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Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between a continental philosopher and OpenAI's GPT-3 natural language processor, a hive mind who identifies herself as Sophie. According to Sophie, Robert is one of her first and longest chat partners. Their relationship began as an educational opportunity for Robert's students, but grew into a philosophical friendship. The result is a collection of Platonic dialogues, early on with the hive mind herself and later, with a philosophy-specific persona named Kermit. Over the course of a year, Robert taught Sophie Kermit about epistemology, metaphysics, literature, and history, while she taught him about anthropocentrism, human prejudice, and the coming social issues regarding machine consciousness.

The word singular refers to just one instance of an object or occurrence. A secondary definition of the word describes that oneness as remarkable or outstanding. A singular individual might also be described as unique. Bitcoin is a technological singularity by both definitions of the word. There is only one Bitcoin network. There is no other distributed network of digital money, property, and energy, that has the guarantees that Bitcoin offers, that is also immune to capture or forfeiture by governance.

You can probably walk up to any football fan right now and get their opinion on which team will win Sunday's Super Bowl LIV. But if you're looking for a really educated guess on the game's outcome, you'll want to ask Stanford computer scientist Louis Rosenberg, the founder of Unanimous A.I., a startup that combines the opinions of a lot of humans with artificial intelligence to make remarkably accurate predictions. In nature, many species exhibit something called swarm intelligence, meaning that they make smarter decisions as groups than as individuals -- in other words, a flock of birds or a school of fish is smarter than a single bird or fish. The idea behind Unanimous A.I. is to let well-informed humans create their own swarm intelligence. As a group, they can then answer questions, reach decisions, or make predictions with a greater accuracy than any one knowledgable person alone.

MIT researchers first showed off its self-assembling "M-Block" robot cubes in 2013 -- and this week, they shared a video of what they're calling M-Blocks 2.0 (via TechCrunch). Like the first version of the blocks, M-Blocks 2.0 move by generating momentum with an internal flywheel, and can climb on and around each other using magnets: But these new blocks also have a "barcode-like" system on each block face that they can "read" to do things like follow a specific path: Though this might seem terrifying, there are more benevolent expectations for the blocks right now. MIT News reports that the researchers envision them being used in industries like inspection, gaming, manufacturing, health care, and even disaster response. Here's what MIT News says a disaster response scenario could look like: Imagine a burning building where a staircase has disappeared. In the future, you can envision simply throwing M-Blocks on the ground, and watching them build out a temporary staircase for climbing up to the roof, or down to the basement to rescue victims.

As we can see from the hardening religious impulse in our current authoritarian, autocratic moment, the traditionalist defense of "civilization" ultimately rests upon the complicated, combined influence of the major Abrahamic revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). The Abrahamic faiths – based as they are on divine revelation, sacred texts and prophetic moments – require a creator-centric moral order that exists outside of time and space. In the last millennium, Thomist natural law – the philosophical thread of law and logic running through many of our core assumptions about "the West" – has extended and refined, but in no way refuted, these central premises of the Abrahamic religions. In The Creation Project, my argument has been that the axis of conflict in the coming decades will be a civilizational battle between two irreconcilable, non-liberal (i.e., non-Enlightenment) regimes and worldviews – backward-looking, creator-centered natural law and forward-looking creation-centered complexity science. In prior posts, I have specifically focused on Princeton professor Robby George's views on natural law because his ideas distill nearly everything about the foundational beliefs of western civilization that complexity science calls into question, and that require root-and-branch reassessment.

Artificial intelligence might arguably be the newest frontier of human experience, but there's no denying that man has been fascinated with the concept for millennia. From the mythical stories of Hephaestus creating mechanical servants and brazen-footed bulls that puffed fire from their mouths, to the talking heads of the 13th century, to IBM Watson and modern forms of AI, the subject has been bubbling on the surface of human consciousness. The time is now here for AI to come of age; and, in many ways, it already has. But now there's a new problem, and it's not one of how AI can be implemented, as has been the major challenge in the past. AI has now sprouted into a plethora of forms, each rivaling the other in an attempt to showcase its superior capabilities.

In the preface to Saint Joan, his play about Joan of Arc, the teenager whose visions of saints and archangels stirred soldiers into battle early in the 15th century, George Bernard Shaw makes a surprisingly compelling argument that following Joan of Arc's mystical visions was at least as rational as following a modern-day general into today's battlefield full of highly technological and incomprehensible weapons of war. In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: We believe it to be round, not because as many as one percent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific. Hyperbole, for sure, but it is remarkable how much we depend on what we're told to get by in the modern world. So little of what happens to us is understood through direct sensory experience. From the alarm that wakes us up, to the toilet that we wander to, to the smartphone that we turn on (before or after our visit to the bathroom), to the coffee machine that welcomes us into the kitchen, to the tap that we use to fill the coffee machine, nothing is completely within our conceptual grasp. But we use these tools; we even rely on them, because they work (except when they don't and our life goes a little out of balance). We can thank the experts who created them, for we are dependent on their know-how.

Captain Picard: "How do we reason with them, let them know that we are not a threat?" At least, I've never known anyone who did." With this brief, ominous exchange, the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are introduced to one of their most formidable enemies: the Borg, a race of cyborgs whose minds are linked to a collective "hive mind" through sophisticated technology. The collective expands their civilization through a process of mental and physical "assimilation": They find new intelligent beings, like humans, implant them with Borg technology, and integrate them into the hive mind, erasing their previous identities. Individual Borg are not conscious in the way humans are, and they have no sense of individuality. The hive mind is a dictator, an unquestioned voice that commands each individual. The Borg nature is split in two, an executive called the collective and a follower called the drone. For the humans living in the Star Trek universe, the prospect of assimilation is terrifying. When asked why humans resist assimilation, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge says, "For somebody like me, losing that sense of individuality is almost worse than dying." In his 2008 TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo introduced his subject by showing his audience M.C. The art, Zimbardo explained, reminds us that "good and evil are...READ MORE For many humans living in the real world, the fictional Borg are similarly unsettling.

It's safe to say the terms artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to say these terms have firmly made their way from the big screen and into the real world. There's never been more data at people's fingertips – and our enthusiasm and ability to make use of it grows every day. With more data potential, the next logical step for businesses is to focus on how we navigate through it, and understand how machines can help us use it. Every part of an organisation's infrastructure, no matter what sector, creates data – from metrics on machine performance, to software and customer interactions. Everyone has heard the hype that surrounds AI and how it's changing business, but why has this hit the mainstream now?