Innehållsförteckning för Issue 40 - June/August 2023 från New Philosopher

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can’t know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” — Stephen Hawking What happens when a machine can do something better than we can? Well, it’s simple: when machines outperform us – either physically or intellectually – typically we assign the activity to them. A vehicle can transport us faster than our own legs, a dishwasher can wash dishes more thoroughly than we can, and a GPS works better than an old-fashioned map, so we delegate these tasks to machines. Typing on a computer has replaced handwriting. Vacuum cleaners…

When police traced the origins of a red laser dot to the third-floor window of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, they were surprised to discover that the offending room belonged to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis. The esteemed scientist had been staying in the Swedish capital for days in anticipation of receiving the Nobel Prize and making his laureate speech. Mullis had developed a laboratory technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in which a small amount of DNA can be copied in large quantities over a short period of time. The discovery was so significant that the New York Times described it as “dividing biology into the two epochs of before PCR and after PCR”. Mullis, described by his peers as an “untamed genius”, had, from his hotel window, been toying…

Who can forget the epic opening scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a blood-thirsty ape, fresh from a fight, hurls a thighbone into the sky and its revolving outline morphs into that of a spaceship? The scene has become something of a leitmotif, encoding an arrogant, masculinist notion of how intelligence evolves – from thuggish survivalism, via tool-making, to societies based on sophisticated technologies. At its heart is the idea that evolutionary success is predicated on dominion, with intelligence recruited into the triumphalist charge of progress. Such ideas live deep under our skins. They colour our assumptions in subtle ways we seldom question, even the ways we design scientific experiments around animal cognition. In a famous test of primate intelligence, for example, researchers daubed a blob of…

Alexithymia is a condition characterised by the inability to name emotions. The term usually applies to individuals, for whom dozens of books on emotional intelligence have been written. Peter Salovey and John Mayer coined the term in 1990, and Daniel Goleman made it famous five years later in his best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence. In 2013, Susan David replaced ‘intelligence’ with ‘agility’ to create the similar concept: Emotional Agility. Finally, in 2019, Marc Brackett published Permission to Feel, which explains the evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning that he created at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Today, there is little doubt about the importance of identifying our emotions, naming them, and using them wisely. So, whether you believe there are four human emotions, or twelve, or twenty-seven, or one-hundred…

Being a person comes with a lot of baggage. To say someone is a person seems to imply that they should be treated in a certain kind of way – namely, with a certain amount of respect or dignity. In legal language, we would say that being a person makes one the subject of certain legal rights and duties. More colloquially, we might say that to be a person is to not be a ‘thing’. Much of human history – from the abolition of chattel slavery to women’s suffrage – can be understood as precisely a series of battles over that distinction between persons and things. More often than not, such battles have been waged in the language of morality: to recognise someone’s personhood is a matter of moral right…

Theodore is a lonely writer whose marriage has just ended. To solve this problem, he develops a relationship with a woman – who for a while cures his loneliness. The relationship doesn’t last though. After their breakup, he takes the lessons he’s learned from the experience and extends them to his other relationships. This sounds like a typical love story: two people fall in love with each other. And it sounds like a beneficial tale: one lover grows as a result. However, it is far from normal. Theodore’s assistant, Samantha, is an artificially intelligent virtual assistant. Her software is so convincing that it gives Theodore the illusion that he is communicating with a real human. What isn’t an illusion is the heartbreak that results when the software breaks up with…

“Don’t bother getting a university degree,” the 68-year-old man declares to the recent school leaver, “because AI is going to take all the jobs. Instead,” he continues, “get a trade because that’s safer. Robots aren’t moving into the trades just yet.” The school leaver relayed the conversation to me. He was notably perturbed. Is artificial intelligence, or AI, going to take all white collar jobs? And if not all of them, which ones are safe? Artificial intelligence, or AI, has an ominous sense to it, much like saying “the robots are coming”. But AI isn’t new. When you search the internet, use spam filters on your email, question digital assistants such as Alexa, wear a smart watch, or assess traffic levels using Google maps, AI is working behind the scenes.…

