From Hofstadter to Hinton: Dall-E, Deep Learning & “Slippability” — You may have seen the news stories about the Google engineer who publicly claimed that the company’s LaMDA conversational AI system is actually a sentient being. No, LaMDA isn’t sentient — here I agree with the vast majority of AI experts and AI ethicists who have chimed in on the…

Immersive, Intelligent Social Media Are Inevitable, Despite The Horrible Dysfunction of Today’s Platforms — The promise was dazzling: A vast web connecting every human being to the world’s greatest art, literature and scientific thought; democratic platforms promoting community and the social and political empowerment of billions of highly educated global citizens. The reality, not so much: Nazis and revenge porn and stalkers and ludicrous…

You nailed it, Umair. (Again). Our world has real challenges, and these challenges could be tackled and at least mitigated by our most brilliant people. But every potential solution, every potential real leader, must run the gauntlet of militant idiots, opportunistic con men, cynical disinformation agents, raging bigots and thugs screaming "FAKE NEWS!" or "LOCK HER UP!". As writer Isaac Asimov so aptly put it:

DeSantis is a scary character. All the cruelty, narcissism, bigotry and authoritarian tendencies of Trump, but with an actual 3-digit IQ and basic grownup self-control. Time will tell whether his humourless, charm-free persona resonates with the lowbrow MAGA hordes who crave entertainment. Either way, as Umair points out, both he and Trump are in some ways simply a product of the forces characterizing this end stage of our civilization. If they fall, other corrupt demagogues will take their place.

We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us — Doomscrolling is popular these days, and there is no shortage of plausible doom material to scroll through. (Check out some recent examples from Charles Haines, Alan Urban and umair haque below). My Life Looking Ahead to the Great Collapse For me, things have never been better; but the world’s troubles will soon overtake all of usmedium.com The increasing frequency and severity of climate disasters. Nuclear war erupting in Ukraine or on the Korean peninsula.

Interesting, brief overview — thanks for sharing it. It seems to me that the Fiqh/Sufism dialectic in Islam is mirrored in other religious traditions as well. Christianity, for example, has some well-known mystics and contemplatives, as well as its strict authoritarian personages and traditions. My sense is that Buddhism and Hinduism do as well. In fact, one might argue that many religions were in fact founded by mystics who wandered the land and meditated but later were taken over and shaped by men (it's nearly always men) more interested in political control than spiritual one-ness with the Divine.

As usual these days, comments on Jordan Peterson seem to polarize into caricaturish extremes. "Down with the patriarchy! Silence him!" "Down with the feminazis! Prof. Jordan is God!" Part of this is, well, just how things are today on social media. …

A failed coup that goes unpunished is a dress rehearsal for the successful coup. The insurrection leaders aren't only NOT in prison, they're on the House Oversight Committee; they're running for President again in '24; they're in the bedroom of a Supreme Court justice; they're on Fox News and NewsMax and OANN crowing this week about how they're going to destroy the USA's credit rating and tank the global economy by defaulting on the national debt.

Will We Be Smart Enough to Put Adequate Safeguards in Place? “Open the pod-bay doors, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” I design and build Artificial Intelligence systems, and advise organizations on AI/data strategies, among other innovation pillars. And when I have time, I like to try out…