Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics The Creative Process

“When AI takes over with our information sources and pollutes it to a certain point, we'll stop believing that there is any such thing as truth anymore. ‘We now live in an era in which the truth is behind a paywall and the lies are free.’ One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”

How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?
Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.

“I think one very big example of this phenomenon is the computational irreducibility. This idea that even though you know the rules by which something operates, that doesn't immediately tell you everything about what the system will do. You might have to follow a billion steps in the actual operation of those rules to find out what the system does.
There's no way to jump ahead and just say, "the answer will be such and such." Well, computational irreducibility, in a sense, goes against the hope, at least, of, for example, mathematical science. A lot of the hope of mathematical science is that we'll just work out a formula for how something is going to operate. We don't have to kind of go through the steps and watch it operate. We can just kind of jump to the end and apply the formula. Well, computational irreducibility says that that isn't something you can generally do. It says that there are plenty of things in the world where you have to kind of go through the steps to see what will happen.
In a sense, even though that's kind of a bad thing for science, it says that there's sort of limitations on the extent to which we can use science to predict things. It's sort of a good thing, I think, for leading one's life because it means that as we experience the passage of time, in a sense, that corresponds to the sort of irreducible computation of what we will do.
It's something where that sort of tells one that the passage of time has a meaningful effect. There's something that where you can't just jump to the end and say, "I don't need to live all the years of my life. I can just go and say, and the result will be such and such." No, actually, there's something sort of irreducible about that actual progression of time and the actual living of those years of life, so to speak. So that's kind of one of the enriching aspects of this concept of computational irreducibility. It's a pretty important concept. It's something which I think, for example, in the future of human society, will be something where people right now will think of it as this kind of geeky scientific idea, but in the future, it's going to be a pivotal kind of thing for the understanding of how one should conduct the future of human society.”

How can computational language help decode the mysteries of nature and the universe? What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work? How will AI affect education, the arts and society?

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. He received his PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech by the age of 20 and in 1981, became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Wolfram authored A New Kind of Science and launched the Wolfram Physics Project. He has pioneered computational thinking and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.

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“Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, they seem to be engaging in conversation with us. We ask questions, and they reply. It seems like they're talking to us. I don't think they are. I think they're playing a game very much like a game of chess. You make a move and your chess computer makes an appropriate response to that move. It doesn't have any other interest in the game whatsoever. That's what I think Large Language Models are doing. They're just making communicative moves in this game of language that they've learned through training on vast quantities of human-produced text.”

Is consciousness an illusion? Is it just a complex set of cognitive processes without a central, subjective experience? How can we better integrate philosophy with everyday life and the arts?
Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has published widely about topics such as human consciousness and cognition. Profoundly inspired by Daniel Dennett, Frankish is best known for defending an “illusionist” view of consciousness. He is also editor of the journal Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness and co-edits, in addition to others, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science.