AI, Robotics, CogSci, Tech & More AI Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning Brain-Inspired AI Code Library Notches Milestone Spyx: A Li… Read More

AI, Robotics, CogSci, Tech & More AI Scientists aghast at bizarre AI rat with huge genitals in peer-reviewed article Sora, etc.—Are we “rapidly approaching the top o… Read More

AI, Robotics, CogSci, Tech & More AI New GitHub Copilot Research Finds ‘Downward Pressure on Code Quality’ VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic… Read More

The Amazing Cockroach, Biomimetic Robots and Cyborg Bugs in Recent Years Although some might squirm at the notion—or the ethics—insects are very mobile and adaptable to all ki… Read More

AI, Robotics, CogSci & More AI Three Things That LLMs Have Made Us Rethink – Rodney Brooks The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project Revo… Read More

AI, Robotics, CogSci & More AI The Church of AGI Here’s Why People Will Never Care About AI Risk: It is an irrational fear but people are afraid of stupider things Gene… Read More

AI, CogSci, Health, Materials & More AI GenAI image by Cheesimus Prime ‘Game of Thrones’ creator and other authors sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for copyright infringement… Read More

AI, CogSci, Health & More AI & Robotics Pivot to AI: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction Language Modeling Is Compr… Read More

Designing Artificial Organisms I’m going to discuss context-form relationships of organisms. Why? Well to glean insight into designing artificial organisms, of course. Yes, artif… Read More

AI, Robotics, Aliens & More AI & Robotics Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness Consciousness and the Overton Window of Sc… Read More

An Ecological Development Meta-Framework Previously, I talked about “Nature-Inspired Development as an AI Abstraction.” In other words, a meta-framework of sorts for bio-inspi… Read More

Back in 2012 I was working on some ideas and a paper to present my version of biologically-inspired development. Not just as a single project or as a technique, but as an abstraction level… Read More

AI, Robotics, Space & More AI & Robotics Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science The Imminent Enshittification of the Internet Why Using Artificial Inte… Read More

On Processes for Solving Problems Big and Small Your first problem is how to solve a problem. Photo by Matt C on Unsplash We are awash in people / organizations sharing their ide… Read More

AI, Robotics, Superconductors, Environment & More AI Research to merge human brain cells with AI secures national defence [Australia] funding AI-text detection tools are really… Read More

A Wide Range of Societal Effects from LLMs The Good Image by free-vectors.net Paul Pallaghy points out the unexpected benefits of LLMs (Large Language Models). I can’t… Read More

AI, CogSci, Perceptual Creep, Antarctica & More AI The situational awareness assumption in AI risk discourse, or why people should chill ChatGPT: A Bullshit Tool For Bullshit Jo… Read More

And Spiders For decades, insects—both morphology and intelligence—have influenced robot design. In the 1980s and 90s, Rodney Brooks and his students at MIT made various rea… Read More

AI, Robots, Materials & More AI BearID: Face recognition for brown bears The “Boring Apocalypse” Of Today’s AI Eating disorder helpline shuts down AI chatbo… Read More

Play, or Else! Games are not just for fun anymore—or so I declared back in 2011 in the original version of this post. Engagement Designers try to “gamify” applicat… Read More

AI, Robotics, Nukes, Neuro, Art & More AI Wendy’s is working with Google to test an AI-powered drive-thru Don’t trust AI to talk accurately about itself: Bard wasn&r&hell…Read More

Curated Links of the Visionary and the Vrot A Giant Googly Eye on a Giant Robot The “DIXIE Showgirl” who danced in front of an atomic bomb explosion The Time that the US… Read More

Researchers have made a new robot hand that is sensitive enough to hold and manipulate not only spheres but also irregularly shaped objects. And, potentially, soft objects. That screen… Read More

Curated Links of the Uber and the Unexpected DART VADAR harnesses the force of enzymes for better RNA drugs Optical illusion turns Glen Affric hills into icebergs Physicists perform… Read More

Merging Two Cognitive Science Theories with Affordances There are two freaky theories of perception which are very interesting to me not just for artificial intelligence, but also from a… Read More

Curated Links of the Tremendous and the Titillating This installation enables a live plant to control a machete GPT-4 debuts and Google beats Microsoft in race to add generative A… Read More

Curated Links of the Sus and the Shocking ‘Unspeakable botch’: Spain spends €258 million on trains that are too big for its tunnels Man punches, fights self-driving ca… Read More

I’ve posted some skepticism of the new AI models that are getting all the press—and all the money—in the past year. I said in “When AI Phones It In” that… Read More

Curated Links of the Remarkable and the Ridiculous Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations using augmented reality Human Error Is the Most Common Cause of Train Acciden… Read More