1. The Imitation Game I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in…

Howard Gardner Howard Gardner is Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. The author of thirty books translated into 32 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences. Zan Boag Zan Boag is Editor-in-Chief of New Philosopher and Editorial Director of the international newsstand magazine Womankind. In 2017 he won the Australasian Association of Philosophy Media Professionals Award and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the international Stack Awards. Boag is the co-founder and host…

In February 2023, Australia’s corporate regulator came under fire for hiring a bunch of robots. You might be envisioning a Robocop-type scenario or an army of droid soldiers right now, and I can guarantee you’re about to be disappointed. The robots in question were just artificial intelligence (AI) software programs. Yet they still managed to cause considerable unease. This particular department receives a huge volume of written complaints about company directors. Determining which of these complaints warrant using time and resources to investigate is itself a time-consuming process. So, to speed things up and to free up staff, the department started using an AI system to decide which complaints to take further, and which to politely decline. Other organisations use AI to do similar sorting tasks, such as pre-vetting job…

“Strength cannot keep pace with intelligence.” — Sumerian proverb “When the light of the intelligence grows dim, it is not very long before the love of good becomes lost.” Simone Weil “The three greatest mistakes that can be made – lack of intelligence, lack of resolution, or lack of responsibility.” Thucydides “We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether.” Susan Sontag “The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.” François de La Rochefoucauld “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” George Orwell “It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.” Arthur C. Clarke “Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.” Nassim Nicholas…

/ɪnˈtelɪdʒəns/ noun: 1. the ability to learn, understand and think in a logical way about things; the ability to do this well; 2. secret information that is collected, for example about a foreign country, especially one that is an enemy; the people that collect this information. Artificial intelligence: 1. the study and development of computer systems that can copy intelligent human behaviour. Origin: late Middle English: via Old French from Latin intelligentia, from intelligere ‘understand’, from inter ‘between’ + legere ‘choose’. Source: Oxford English Dictionary…

One way of exploring the latest generation of Artificial Intelligences is to investigate a topic you’re guaranteed to know more about than any computer: yourself. Here, for instance, is how Google’s AI assistant Bard replied to the query, “Who is Tom Chatfield?” at the time of writing, in April 2023. “Tom Chatfield is a British author, broadcaster, and tech philosopher. He is the author of several books on technology and culture.” So far, so good. Things got a little stranger, however, by the next paragraph. “Chatfield is a regular contributor to the BBC, The Guardian, and other publications. He is also the host of the podcast ‘The Chatfield Show’.” The last of these sentences is what computer scientists have taken to calling a hallucination: a response that may or may…

False intelligence is an enemy of mine,A foe that I cannot outwit nor outrun.Though I search with vigour, I cannot divineA way to escape its grasp when it has come. False intelligence brings us to our knees,Confusing us with facts and data streams.It can be a terrible disease,Removing our control over our dreams. But in my heart I know a way to beatThis beast of darkness that I can’t see.For knowledge is the key to defeatThe false intelligence that attacks me. So I will arm myself with knowledge’s forceTo battle this enemy and stay its course.For truth is the only thing to counter falseIntelligence and I’ll use it without pause. Poem created via poetrygenerator.ai using the prompt “Shakespearean sonnet about false intelligence”.…

Zan Boag: In your book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, you proposed the idea that we all possess different types of intelligences, that the majority of us have a range of these abilities or intelligences to some degree. What was the reaction back in the early 1980s to this challenge to the thinking of the time, that there was a singular intelligence? Howard Gardner: Let me give a little background. I was not a student of intelligence. I was a cognitive developmental psychologist. The school at which I worked, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, got a very sizable grant to study the nature and realisation of human potential. And as a cognitive psychologist, my job was to study the nature and realisation of human potential. It’s…

