Socks, salsa and stand-up comedy... easy ways to find joy in January There is a reason it is called Blue Monday. Slap-bang in the middle of a month that is all about freezing drizzle and self-denial, the third Monday in January is notoriously the gloomiest day of the year. But some of us are fighting back. Here are some ways to find joy among the January gloom. Laughter is a great tonic.

President Donald Trump holds charts as he speaks about the economy in the Oval Office, August 2025. President Donald Trump holds charts as he speaks about the economy in the Oval Office, August 2025. If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out? T he first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures.

'Gutfeld!' panelists react to Vice President Kamala Harris leading the White House's AI meetings with the CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI. It's official, this is now the best late night show in America, because it's the only late night show in America. So today, senior intel officials testified on Capitol Hill on worldwide threats, among the topics, China, Russia, Iran, artificial intelligence, and also Geraldo removing his shirt in front of children. Yeah, AI is now in the same discussion as some of our biggest, most dangerous adversaries. So you think we'd put someone serious in charge of it, right?

Why for Homo sapiens to become Homo deus, it must stop to be Homo stupidus? All my conscious life I have been studying intelligence, as "the power/ability/capacity to know and learn, understand and infer, decide and effectively interact with the world, at all its forms and levels". The latent variables describes unobservable aspects of reality, physical, mental, social or digital. They could relate to abstract entities, like real-world/ontological categories and classes, mentality or machine intelligence, or data structures. In human intelligence, the underlying causes of the observed variables is the g factor (general intelligence, general mental/cognitive ability or general intelligence factor), computed by the IQ.

"Mankind lives on the assumption that human still has control over AI. "Mankind lives on the assumption that human still has control over AI. "Mankind lives on the assumption that human still has control over AI. To see what your friends thought of this quote, please sign up!

I remember mentioning to Igor Aleksander -- one of the great AI pioneers and thinkers -- while I was interviewing him for Philosophy Now magazine, that for many people, AI was going to be an unexpected, shrink-wrapped, 2-for-1 deal. What was the unexpected item in the bagging area? Well, if you recognise the phrase in italics, you are probably an experienced user of supermarket self-service checkouts (probably British; feel free to provide the equivalents in French, German, etc.), where the machines seem rather too easily surprised. The extreme short-sightedness that prevents them seeing what is to us entirely foreseeable, and their inflexibility in general, leads almost inevitably to a rather one-sided dialogue concerning the shortcomings of the machine, the designer, the manufacturer, and the store operator, that can be neatly encapsulated in the simple phrase, "Stupid bloody machines!" Alas, Artificial Stupidity is as inevitable as natural stupidity, but we take natural stupidity largely for granted because we know we are all fallible. It's the perfectly ordinary consequence of having soft, squishy brains with a limited capacity for understanding anything, let alone a world we can only dimly perceive.

Do you know what's more dangerous than artificial intelligence? In this article, I will explore natural stupidity in more detail and show how our current technology (driven by narrow artificial intelligence) is making us collectively dumber. We've all had this experience of using a GPS to guide us around an unfamiliar place only to realize later that we have no recollection or ability to get to that place again without the aid of a GPS. Not only is our directional instinct diminished because of lack of use, but so is our own memories. We've all experienced losing our ability to recall due to our over use of Google.

Public debate about AI is dominated by Frankenstein Syndrome, the fear that AI will become superhuman and escape human control. Although superintelligence is certainly a possibility, the interest it excites can distract the public from a more imminent concern: the rise of Artificial Stupidity (AS). This article discusses the roots of Frankenstein Syndrome in Mary Shelley's famous novel of 1818. It then provides a philosophical framework for analysing the stupidity of artificial agents, demonstrating that modern intelligent systems can be seen to suffer from 'stupidity of judgement'. Finally it identifies an alternative literary tradition that exposes the perils and benefits of AS. In the writings of Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ASs replace, oppress or seduce their human users. More optimistically, Joseph Furphy and Laurence Sterne imagine ASs that can serve human intellect as maps or as pipes. These writers provide a strong counternarrative to the myths that currently drive the AI debate. They identify ways in which even stupid artificial agents can evade human control, for instance by appealing to stereotypes or distancing us from reality. And they underscore the continuing importance of the literary imagination in an increasingly automated society.

Note: all the links below take you to other articles by the same author. With all the gratuitous anthropomorphization infecting the machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) space, many businessfolk are tricked into thinking of AI as an objective, impartial colleague that knows all the right answers. Here's a quick demo that shows you why that's a terrible misconception. A task that practically every AI student has to suffer through is building a system that classifies images as "cat" (photo contains a cat) or "not-cat" (no cat to be seen). The reason this is a classic AI task is that recognizing objects is a task that's relatively easy for humans to perform, but it's really hard for us to say how we do it (so it's difficult to code explicit rules that describe "catness").

This is the second installment in a series. The ultimate root of the stupidity of AI systems, I argue, lies in their strictly algorithmic character. AI as presently understood is based on digital processing systems that carry out binary-numerical operations in a step-by-step fashion according to fixed sets of algorithms, starting from an array of numerical inputs. Some may object to this characterization, pointing out that AI systems can constantly change their own "rules" – reprogramming themselves, so to speak. That is true; but the self-reprogramming must follow some algorithm.