Justus Sustermans, Galileo Galilei, 1636.
2,142 words
Even the mainstream media are acknowledging that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is declining in most of the world. My view of intelligence is that is partially genetically determined. Genes give you a ceiling for intelligence; you have a potential IQ and a real IQ. Your biology determines your potential IQ; let’s say it is 120. If you receive the proper nurture, i.e. good food in childhood, exercise, and cognitively stimulating activities, by the time you are 25 (the age the brain fully develops) or before, you will have an IQ of 120. (more…)
1,190 words
David Goodhart
Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020
David Goodhart is an upper-class British political centrist who arrived at his views from the Left. He works at a UK think tank called Policy Exchange. He’s the author that first articulated the concept of “Somewheres” vs. “Anywheres.” (more…)
1,683 words
Miss Anthropocene is the fifth full-length release of Canadian avant-pop songstress Claire Boucher, known professionally as Grimes, and it’s considerably darker than much of her previous work. This is fitting — Grimes has stated that the concept of Miss Anthropocene, a triple-entendre, is that of an “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change.” If this sounds like a bunch of woo nonsense to you, you’d be (mostly) correct. (more…)
4,440 words
“Only the dead can know what it means to be dead.”—Ananda Coomaraswamy[1]
Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” articulates his fear of death in chilling terms. It describes a man who hates his job and gets drunk every night. Then, before dawn, he wakes, and with the gathering light, he fixates on the certainty of his own death and what it will mean for him. Larkin is clear that it means complete cessation of the self, that there is no possibility of an afterlife, and that this absence of the self is the most terrifying thing in the world. (more…)
If Tay, a supercomputer AI, went from tabula rasa to full Nazi in less than 24 hours, who are we to argue?
1,033 words
By now you have probably heard of Tay AI, Microsoft’s attempt to create a female teenage chatbot that went rogue after less than 24 hours of exposure to unfiltered Internet users (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). When the company first launched Tay on March 23, 2016, her tagline was, “Microsoft’s AI fam from the internet that’s got zero chill.” The tech giant initially used huge amounts of online data and simulated neural networks to train the bot to talk like a millennial, which to them meant the bot should be a trendy imbecile. (more…)
Giorgio de Chirico, “Les Masques”
3,924 words
English original here
Z tempa technologického pokroku se nám může snadno zatočit hlava a navykli jsme si očekávat nekonečný proud rychlejších a výkonnějších zařízení. Budoucí vývoj takových technologií slibuje stále sofistikovanější stroje, které zpochybní základní premisu lidské nadřazenosti. Je vynakládáno velké úsilí na dosažení dystopické budoucnosti strojů, nadaných úžasnými schopnostmi, jejichž samotná existence možná způsobí nahrazení lidstva. (more…)
Giorgio de Chirico, “Les Masques”
4,884 words
Czech translation here
The speed of technological development can be dizzying, and it has become natural for us to expect a never-ending stream of faster, more powerful devices. The future development of such technologies promises increasingly sophisticated machines that will challenge the very notion of man’s supremacy. (more…)
1,019 words
Transcendence marks the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer. Nolan is also the executive producer so the expectation is that this sci-fi project could aspire to the heights reached by Nolan’s Inception. Sadly, it fails to live up to the comparison.
Johnny Depp stars as Dr. Will Caster, a leading researcher in artificial intelligence (AI). His work is opposed by a terrorist group known as RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology) (more…)
