New twist in the human origin plot

A growing body of evidence suggests human beings arrived on the scene much earlier than previously thought. But that's not all. These revolutionary new findings could upend both longstanding conventional wisdom about where the human species emerged and the established record of co-existing hominids. While still controversial, the results paint a radically new picture of early human development alongside our close relatives. Watch the video from New Scientist below to get the details:

 

Fascinating. However, the question I and no doubt many other people have immediately upon seeing this is, "why is the model ancient skull green?"

Of course, anyone who has seen Spinal Tap already knows the answer: It IS green!

Another studio performance

Yes we can!

Today millions of Americans stood up for democracy, freedom, and the rule of law. Across the nation an outpouring of sentiment sent a message that resounded from every town hall, living room, place of business or worship. That message was united and clear: save our democracy from the illegitimate and illegal authoritarian power grab represented by Donald Trump and his Republican Party. The actions of their administration have not only further delegitimized the US government and ruined the reputation of a country once admired and emulated throughout the world, they have literally killed thousands of innocent people whose lives depended on the solid, competent governance of a potent and wealthy nation. Both we as citizens and the world deserve much, much better than to have that wealth siphoned off and hoarded by a small group of cynical, manipulative con artists in the service of some of the most lucrative business interests in the country and then wasted in the most profligate and inexcusable fashion on a pointless series of military escapades culminating in the death of American citizens and a violent international war which has already caused widespread destruction and death; a conflict presenting no easy resolution and one apt to merely line the pockets of the defense industry while the rest of the country languishes in poverty or burns.

Today the people of this country showed what is possible when ordinary citizens take matters into their own hands to protect what the Constitution guarantees to everyone: freedom of speech and assembly. The right to criticize leaders and powerful interests. They showed that you don't need to be rich or well-connected to use the tools at your disposal to enact real change; that people in all parts of the country are united behind a common purpose and are not afraid to speak up. That is an incredibly powerful message, and I would like to thank everyone who participated in this movement for their admirable courage and fortitude. We are not alone. Together, we can work to unseat the authoritarians and roll back their heinous agenda that has poisoned the discourse of the nation and so weakened us a people and reduced our standing as a respected and trustworthy partner on the international stage. Keep up the pressure and let's take this momentum to the polls to defeat the MAGA movement for once and for all!

British imperialism continues

To be completely honest, it's been quite a while since Warp released anything I had any genuine interest in. Nala Sinephro's was pleasant but almost willfully insubstantial, Squid were tentacular but constrained, and let's just get this one out of the way right now: do we need to hear (or buy) another Autechre album?

But is that even really the issue now? You know a label is past relevance when they start churning out cuter, slightly more marketable versions of you, (or at least what some ad agency's algorithm thinks you might be like) with many more tatts and piercings, and then expect you to pay for them.

The latest entry in Warp's "paint by numbers" series is no doubt a similarly chunky, uneven pastiche of 'genre' (as if those words meant anything anyway), proving once again that you just can't fake naturalism or good taste. The soccer ball on the rear cover pretty much says it all, but fortunately this independently minded musician has long since left the Warp fanboy club.

More digressions about AI

Of course, there are other dangers. Whether or not we go all the stops along the way to creating an arbitrarily more capable version of the infamous Daleks from the popular Doctor Who series, invented by writer Terry Nation, the all-too predictable result of such an effort is not an experiment that most humans would prefer to see play out in real time. That isn't to say that benign uses of realistic humanoid robots aren't possible, even if a majority of people, aligned possibly along readily identifiable cultural boundaries, might find the idea of cohabitation with such devices distasteful. (Yes, it is a little weird to be referring to something that one would interact with almost as one would with an actual person as a "device", but these are the waters humanity is now definitively wading into).

I tend to be somewhat skeptical about the widespread adoption of truly autonomous AI robots employed for military purposes for the simple reason that such entities would presumably be just about as useful to the military as the proverbial soldiers given experimental doses of LSD to see what would happen to the chain of command during the 1950s. To put it bluntly, if a machine can't or won't follow orders as given in a more or less brain-dead and totally predictable fashion, why would any military have a reason to invest in the technology? That is, unless the top brass are also getting into reading tea leaves and studying the works of Nostradamus.

Just sayin'.

Which is entirely possible. However, the possibility of semi-autonomous killer robots guided by advanced AI control systems with the potential to cause severe harm and widespread or targeted destruction during armed conflicts IS very real, and authoritarian governments already have a great deal of interest in such systems. So does my government, which isn't at all a coincidence.

WHICH brings us to another less-oft remarked upon issue regarding AI warfare: the question of purpose. If we are at a point where, as a species and as a planet, people no longer see the purpose or utility of sending brave young men and women into lethal contests between nations or causes, and instead send a machine in their place, then at what point do we simply begin to question the fundamental point of the enterprise? Might we at that point simply have rendered warfare, in any conceivably meaningful sense, obsolete?

This brings the issue full circle* back to the question of human intelligence raised in the article by Shannon Vallor. If we devalue the nature of human intelligence by glibly applying AI to dubious, mundane or misguided ends, would we not also be rendering the meaning or nature of warfare void and useless via the same means? It seems evident to me that we would. But is that really the point? Don't most intelligent, thinking people already know that war is futile anyway??

* which is also the title of a totally decent Doctor Who episode from the Peter Davison era, and of course the first to feature the character K9.

Read it and weep (for joy, of course)

This Noema article about the real dangers of AI by Shannon Vallor - and how they differ from those more typically bandied around in public debates - has saved me a great deal of time and mental anguish by precluding the need for me to actually write a similar article laying out more or less precisely my views on the subject. There is one slight inconsistency in the later acknowledgement that the notion of "human resources" as something akin to mechanically interchangeable parts in a machine designed primarily for the extraction of profit did in fact exist prior to the introduction of computer-based information systems, but this is a fairly minor quibble. Overall I think it does an excellent job of laying out the full scope of what is at stake when it comes to the question of artificial intelligence, and I would recommend it to almost anyone with a brain, especially if - like me - you have long suspected that the debate about AI may really revolve more around unresolved questions surrounding human intelligence and capabilities rather than resting on the various unqestioned assumptions often involved in the comparison of one type of intelligence to another. 

Thanks also to Sean Carroll for the heads up on this one. By this point I'm so firmly down my rabbit hole it may be some time before I get around to saying anything quite so sensible or indeed topical...