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When did you realize Wikipedia had a problem with AI-generated material? Ellia Lebleu: It was around December 2023. A few other editors and I were chatting on Wikipedia’s Discord server, and we had all seen very strange articles with the same odd characteristics. They repeated phrases like “stands as a testament” or…
Imagine a building, let's say a small office tower. When this building was built, they used a type of pipe that will degrade over time and eventually need to be replaced. This is standard infrastructural debt; basic wear and tear, as they say. Then, let's say that when it comes time to replace the pipes, you need to…
I get the impression that people who study musical psychology are fairly confused about this, too. There are, as I interpret it, two broad families of perspectives. One, the more traditional, suggests that music works roughly the same way as painting. We have a very sensitive auditory processing system in our heads…
One thing Star Trek could never do today is introduce one of its main characters as an unrepentant anticolonial terrorist, and then spend seven seasons stubbornly refusing to make her apologize for having been one. Major Kira Nerys grows enormously over Deep Space Nine. She learns that individual Cardassians aren't…
Have you ever played Akinator? You think of a character, a genie asks you some twenty questions, and somehow it knows. That’s fingerprinting in a nutshell, except your browser answers the questions for you. Once you understand information entropy, Akinator’s magic turns into a simple trick. Let’s simplify with that…
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an…
I know this isn’t everyone’s experience growing up in Northern Virginia, but something I’ve realized after living here my entire life is how unusual the baseline expectations can be. Growing up, going to college never felt like a major accomplishment or even much of a decision; it was just what everyone was doing…
Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: 'Where did the world come from?' 'Why did God make the world?' 'Where was I before I was born?' 'Where do people go when they die?' Again and again I have found that they…
...in physiological textbooks, we speak of the brain, or the nervous system, as 'governing' the heart or the digestive tract, smuggling bad politics into science, as if the heart belonged to the brain rather than the brain to the heart or the stomach. Yet it is as true, or false, to say that the brain 'feeds itself'…
Yet the more surely and vividly you know the future, the more it makes sense to say that you've already had it. When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another. This is why many people object to having their fortunes told: not that fortunetelling is mere superstition or that the predictions…
The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality. In an A.I.-dominated future, those with capital will buy “compute” (the tech term for A.I. horsepower) and…
Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for growth. It's where they show off their achievements. Once I made that realization, I finally started making continued growth my goal, rather than winning. Games enrich my life by allowing me to grow as an individual, and that's what motivates me to keep on going.
Ron complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights. What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room…
The airports with their self-check-in kiosks and restaurants full of iPads are staffed by thousands of human workers (most using mano machine can do? Or, like operating an elevator and driving a car, is it because at first we don't trust machines to do a job where lives are at risk? Elevators became much safer as soon…
HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from…
A living being like you or me usually has two elements: a set of instructions that tell the system how to keep going and how to reproduce itself, and a mechanism to carry out the instructions. In biology, these two parts are called genes and metabolism. But it is worth emphasising that there need be nothing biological…
he one remaining area that reHgion can now lay claim to is the origin of the universe, but even here science is making progress and should soon provide a definitive answer to how the universe began. I published a book that asked if God created the universe, and that caused something of a stir. People got upset that a…
While most of us focus on consuming information that we won’t care about next month, let alone next year, Buffett focused on knowledge and companies that change very, very slowly or not at all. And because the information he was learning changed slowly he could compound his knowledge over time. And as Schroeder notes…
Most technologies in the Star Wars universe that don’t have some capability of being used in war… well, they kinda just suck. There are so many areas where it seems like average Star Wars tech should outdo itself given how advanced the military-grade technology is, but in practice it doesn’t appear to make much…
Much as the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly became a model organism for geneticists, chess became a Drosophila of reasoning. In the late 19th century, Alfred Binet hoped that understanding why certain people excelled at chess would unlock secrets of human thought. Sixty years later, Alan Turing wondered if a…