Creativity & Intelligence
Brian Wilson, musical genius behind the Beach Boys, dies at 82
Brian Wilson, the musical savant who scripted a defining Southern California soundtrack with a run of hit songs with the Beach Boys before being pulled down a rabbit hole of despair and depression when his highly anticipated masterwork was shelved unfinished, has died. Wilson's family announced his death Wednesday morning on Facebook. "We are at a loss for words right now," the post said. "Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize we are sharing our grief with the world," said the statement, also shared on Instagram and the musician's website. The statement didn't reveal a cause of death. Wilson died more than a year after it was revealed he was diagnosed with dementia and placed under a conservatorship in May 2024.
Amplifying Human Creativity and Problem Solving with AI Through Generative Collective Intelligence
Kehler, Thomas P., Page, Scott E., Pentland, Alex, Reeves, Martin, Brown, John Seely
We propose a general framework for human-AI collaboration that amplifies the distinct capabilities of both types of intelligence. We refer to this as Generative Collective Intelligence (GCI). GCI employs AI in dual roles: as interactive agents and as technology that accumulates, organizes, and leverages knowledge. In this second role, AI creates a cognitive bridge between human reasoning and AI models. The AI functions as a social and cultural technology that enables groups to solve complex problems through structured collaboration that transcends traditional communication barriers. We argue that GCI can overcome limitations of purely algorithmic approaches to problem-solving and decision-making. We describe the mathematical foundations of GCI, based on the law of comparative judgment and minimum regret principles, and briefly illustrate its applications across various domains, including climate adaptation, healthcare transformation, and civic participation. By combining human creativity with AI's computational capabilities, GCI offers a promising approach to addressing complex societal challenges that neither humans nor machines can solve alone.
Exploring Societal Concerns and Perceptions of AI: A Thematic Analysis through the Lens of Problem-Seeking
This study introduces a novel conceptual framework distinguishing problem-seeking from problem-solving to clarify the unique features of human intelligence in contrast to AI. Problem-seeking refers to the embodied, emotionally grounded process by which humans identify and set goals, while problem-solving denotes the execution of strategies aimed at achieving such predefined objectives. The framework emphasizes that while AI excels at efficiency and optimization, it lacks the orientation derived from experiential grounding and the embodiment flexibility intrinsic to human cognition. To empirically explore this distinction, the research analyzes metadata from 157 YouTube videos discussing AI. Conducting a thematic analysis combining qualitative insights with keyword-based quantitative metrics, this mixed-methods approach uncovers recurring themes in public discourse, including privacy, job displacement, misinformation, optimism, and ethical concerns. The results reveal a dual sentiment: public fascination with AI's capabilities coexists with anxiety and skepticism about its societal implications. The discussion critiques the orthogonality thesis, which posits that intelligence is separable from goal content, and instead argues that human intelligence integrates goal-setting and goal-pursuit. It underscores the centrality of embodied cognition in human reasoning and highlights how AI's limitations come from its current reliance on computational processing. The study advocates for enhancing emotional and digital literacy to foster responsible AI engagement. It calls for reframing public discourse to recognize AI as a tool that augments -- rather than replaces -- human intelligence. By positioning problem seeking at the core of cognition and as a critical dimension of intelligence, this research offers new perspectives on ethically aligned and human-centered AI development.
Context-Aware Testing: A New Paradigm for Model Testing with Large Language Models
The predominant de facto paradigm of testing ML models relies on either using only held-out data to compute aggregate evaluation metrics or by assessing the performance on different subgroups. However, such data-only testing methods operate under the restrictive assumption that the available empirical data is the sole input for testing ML models, disregarding valuable contextual information that could guide model testing. In this paper, we challenge the go-to approach of data-only testing and introduce Context-Aware Testing (CAT) which uses context as an inductive bias to guide the search for meaningful model failures. We instantiate the first CAT system, SMART Testing, which employs large language models to hypothesize relevant and likely failures, which are evaluated on data using a self-falsification mechanism. Through empirical evaluations in diverse settings, we show that SMART automatically identifies more relevant and impactful failures than alternatives, demonstrating the potential of CAT as a testing paradigm.
Jasmine Crockett tells Jimmy Kimmel she will 'absolutely' take head-to-head IQ test against Trump
Rep. Jasmine Crockett said she would "absolutely" take a head-to-head IQ test against President Donald Trump during an interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday that she would "absolutely" take a head-to-head IQ test against President Donald Trump. "He also called you low IQ, I'm sure you're aware of that. Would you be willing to take an IQ test publicly head-to-head against the President of the United States?" Kimmel played a clip of Trump talking about the Democratic lawmaker, during which he called Crockett the Democrats' "new star," and suggested the party was in trouble if that was the case.
