that misaligned AI could overstep its bounds—not necessarily maliciously—and inflict subtle yet real harms on people.
“To prevent that, we need to get this right,” Overman says.
“We must set up the proper interactions and training and incentives for these AI agents and models. It’s critical to think about shaping all of that now, so that these tools help make life better for us, not worse.”
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Cosmic lockdown: How the environment can isolate quantum fields
A simplified cosmological model suggests that decoherence can suppress quantum tunneling, effectively locking fields into the vacuum state they have reached.
The vacuum is not always so empty. “When we talk about a vacuum in cosmology, we do not mean completely devoid of energy,” explains David Wands, Professor at the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. “A vacuum is rather a state in which a field sits at a minimum of its energy. The true vacuum is the lowest possible minimum, but there can also be local minima, which we call false vacua.” We can picture this as a landscape made up of valleys of different depths: the true vacuum is the deepest one, while the others are false vacua.
Something sitting in one of these depressions can remain “trapped” there even if, somewhere else, a lower-energy state exists. This is exactly what can happen to quantum fields, fundamental physical objects that permeate the universe. A classical field is something that has a value at every position in space, like a magnetic field, whose strength changes from point to point. Quantum fields behave in a similar way, and their excitations appear as particles.