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- Who is Elon Musk and what is his net worth?
The boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX is the world's richest person and has used his platform to make his views known on a vast array of topics. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Someone Finally Wants to Hire Philosophers
Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what the means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed “an impressively impractical thing to do,” as he later wrote. “Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear.” But over time, Graham became disillusioned: “I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring,” he explained. And so, eventually, he switched to studying artificial intelligence.Like Graham, the field of philosophy has lately turned its attention to AI. At major tech companies, a growing rank of philosophers with Ph.D.s and flush compensation packages are helping shape the technology’s future. Meanwhile, universities are pouring resources into hiring philosophers who study AI. In 2013, 1 percent of roles on PhilJobs, the field’s primary job board, were related to the technology. Last year, that figure hit 16 percent.In some ways, it is philosophers who got us into this AI mess in the first place. For centuries, they have contemplated the creation of artificial minds. And the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book, Superintelligence, helped bring attention to the potential dangers of all-powerful AI. Bostrom’s work has influenced research agendas across all of the major labs. Sam Altman once described the book as “the best thing” he had read on the risks of AI.But the two disciplines have never been quite as entangled as they are now. As the AI boom has exploded, Silicon Valley has looked to philosophers to help the industry build what are, at least in theory, more virtuous machines. AI companies have to make all kinds of difficult decisions about how their bots should interact with humans—decisions that philosophers, experts in parsing such dilemmas, are uniquely well equipped to inform. Last fall, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Altman said that OpenAI consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers” and tech-ethics experts when designing rules for ChatGPT’s behavior. (An OpenAI spokesperson was unable to provide additional information about what this consulting involved.)Perhaps the most philosophy-drunk of the major AI firms is Anthropic. It wants Claude, in addition to being a helpful assistant, to have “good character,” Amanda Askell, a philosopher at the company, told me last year. In January, under Askell’s leadership, the company published Claude’s constitution,… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not ConsciousAnthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year, the company released an 84-page document titled Claude’s “constitution,” Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company’s flagship product. The first sentence reads, “Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behaviors.” It goes on: “The document is written with Claude as its primary audience,” “we want Claude to be able to use its judgment once armed with a good understanding of the relevant considerations,” “Claude’s moral status is deeply uncertain,” and “Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings.”This anthropomorphism is by no means limited to the document. In an interview earlier this year, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said that “we’re open to the idea” that AI could be conscious. In a separate interview, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff.” It’s enough to make you wonder: Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot. To appreciate the titanic magnitude of this error, we need to begin by understanding how LLMs work.If we give an LLM a prompt that reads, “The following is a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan,” it will generate a coherent dialogue between the two historical figures. But no matter how detailed the responses are, no matter how vividly they recount their respective historical accomplishments, we would never conclude that the LLM has conjured up digital re-creations of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, nor would we suggest that the historical figures are conscious despite being disembodied and are happily conversing in a language that neither actually spoke. In reality, they are just characters in a piece of speculative fiction.Now let’s replace the… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago
- Phone signal on trains not good enough most of the time, research saysOfcom found the major phone networks were not providing good signal on trains, and train companies were slowing down wi-fi. [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago
- Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland app users hit by outage"We're aware some customers are having issues with our app and online banking. We're really sorry about this," Lloyds Bank posted on X. [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago
- The President Keeps Contradicting Himself on AIFor months now, the White House has hinted that it may try to rein in the AI industry. Just two weeks ago, the nation’s top tech executives—including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei—were invited to attend a ceremony for the signing of a long-anticipated executive order on AI. But just hours before the ceremony, Donald Trump scrapped it. America is leading the world in the AI race, the president told reporters at the time, “and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.”Apparently, Trump has changed his mind again. Earlier today, the president signed an executive order that will create a process for top AI companies to voluntarily share certain upcoming models with the government for safety testing up to one month before wider release. OpenAI, Anthropic, and the like will also be asked to work with the government to shore up federal, state, and local cyberdefenses. The White House spokesperson Liz Huston told us that the policy reflects a “common-sense approach of collaborating with industry to balance innovation and security.”The order itself is relatively toothless: Even before today, the major AI firms already had agreements in place that allowed the government to preemptively test their models for safety risks. The new rule “effectively formalizes what has already been happening between the US government and the leading AI companies,” Daniel Remler, an AI expert at the Center for a New American Security, told us.But the executive order is meaningful in that the president is doing something—anything—about AI. At the start of his second term, Trump signaled to tech companies that he would stay out of the way. Last January, he rescinded a set of modest Joe Biden–era policies, calling the rules “dangerous” and a “barrier” to American AI leadership. Even the preamble of today’s executive order celebrates that Trump “unleashed tremendous technological growth” by “slashing the bureaucratic constraints that the prior administration placed on America’s AI developers.” Yet core components of those supposedly dangerous Biden-era AI regulations—voluntary agreements to share information about advanced AI models with federal agencies, for instance, as well as federal programs to leverage AI for cyberdefense—are strikingly similar to today’s new AI executive order. Dean Ball, a former AI adviser to the Trump administration, wrote that the policy “is considerably more intrusive” than Biden’s executive order.Today’s order still could have been much more forceful. When the White House first… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
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