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What is “Sentient AI?”

Recently, as anyone who has managed to find this post is likely to know, a  Google engineer was placed on leave after raising concerns that they may have created a sentient artificial intelligence (AI) , called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications). This story made waves in the popular press, with many people outside the field wondering if we had at last created the sci-fi holy grail of AI: a living machine. Meanwhile, those involved in cognitive science or AI research were quick to point out the myriad ways LaMDA fell short of what we might call “sentience.” Eventually,  enough   popular   press   articles   came   out   to   firmly   establish   that   anyone   who   thought   there   might   be   a   modicum   of   sentience   in   LaMDA   was  a fool, the victim of their own credulity for wanting to anthropomorphize anything capable of language. That previous sentence has 23 hyperlinks to different articles with various angles describing why having a sentience conversation
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AI, Medicine, and Xenocomplexity: Beyond Human-Understandable Data

Medical applications for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL) have drawn a lot of attention from investors, the media, and the public at large. Whether helping us  better interpret radiological images ,  identify potentially harmful drug interactions ,  discover new therapeutic targets , or simply  organize medical information , AI and DL are beginning to impact real care given to real patients. Because these systems learn from examining data, rather than being programmed to follow specific logic, it is often challenging to understand why they make the decisions they make. Furthermore, recent results suggest the role of AI in medicine is transitioning to a new phase, in which AI enables us to do more than merely solve known problems in an automated way. AI is enabling us to solve  “xenocomplex” problems : problems so difficult, humans have a hard time identifying a solution or even fully articulating the problem itself. To fully translate these capabilities into better o

Capitalism and Greedy Algorithms

Capitalism: you hate it, you love it, you love to hate it, and you hate to love it. As the dominant, or at least most successful, economic system of  the last 3-5 centuries  (depending how you want to  define capitalism ), it has been an integral part of the socioeconomic fabric for innumerable successes and tragedies. For almost any take you might conceive someone having on capitalism, if you look around enough, you’ll likely find someone has already written about it (maybe even this one!). A common trope, of course, is the “greedy capitalist,” the evil banker or industrialist or business owner ruthlessly exploiting those beneath them for their own profit. Gordon Gekko  infamously lauded the goodness of greed , kicking off a generation of bloodthirsty blue-shirted hostile takeover artists who saw economics in brutal Darwinian terms.   Blue shirt + white collar + power tie + suspenders + gold Cartier = hide ya assets, hide ya balance sheet, hide ya sales projections, cause they takin o