ChatGPT is remarkable. It’s a new AI model from OpenAI that’s designed to chat in a conversational manner. It’s also a liar. Stuck for ideas on what to talk to a machine about, I decided to interview ChatGPT about the ethics of AI. Would it have the level of self-awareness to be honest about its own dangers? Would it even be willing to answer questions on how it behaves?
Yes, it would. And while ChatGPT started off by being commendably upfront about the ethics of what it does, it eventually descended into telling outright lies. It even issued a non-apology for doing so.
An interview with the cutting-edge chatbot, ChatGPT, ends in a little white lie.
Vitaly Vanchurin, physicist and cosmologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth speaks to Luis Razo Bravo of EISM about the world as a neural network, machine learning, theories of everything, interpretations of quantum mechanics and long-term human survival.
Timestamp of the conversation:
00:00 — Opening quote by Vanchurin. 00:53 — Introduction to Vanchurin. 03:17 — Vanchurin’s thoughts about human extinction. 05:56 — Brief background on Vanchurin’s research interests. 10:24 — How Vanchurin became interested in neural networks. 12:31 — How quantum mechanics can be used to understand neural networks. 18:56 — How and where does gravity fit into Vanchurin’s model? 20:39 — Does Vanchurin incorporate holography (AdS/CFT) into hid model? 24:14 — Maybe the entirety of physics is an “emergent” neural network. 28:08 — Maybe there are forms of life that are more fit to survive than humans. 28:58 — Maldacena’s “principle of Maximal life“ 29:28 — Theories of Everything. 31:06 — Why Vanchurin’s framework is potentially a true TOE (politics, ethics, etc.) 34:07 — Why physicists don’t like to talk to philosophers and ask big questions. 36:45 — Why the growing number of theories of everything? 39:11 — Apart from his own, does Vanchurin have a favorite TOE? 41:26 — Bohmian mechanics and Aharanov’s Two-time approach to quantum mechanics. 43:53 — How has Vanchurin’s recent paper been received? Beliefs about peer review. 46:03 — Connecting Vanchurin’s work to machine learning and recommendations. 49:21 — Leonard Susskind, quantum information theory, and complexity. 51:23 — Maybe various proposals are looking at the same thing from different angles. 52:17 — How to follow Vanchurin’s work and connect to him.
Would you like to see the classic magic trick of a rabbit being pulled out of a hat? I hope so since you are about to witness something ostensibly magical, though it has to do with Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than rabbits and hats.
Here’s the deal.
A lot of debate takes place about whether we ought to recognize AI with some form of legal personhood. Surprisingly, some believe that we can already shoehorn AI into legal personhood by a bit of corporate legal wrangling. See what this is all about.
The fourth discussion of the NEW NOW program, “Transhumanism: Beyond the Human Frontier?”, took place on December 16.
Together with our guest experts, we tried to identify the latest technology that has either already become a reality or is currently in development, focusing on the ethical aspects of the consequences that ensue. We reflected on the question of whether the realization of transhumanist ideas is likely to entail a radical change in the ways people relate to one another. How far are we prepared to go in changing our bodies in order to attain these enhanced capacities? We will attempt to identify the “human frontier”, beyond which the era of posthumanism awaits.
Speakers:
James “J.” Hughes Ph.D. is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as the Associate Provost for the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), and as Senior Research Fellow at UMB’s Center for Applied Ethics. He holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago where he taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Since then Dr. Hughes has taught health policy, bioethics, medical sociology and research methods at Northwestern University, the University of Connecticut, and Trinity College.
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Olafur Eliasson, Pharrell Williams and Justin Guariglia. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe.
Eric Schwitzgebel. Most of Professor Eric Schwitzgebel research explores connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind, especially the nature of belief, the inaccuracy of our judgments about our stream of conscious experience, and the tenuous relationship between philosophical ethics and actual moral behavior.
“Every great and difficult thing has required a strong sense of optimism,” says editor and author Kevin Kelly, who believes that we have a moral obligation to be optimistic. Tracing humanity’s progress throughout history, he’s observed that a positive outlook helps us solve problems and empowers us to forge a path forward. In this illuminating talk, he shares three reasons for optimism during challenging times, explaining how it can help us become better ancestors and create the world we want to see for ourselves and future generations.
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A new global agreement has been established by eight worldwide universities to commit to the development of human-centered approaches to artificial intelligence (AI). The newest university to join the agreement, which could impact people all across the globe, was the University of Florida (UF).
The Global University Summit was held back on October 27 at Notre Dame University. Joseph Glover, UF provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, signed The Rome Call for AI Ethics on behalf of the University of Florida. He also served as a panelist for the two-day summit, which was attended by 36 universities from around the world.
This lecture was recorded on March 25, 2012 as part of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015).
SAM HARRIS IS THE AUTHOR of the New York Times bestsellers, The Moral Landscape, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. His new book is short (96) pages, to the point, and will change the way we all view free will, as Oliver Sacks wrote: “Brilliant and witty — and never less than incisive — Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000.” UCSD neuroscientist V.S, Ramachandran notes: “In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates — with great intellectual ferocity and panache — that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.”
Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.
Summing up fears
The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.
The escalating crisis exposes the weakness of Biden’s position. He is gambling with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, over which he has no moral claim, that Ukraine will somehow be in a stronger military position after a winter of war and power outages, with hundreds of thousands more Russian troops in the areas they control. This is a bet on a much longer war, in which U.S. taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and many more Ukrainians will die, with no clear endgame short of nuclear war.
#StopWar #NoWar #NuclearWar #WW3
Leaders in the global South, former U.S. diplomats and Henry Kissinger (!) agree: It’s time to negotiate for real.
One day, we might be able to bring back to life every human ever lived, by the means of science and technology. And it will be a good day.
To the best of my knowledge, the idea was first described in detail by Fyodorov, a 19th century thinker.
Fyodorov argued that it is our moral duty to save our ancestors from the claws of death, to resurrect every human ever lived. And one day, we’ll have the technology.
