Labels like “age of AI” simplify complex issues, overshadowing individual experiences and who defines them.More
Tag Archives: AI
The AI skillset
AI reveals and reshapes architectural practice, highlighting tasks, roles, and knowledge responsibilities previously overlooked.More
Is anyone paying attention?
How AI seems to be paying attention to users and their every word.More
Why a neural network forgets
Conversational AI, such as ChatGPT, has limited capacity to recall the content of earlier conversations. OpenAI does not disclose all the details of its operations, but scholars estimate that ChatGPT4 can process and recall up to 10,000 words in a single session or thread. That’s a substantial improvement on earlier models, but it doesn’t ensure…More
Welcome to the Apocalypse
Not everyone is averse to the prospect of a global AI-induced apocalypse. Catastrophizing circumstances and events caries a certain appeal to some, in particular those who identify with the status of a powerless underclass. Let social, political and economic systems fall! Let AI take over! I think here of those who identify as dispossessed, who…More
Generalised AI as existential threat
Many specialised AI applications are acceptably proficient in identifying people, animals and other objects in pictures, in searching databases, winning at chess and in many other areas invisible to most users, such as controlling factory production lines, navigating aerial vehicles, surveillance, medical imaging, diagnosis, and aspects of smart city infrastructures. That’s “narrow” AI. But general artificial…More
Attention is everything
Attention is a key element in cognition. At our most thoughtful we direct attention to features in our environment that are most important to us at that moment. Attention can wander, of course, we daydream, and we can pay attention to inexistent things, memories and objects of the imagination. A lecturer will come to the…More
Intentional systems
In his book Consciousness Explained, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett says that a study of hallucination, “will lead us to the beginnings of a theory — an empirical, scientifically respectable theory — of human consciousness” [4]. I’ve explored what some philosophers say about hallucination in previous posts and tried to relate that to…More
Inattention and power
Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) provides one of the most enduring depictions of machine intelligence, a spaceship that exhibits sentience. HAL, the onboard computer provides an interface to the ship’s functions. In his chapter “Toward the sentient city,” Mark Shepard identifies the conversational aspect of HAL’s interface, “symbolized by his iconic and…More
Urban discourse
Dialogue typifies what it is to be intelligent. I’m thinking of two or more people engaged in conversation. Alan Turing proposed conversation as the test for AI. If participants or observers can’t tell the difference between a human conversing with a simulation and a human being conversing with another human then it’s fair to say…More