Day: June 14, 2022
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LaMDA and the Sentient AI Trap
Now head of the nonprofit Distributed AI Research, Gebru hopes that going forward people focus on human welfare, not robot rights. Other AI ethicists have said that they’ll no longer discuss conscious or superintelligent AI at all. “Quite a large gap exists between the current narrative of AI and what it can actually do,” says…
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‘Is This AI Sapient?’ Is the Wrong Question to Ask About LaMDA
The uproar caused by Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who believes that one of the company’s most sophisticated chat programs, Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is sapient, has had a curious element: Actual AI ethics experts are all but renouncing further discussion of the AI sapience question, or deeming it a distraction. They’re right…
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The Sexist Pseudoscience at the Heart of Biology
For years, studying zoology made me feel like a sad misfit. Not because I loved spiders, enjoyed cutting up dead things I’d found by the side of the road, or would gladly root around in animal feces for clues as to what their owner had eaten. No, the source of my disquiet was my sex.…
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Best MacBooks (2022): Which Model Should You Buy?
in 2020, Apple’s MacBooks entered a new era. The company announced it was moving away from the Intel chips it had been using since 2006, and it rolled out the first Macs with the Apple-designed M1. Cut to 2022 and the company has added four more chips to the lineup: M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1…
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How Lost Hikers Can Send an SOS to Space
Last July, two hikers were on a backpacking trip in California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Just northeast of Granite Lake—a small body of water edged by deadfall and a rocky mountainside—one of them fell and was too badly hurt to continue. From their supplies, they pulled out a personal locator beacon. They extended the device’s antenna…
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How to Use Microsoft Word for Free
That said, they’re still great for quick edits and for viewing documents. If, for example, someone has sent you a Word document that you need to look at, and you don’t want to pay for the full version of the software, then you can easily get at it using your phone. Alternatively, if you just…