Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?
Technology
Posted inWar and Peace
So this is 90 seconds to midnight
Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first launched, on the cover of the June […]
Posted inTechnology
Camera phones don’t prove God’s existence
Reading Time: 3 minutes Smartphones have created video evidence for many claims both unknown and underappreciated, but they’ve failed to support religious beliefs.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
AI is here: Are we finally ready to rethink the value of being human?
Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s been a good few months for machine-learning software—and a confusing one for the humans trying to live their best lives around it. Last fall, digital art generators like Midjourney and DALL-E drew the alarm of illustrators, photographers, and other digital artists: not just because the algorithms were trained on data not expressly sanctioned by […]
Posted inDeep Dive
2022: The year in global review, Part II
Reading Time: 9 minutes Our exercise in the folly of year-end lists continues! In Part I of this global review for 2022, three key themes emerged from this year’s major news events. The first was “Europe on fire”, and the implications of energy infrastructure policy for the environment and future imperialist tyranny. The second dealt with the collapse of […]
Posted inTechnology
What I found in that dusty shop in Arabia in 1985 changed everything
Reading Time: 5 minutes It was summer 1985, and I found myself at scorching midday deep in the dry-as-dead-bones central marketplace, the souk, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was hunting for, of all improbable things at that time, a “personal computer” (PC). Ever since a fellow American expatriate demonstrated the wonders of his clunky, DOS-powered IBM PC at his […]
Posted inTechnology
Can a Christian be moral? Let’s ask ChatGPT
Reading Time: 2 minutes I asked the new super-artificially-intelligent ChatGPT this question: “Can a Christian be moral?” Here’s what the entity immediately spat out: Yes, a Christian can be moral. Christianity teaches that morality is grounded in the teachings and example of Jesus Christ, and that believers should strive to follow his example and teachings in their own lives. […]
Posted inTechnology
ChatGPT shows the secular outlook is spreading
Reading Time: 5 minutes AI chatbots are a mirror, reflecting our society back to us—and one thing we can notice from them is that the secular, scientific outlook has taken hold.
Posted inEconomics
Bankman-Fried arrested—Now what’s to be done about Ponzinomics?
Reading Time: 5 minutes On December 12, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested at his apartment complex in the Albany resort in the Bahamas, after US prosecutors sent formal notice to local officials that they had filed criminal charges against him. The founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which Bankman-Fried announced was filing for bankruptcy on November 11, had been scheduled […]
Posted inTechnology
Does the FTX collapse discredit effective altruism?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced founder of a bankrupt crypto empire, was a big proponent of effective altruism. Does his deception reflect badly on the philosophy he claimed to believe in?