Bing’s AI and ChatGPT Are Causing Quite the Hullabaloo As you’ve probably heard, ChatGPT has safety and filtering mechanisms which they’ve been updating as users find ne… Read More

A Brief History Why upgrade a personal computer or game console internally—when instead you can externally attach ungainly boxes! And as a bonus, use up more desk space! No mere… Read More

Curated Links of the Quizzical and the Quixotic Most sites claiming to catch AI-written text fail spectacularly The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing Phoenix robotics firm… Read More

Needed for Learning or Just Toxin Removal? Does sleep help problem solving in an informational way aside from refreshing you so you can focus? In 2018, a hypothesis was proposed1: Mem… Read More

Hits: 48 Curated Links of the Peculiar and the Prodigious Vitamin D deficit is associated with accelerated brain aging in the general population Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Compu… Read More

Curated Links of the Odd and the Outrageous Stop assuming so much The story of VaccinateCA Proto-cyborg? Biohybrid robot powered by an antagonistic pair of skeletal muscle tissues… Read More

And the First Honeybee Vaccine They vaccinated a bee! Ok it’s more than just one bee but I like how absurd that sentence sounds, kind of like “they did surgery on a grape… Read More

Work Lazier Not Harder Back in 2010, Stephen Wolfram proposed a potentially major tech disruption: migrating engineering from iterative to search-based. In the most abstract case, an e… Read More

Curated Links of the Bizarre and the Bodacious Scientists Grew Stem Cell ‘Mini Brains’ And Then The Brains Sort-of Developed Eyes Texas Hunter Takes Deer With Three Eyes… Read More

The Neats Strike Back LOT THOT Previously I described a famous THOT (That Hypothesis Over There) known as LOT—Language Of Thought. This famously goes back to the philosopher Fodo… Read More

Curated Links of the Weird and the Wonderful 2022 Was a Great Year for Mysteries January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all! There is no AI risk Snowbo… Read More

(It’s a Helicopter) A helicopter is an assembly of forty thousand loose pieces, flying more or less in formation. —unknown The mind is a kluge.1 But it runs in real tim… Read More

2022 was Really Weird Should we tax robots? Ceiling Roomba is watching you poop Bats use death metal “growls” to make social calls “And then a Plank in Reason… Read More

Language of Thought—It’s Back! Since the dawn of Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s there have been roughly two approaches: Symbolic Connectionist In the 1970s the two… Read More

“NYT continues to be trash at covering AI” The False Equivalence of Categorization as Thought The problem isn’t AI, it’s requiring us to work to live Should… Read More

A Resurgence in Analog AI? Cognitive Science and AI typically subscribe to computationalism—the mind is a form of computation in the brain (or the overall nervous system including t… Read More

A Side Effect of the Main Process Inherent in being proactive and trying things and not waiting to be told what to do is the fact that you’re going to fail, you’re going to m… Read More

Self-healing robot recovers from being stabbed then walks off Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World’s Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs “seems very unlikely… Read More

Who Cares About Quality if Costs Are Down? The latest round of Generative AI with imagery, and also ChatGPT, have renewed the interest in fairness and quality of AI horning in on traditio… Read More

Emotions and Semantic Nets Back in the fall of 2005 I took a class at the MIT Media Lab called Commonsense Reasoning for Interactive Applications taught by Henry Lieberman and TA’d… Read More

Scientists Reexamine Why Zebra Stripes Mysteriously Repel Flies Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to ‘ignore’ Web3: ‘Web3 is not the web at all’ San Francis… Read More

You might have heard of the “wisdom of crowds.” It’s basically a stock phrase, easily believed and easily repeated. However, in most circumstances, human crowds and groups… Read More

Agent Collaboration Using Anigrafs It’s been well over a decade since I finished a Cognitive Architectures course at MIT (9.364) under professor Whitman Richards. My final projec… Read More

Laser Cyanotypes of Ralf Jacobs Cognitive Science and the Different Kinds of Computation Tech giants are axing their experimental projects. That could cost them in the end. New CRIS… Read More

The Curse of AI and AGI I originally wrote this about a decade ago. I’ve updated it a little bit. Although I’m presently on hiatus hacking AI agents / robots, I thought this s… Read More

A Way of Looking at Cognition Whenever you (or a team) come up with a solution for some problem, you probably considered a few other solutions. An observer of the process could potentiall… Read More

Double dose of quantum weirdness pushes sensors past the limit Scientists just found a hidden 6th mass extinction in Earth’s ancient past The Death of the Key Change: What&rs&hell…Read More

A Surprising Weapon Against Global Warming By the middle of the last century, the industrialized nations had caused climate change in the form of global cooling. Sulfate aerosol emi… Read More

Mammatus Clouds Over Saskatchewan: Craig Lindsay, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons It’s kind of disheartening to hear supposedly… Read More

