Cognition
The Human Brain’s Bandwidth For Visual Images Is Severely Limited
Imagine you are at Ikea to pick up a sofa for your new flat. You see one you like, a wine-coloured two-seater with big soft cushions. You imagine what it would look like with your current furniture, and decide that’s the sofa you want. As you continue meandering through the store you find a nice …
What Toddlers Can Teach Us About How The Human Brain Does Science
Science as we’ve come to understand it today – that is, conducting experiments using a hypothesis-testing method – has existed only since about the 17th century. But the Homo sapiens brain has been around since the Pleistocene, so how is it that we’ve gotten so good at the kind of science we do in such a short …
Science Has Outgrown The Human Mind And Its Limited Capacities
The duty of man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads and … attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into …
Why Artificial Neural Networks Have A Long Way To Go Before They Can ‘See’ Like Us
Artificial neural networks were created to imitate processes in our brains, and in many respects – such as performing the quick, complex calculations necessary to win strategic games such as chess and Go – they’ve already surpassed us. But if you’ve ever clicked through a CAPTCHA test online to prove you’re human, you know that …
Even If Genes Affect Intelligence, We Can’t Engineer Cleverness
First, let me tell you how smart I am. So smart. My fifth-grade teacher said I was gifted in mathematics and, looking back, I have to admit that she was right. I’ve properly grasped the character of metaphysics as trope nominalism, and I can tell you that time exists, but that it can’t be integrated …
Planes Don’t Flap Their Wings: Does AI Work Like A Brain?
In 1739, Parisians flocked to see an exhibition of automata by the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson performing feats assumed impossible by machines. In addition to human-like flute and drum players, the collection contained a golden duck, standing on a pedestal, quacking and defecating. It was, in fact, a digesting duck. When offered pellets by …
If Machines Want To Make Art, Will Humans Understand It?
Assuming that the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds is possible, those minds will feel the urge to create art. But will we be able to understand it? To answer this question, we need to consider two subquestions: when does the machine become an author of an artwork? And how can we form an understanding …
Robot Cognition Requires Machines That Both Think And Feel
For more than two millennia, Western thinkers have separated emotion from cognition – emotion being the poorer sibling of the two. Cognition helps to explain the nature of space-time and sends humans to the Moon. Emotion might save the lioness in the savannah, but it also makes humans act irrationally with disconcerting frequency. In the …
Artificial Intelligence Safety & Cybersecurity: A Timeline Of AI Failures
Breakthrough after breakthrough, artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to challenge the human definition of impossible. Our lives and AI technologies are intertwining further as time goes on. For us, this means a more convenient life aided by this technology. At the same time though, this means that we are making ourselves vulnerable to the consequences …
Google I/O 2019 | Artificial Intelligence: From Social Good to Ambient Intelligence
Google I/O 2019 | Artificial Intelligence: From Social Good to Ambient Intelligence Google’s scale and AI expertise uniquely positions us to use AI to positively impact society. In this talk, hear from our global leader of Google’s Crisis Response efforts on how to think about applying ML and AI to positively impact some of the …