How to Get Out of Your Own Way When Writing
Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, Maggie Smith talked with John Dickerson about her new book Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. Maggie's first love is poetry, and they discuss how to tell when your creative endeavor is complete. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity. John Dickerson: What does it feel like when you've arrived with a poem--when you think it's "done?"
'Don't ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us': are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence?
Imagine for a moment you are a child in 1941, sitting the common entrance exam for public schools with nothing but a pencil and paper. You read the following: "Write, for no more than a quarter of an hour, about a British author." Today, most of us wouldn't need 15 minutes to ponder such a question. We'd get the answer instantly by turning to AI tools such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Siri. Offloading cognitive effort to artificial intelligence has become second nature, but with mounting evidence that human intelligence is declining, some experts fear this impulse is driving the trend.
State Space Model Meets Transformer: A New Paradigm for 3D Object Detection
Wang, Chuxin, Yang, Wenfei, Liu, Xiang, Zhang, Tianzhu
DETR-based methods, which use multi-layer transformer decoders to refine object queries iteratively, have shown promising performance in 3D indoor object detection. However, the scene point features in the transformer decoder remain fixed, leading to minimal contributions from later decoder layers, thereby limiting performance improvement. Recently, State Space Models (SSM) have shown efficient context modeling ability with linear complexity through iterative interactions between system states and inputs. Inspired by SSMs, we propose a new 3D object DEtection paradigm with an interactive STate space model (DEST). In the interactive SSM, we design a novel state-dependent SSM parameterization method that enables system states to effectively serve as queries in 3D indoor detection tasks. In addition, we introduce four key designs tailored to the characteristics of point cloud and SSM: The serialization and bidirectional scanning strategies enable bidirectional feature interaction among scene points within the SSM. The inter-state attention mechanism models the relationships between state points, while the gated feed-forward network enhances inter-channel correlations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to model queries as system states and scene points as system inputs, which can simultaneously update scene point features and query features with linear complexity. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our DEST-based method. Our method improves the GroupFree baseline in terms of AP50 on ScanNet V2 (+5.3) and SUN RGB-D (+3.2) datasets. Based on the VDETR baseline, Our method sets a new SOTA on the ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D datasets.
System 0/1/2/3: Quad-process theory for multi-timescale embodied collective cognitive systems
Taniguchi, Tadahiro, Hirai, Yasushi, Suzuki, Masahiro, Murata, Shingo, Horii, Takato, Tanaka, Kazutoshi
This paper introduces the System 0/1/2/3 framework as an extension of dual-process theory, employing a quad-process model of cognition. Expanding upon System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking) and System 2 (slow, deliberative thinking), we incorporate System 0, which represents pre-cognitive embodied processes, and System 3, which encompasses collective intelligence and symbol emergence. We contextualize this model within Bergson's philosophy by adopting multi-scale time theory to unify the diverse temporal dynamics of cognition. System 0 emphasizes morphological computation and passive dynamics, illustrating how physical embodiment enables adaptive behavior without explicit neural processing. Systems 1 and 2 are explained from a constructive perspective, incorporating neurodynamical and AI viewpoints. In System 3, we introduce collective predictive coding to explain how societal-level adaptation and symbol emergence operate over extended timescales. This comprehensive framework ranges from rapid embodied reactions to slow-evolving collective intelligence, offering a unified perspective on cognition across multiple timescales, levels of abstraction, and forms of human intelligence. The System 0/1/2/3 model provides a novel theoretical foundation for understanding the interplay between adaptive and cognitive processes, thereby opening new avenues for research in cognitive science, AI, robotics, and collective intelligence.
Trump blasts Rep. Al Green as 'an embarrassment' to Democrats, says he 'should be forced to take an IQ test'
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was removed from President Donald Trump's speech to a joint session of Congress after disrupting the event. EXCLUSIVE: President Donald Trump told Fox News Digital Thursday that Rep. Al Green "should be forced to pass an IQ test because he is a low IQ individual and we don't need low IQ individuals in Congress," after the Democrat disrupted his joint session address. The House of Representatives Thursday, in a bipartisan vote, censured Green, D-Texas, for interrupting the president's Tuesday joint session address to Congress. President Donald Trump attends a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 4, 2025. In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, the president reacted.