More on Biomimetic AI In my previous post, Biomimetic Memory for AI: From Philosophy to Robots, I talked about how computer “memory” is not really the same thing as “mem… Read More

Generative AI is entering a new stage Craiyon AI generated image from prompt “fish playing blackjack in space” Nintil predicts AI in 2026, and a couple sections of the essay… Read More

From Philosophy to Robots What even is “memory?” It’s easy to describe for computers. But do we really know what it is in biological systems? And how does it relat… Read More

I, Robot is a 1950 book by Isaac Asimov, a legendary science fiction writer—and indeed a writer in almost every category of the Dewey Decimal System—who started in 1939 and conti… Read More

New imagery from James Webb Space Telescope scientists of the “Pillars of Creation,” a big dust / gas cloud: What Will Artificial Intelligence Do To Us? Nathan J. Robinson… Read More

And the award for hypiest headline this week goes to: For the First Time – A Robot Has Learned To Imagine Itself Credit: Columbia Engineering First, it didn’t “… Read More

Where Were You When the Modern AI Hype Train Derailed? “Do you know what a shit barometer is? Measure’s the shit pressure in the air…listen Bubbs, you hear that? The so… Read More

Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking is a 2013 book by Emmanuel Sander and Douglas Hofstadter, the famous (in some circles) author of the Pulitzer Prize winner G&o&hell…Read More

Why don’t AIs have anything like brain waves? Should they? Why AI Is Doomed Without Neuroscience 5 Myths About Learning and Innateness AI co-writer: Making Room for the Past:… Read More

Perception and…branes! These are the golden lions of Goryachii Klyuch, Krasnodar Krai, Russia, a town built around a balneotherapy health resort going back to 1864. Balneotherap… Read More

“According to the results, 42 percent of Autopilot users, and 53 percent of Super Cruise users were confident in treating their vehicles as fully self-driving, even though the manufact… Read More

I’ve mentioned the book The First Idea1 by Greenspan and Shanker many times (Is Human-Level AI Possible Without Childhood Emotions?, Infants, Monkeys, Love and AI, Are Emotional Struct… Read More

Nature vs. Nurture It seems like all human babies go through the exact same intelligence growth program. Like clockwork. Some may assume it’s a perfect program defined by genetics. Bu… Read More

In the recent movie Top Gun Maverick, Tom Cruise’s character ejects at over Mach 10. Walking away from that in real life sounds unlikely if it was a normal ejection seat—but sinc… Read More

Perhaps you have seen pictures or videos from the 1960s of rhesus monkey babies clinging to inanimate surrogate mothers. These experiments were by Harry Harlow, who eventually went against… Read More

Squircles! In space! According to astronomer Pat Morris, these nebulae are “partial dust shells formed where the winds of the orbiting Wolf-Rayet and O stars collide during closest pas… Read More

Strange But True: The US Military Once Wanted to Nuke the Moon “Will we need the first-ever ‘drop second’ in 2023?” Earth Is Spinning Faster Because Of A New … Read More

The Uncertain Heavens: Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life. Harvard scientists are hoping to find a crashed alien space probe at the bottom of the ocean &ldquo… Read More

Telepresence and Following Yourself (Touch Of Light, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)So there I was at the initial outdoor security check at the Pentagon. They asked each person to open a… Read More

Think current AI text generators are getting us very close to human-like language acquisition? Gary Marcus says think again: “Learning Language is Harder Than You Think.” &ldq&hell…Read More

Emotional Developmental Symbol Creation To create an artificial intelligence similar to humans or other animals, it has to have some way to generate meaning. A potential mechanism of meaning… Read More

Many years ago, Ben Bogart asked the question: “What do you consider the most seminal representations of AI in cinema of all time?” At the time I thought the best was yet to c… Read More

Polymorphism in Mental Development What does a crow with a stick have to do with computer programming? And AI? Before we get there, I propose two important features of mental development: Ad… Read More

In response to “The Small Website Discoverability Crisis”1 I’m making a list of bookmarks to small sites that I find interesting. And interesting does not necessarily mean… Read More

One way to increase the intelligence of a robot might be to train it with a series of missions, analogous to the missions or levels in a video game. In a developmental robot, the training wo… Read More

Towards Real Semantics for Strong AI I talked about “symbol grounding” before in “AI Don’t Know Jack?” but there’s always more to say. As a reminder, the… Read More

Nobody is safe! 1. Web Developers There won’t be much of a web soon, so we won’t need web developers. Everything will transfer into Meta’s Metaverse and Microsoft Mesh. So… Read More

Human-level artificial intelligence is a design problem. Design and Specialization “Design” probably brings to mind various professions dealing with design of form, such as indu… Read More

The Disillusionment of Math The Early Years When I was in elementary school, a consultant taught a small group of us some basic algebra. This was amazing to me at the time—solving for… Read More