AI and the crisis of meaning Alexander Stern “It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet… Read More Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse
Alex Karp, Palantirianism, and the tech industry’s embrace of total war. By Jacob Silverman Last July, four high-ranking tech executives — all of them involved with artificial intelligence — were sworn into the US Army Reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel. They were part of a new unit called Detachment 201, also known as the… Read More Keyboard warriors
Shobhit Mahajan The sight of a long line of tail-lights as I descended the flyover left me with a sinking feeling- it was 8 am on a rain-soaked morning and the tail lights could only mean that there was a traffic jam. I assumed it was a truck or a light goods vehicle which regularly… Read More The Delhi that AI Summit VIPs won’t see – and the one they did
The Jena Declaration affirms that there are no “races” in the biological sense in humans, since the genetic variation within human populations is often greater than the genetic variation between these populations… In the human genome, for example, there is not a single difference among the 3.2 billion base pairs that separates Africans from non-Africans. So not… Read More The Jena Declaration on race and eugenics (2019) / Conference on the concept of ‘race’ at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, 2021
The life of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose illuminates how scientific genius can emerge from the most unexpected quarters Somaditya (Soma) Banerjee On a summer day in 1924, a young Indian physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose sent a paper and a letter to Albert Einstein. It would shape the nascent field of quantum mechanics and… Read More A light from the periphery
The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich George Monbiot If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate… Read More Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage
This officially sanctioned system of privileges will breed resentment among those who have spent their lives in those institutions and have a potentially demoralising impact in the long term. A “substantial set-up grant” only makes the funds available. Procurement is another story altogether. Shobhit Mahajan A recent newspaper report (IE, October 22, ) mentions that… Read More Reversing the American brain drain: Is the Indian government’s scheme enough?
NB: Arvind Gupta combines humility, enthusiasm, energy, love and creative intellect in a character all his own. He’s the Pied Piper of India’s children, one who can quieten a noisy class of children in two minutes, by showing them the wondrous ways of nature. He never sought glory, and I suspect his numerous awards indicate… Read More The Science of Toys: by Padma Shri Arvind Gupta
Hinton is known for his pioneering work on neural networks, which helped pave the way to today’s AI boom. In 2023, he stepped down from Google and started speaking out about the dangers of AI. AI systems have tried to blackmail humans or bypass shutdown orders. This keeps happening. This is not going to stop happening. Matt Egan… Read More The ‘godfather of AI’ reveals the only way humanity can survive superintelligent AI
Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer Science is in crisis. Funding infrastructures for both basic and applied research are being systematically decimated, while in places of great power, science’s influence on decision making is waning. Long-term and far-reaching studies are being shuttered, and thousands of scientists’ livelihoods are uncertain, to say nothing of the incalculable casualties resulting from the abrupt removal of… Read More Science could enable a fascist future. Especially if we don’t learn from the past
After the truth-shower 