2 ways to subscribe 1 Online at https://www.newphilosopher.com/subscribe/ 2 Email us: subscribe@newphilosopher.com The perfect gift for family & friends What our readers say: Extraordinary quality in all respects. New Philosopher is one of the best things happening. I love how the writing reminds me that the types of issues we are grappling with today are similar to those grappled with by philosophers for centuries. I love this magazine. I no longer like reading or listening to mainstream news as it is not good for my health. Your magazine is good for me. It has real discussions that relate to life rather than reporting sensational ‘news’. Thank you. Your magazine is so helpful and is churning up the little grey cells, as Hercule Poirot says. Thank you, this world is brighter,…

“Rationality gives us greater knowledge and greater control over our own actions and emotions and over the world… It enables us to transform ourselves and hence transcend our status as mere animals, actually, and also symbolically.” — Robert Nozick How important is intelligence in getting ahead, in conquering goals, and generally making a success out of one’s life? Is intelligence the gold standard for who succeeds and who doesn’t? Intelligence tends to be ‘measured’ by the intelligence quotient, or IQ, an assessment of brain processing speed. Smart people can quickly commit to mind facts, digits, and vocabulary, and can retrieve such information from their memory at rapid speed. Ask a high IQ person to remember a six-digit number, and then to repeat it backwards, or to rotate a 3D object…

In my early 30s, an editing role came up at the BBC. It involved aggregating news content for their Australian site: deciding what went where on the home page and adding a few original stories. I was unsure whether to apply and approached a friend who worked for Google for advice. Don’t do it, they said. This is a job that will, one day soon, be overtaken by AI. AI isn’t yet editing our news sites. But we’re getting dangerously close. On November 30, 2022, the research laboratory OpenAI launched Chat-GPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot. ChatGPT can pass the bar exam, write fiction and, yes, produce newspaper articles. The chatbot marks a rate of progress in AI that is so fast, and so unprecedented, that it poses the question: Does…

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. — Robert M. Pirsig We head south. The land is so flat a spirit level would measure perfect horizontality. My eyes trail along a line of wire a metre or so from the roadway. I watch the intermittent tail lights of a truck before us flash on, flash off. Occasionally, a guanaco bounds across the road. Every moment of this trip south, I know I’ll never see these vistas again as they disappear rapidly, with fleeting points of interest, a continual death. Although change is one of the few things in life that we can depend on, we humans seem to deny its consequences. Harvard University psychologists Jordi…

The connotations of ‘intelligence’ are mostly cerebral and academic. Intelligence is about having high level capabilities, typically involving mathematical, logical, or verbal reasoning. Intelligent people are good at problem-solving and finding neat solutions to puzzles. They see ways through where others flounder or give up. Artificial Intelligence is partly about passing as a human being from behind a screen – displaying human-like or superior capacities in responses to questions, calculations, or challenges. It used to be just about passing the Turing Test, but we’re far beyond that now we’ve entered the revolutionary world of ChatGPT and its siblings. Yet in all this excitement about intelligence, bodily intelligence doesn’t get much of a look in. It should. It can be quite amazing, and there are examples of it all around us.…

How and when did you move into art as a full-time occupation? Since I was a child, I wanted to be a professional draftsman. I know that it is a commonplace answer, but please note the important detail: ‘professional’. Unfortunately, I was never in the right place: among my friends, I never found anyone who shared my passion for drawing and comics; in my family, no one thought of encouraging or supporting my vocation, those remarkable skills I had; and, of course, there were no forums, masters, or social networks then. When my parents refused to finance my art studies, I studied Philology to do something close to my other passion: Literature. Then, at the end of the 1990s, the Spanish government organised an award for young artists that had…

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Multiple Intelligences Howard Gardner Intelligence quotient The original scene: Paris, 1900 – La Belle Epoque. The city fathers approached a psychologist named Alfred Binet with an unusual request. Families were flocking to the city from the provinces, and a good many of their children were having trouble with their schoolwork. Could Binet devise some kind of a measure that would predict which youngsters would succeed and which would fail in the primary grades of Paris schools? As almost everybody knows, Binet succeeded. In short order, his discovery came to be called the ‘intelligence test”; his measure, the IQ, for “intelligence quotient” (mental age divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100). Like other Parisian fashions, the IQ soon made its way to the United States. Noise Daniel Kahneman Appropriate sentences…