Sometimes we take services (apps, web, search, lots) in exchange of our permission to our behavioral and pesonal data. And very often we refer to this exchange as using services ‘for free’. Even a not-naive position still may tend to undervalue our attention.
In “Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention“, Thomas Wells proposes an interest argument that may highlight some issues on the topic.
Article featured in SingularityHub
“cerebral organoids” are the brainchild of Dr. Madeline Lancaster, a neuroscientist at Cambridge who is interested in how our brains develop as embryos.
In a study published last week in Cell, a team from Yale School of Medicine used the technique to glean insight into why autism occurs in some people without a clear genetic cause.
Within a month, it was apparent that organoids created from people with autism overproduced one type of neuron that acts to dampen the chatter of normal neural activity. This small change upset the delicate excitatory and inhibitory balance in the developing brain, and may in part cause the faulty wiring behind autism’s behavioral symptoms. Further sleuthing led the scientists to a single gene responsible for the glitch.
In “Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies” Jordan Kisner profiles sound designer Skip Lievsay.
Used as we are to dissecting cognitive biases, this is a good reminder that optical illusions is but one class of many tricks our minds do on itself.
“The brain is a machine: a device that processes information. (…) [and] somehow the brain experiences its own data. It has consciousness. How can that be?
That question has been called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (…)
Here’s a more pointed way to pose the question: can we build it? (…)
I’ve made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. The theory suggests that consciousness is no bizarre byproduct – it’s a tool for regulating information in the brain. And it’s not as mysterious as most people think. (…)
In this article I’ll conduct a thought experiment. Let’s see if we can construct an artificial brain, piece by hypothetical piece, and make it conscious. The task could be slow and each step might seem incremental, but with a systematic approach we could find a path that engineers can follow(…) “.much more to read – go to full article
Article from MIT Tech Review covering a patchwork of articles on the theme.
“(…) That climate deniers are also conspiracy buffs might seem like one of those dog-bites-man findings for which social scientists are often ridiculed (“People in love do foolish things, study concludes”). But the background to this study is actually more interesting than its conclusion.
Published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, the new paper, “Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere,” is based on an examination of blog comments in response to the authors’ previous paper, “Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere”—itself a follow-up to their original study, “NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science,” published in Psychological Science in 2012. In other words, commenters responding (mostly angrily) to two studies of conspiratorial thought have accused the authors of being part of a massive conspiracy.
(…)
The British newspaper The Telegraph has helpfully compiled a list of the most widely cited climate-change theories (…) a plot against the United States, a plot against Asia, and a plot against Africa. A vast right-wing conspiracy, or a dark plot from the left.(…) climate change was dreamed up by Margaret Thatcher as part of her campaign to break the U.K. coal unions.
(…) “Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus,” writes Achenbach from National Geographic. (…) A well-designed experiment is no match for a Weltanschauung. This is most clearly understood by Thomas Pynchon, the greatest modern novelist of paranoia. “There is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia,” Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. The alternative is “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” read full article
In “Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains” researchers Miguel Pais-Vieira, Gabriela Chiuffa, Mikhail Lebedev, Amol Yadav, and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis introduces application of brain-to-brain interfaces.
Such interfaces are ways to receive from and send stimuli directly to animal’s brains. In this papers experiments, rats.
Applications such as animal social behavior, sensorial phenomena and other insight into animal cognitive process are in the prospect of such – rather invasive – techniques.
Indirectly, it may be very intersting to use such neurological logs in reverse: how should our own, A.I. neural systems benefit from interconnectivity?
“Co-activated yet disconnected—Neural correlates of eye closures when trying to stay awake” by
Ju Lynn Onga, Danyang Konga, Tiffany T.Y. Chiaa, Jesisca Tandia, B.T. Thomas Yeoa, b, Michael W.L. Chee published at Neuro Image studies brains activity related to sleep-deprived participants in the experiments.
Of course it’s no news that when sleep-deprived and approaching sleep with spontaneous eye closures we have a somewhat less connected and aware brain. But this borderline state brings hurdles to collecting data and this paper bring new scientific data on the table.
Article from NY Times Sunday Review
“…
If the brain is not a serial algorithm-crunching machine, though, what is it? A lot of neuroscientists are inclined to disregard the big picture, focusing instead on understanding narrow, measurable phenomena (like the mechanics of how calcium ions are trafficked through a single neuron), without addressing the larger conceptual question of what it is that the brain does.
This approach is misguided. Too many scientists have given up on the computer analogy, and far too little has been offered in its place. In my view, the analogy is due for a rethink.
To begin with, all the standard arguments about why the brain might not be a computer are pretty weak….” read more
Desinger Patrick Mankins article on building trust between people and Artificial Intelligence.
Excerpts below, but read full article – it’s not long anyway:
“Machine learning and cognitive systems are now a major part many products people interact with every da…. The role of designers is to figure out how to build collaborative relationships between people and machines that help smart systems enhance human creativity and agency rather than simply replacing them.
… before self-driving cars can really take off, people will probably have to trust their cars to make complex, sometimes moral, decisions on their behalf, much like when another person is driving.
Creating a feedback loop
This also takes advantage of one of the key distinguishing capabilities of many AI systems: they know when they don’t understand something. Once a system gains this sort of self-awareness, a fundamentally different kind interaction is possible.
Building trust and collaboration
What is it that makes getting on a plane or a bus driven by a complete stranger something people don’t even think twice about, while the idea of getting into a driverless vehicle causes anxiety? … We understand why people behave the way they do on an intuitive level, and feel like we can predict how they will behave. We don’t have this empathy for current smart systems.”
“…Like typing, Googling, and driving, distraction is now a universal competency. We’re all experts.
Still, for all our expertise, distraction retains an aura of mystery. It’s hard to define: it can be internal or external, habitual or surprising, annoying or pleasurable. It’s shaped by power: where a boss sees a distracted employee, an employee sees a controlling boss. Often, it can be useful: my dentist, who used to be a ski instructor, reports that novice skiers learn better if their teachers, by talking, distract them from the fact that they are sliding down a mountain. (…)
Another source of confusion is distraction’s apparent growth. There are two big theories about why it’s on the rise. The first is material: it holds that our urbanized, high-tech society is designed to distract us. (…) The second big theory is spiritual—it’s that we’re distracted because our souls are troubled. (…). It’s not a competition, though; in fact, these two problems could be reinforcing each other. Stimulation could lead to ennui, and vice versa.
A version of that mutual-reinforcement theory is more or less what Matthew Crawford proposes in his new book, “The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). (…) Ever since the Enlightenment, he writes, Western societies have been obsessed with autonomy, and in the past few hundred years we have put autonomy at the center of our lives, economically, politically, and technologically; often, when we think about what it means to be happy, we think of freedom from our circumstances. Unfortunately, we’ve taken things too far: we’re now addicted to liberation, and we regard any situation—a movie, a conversation, a one-block walk down a city street—as a kind of prison. Distraction is a way of asserting control; it’s autonomy run amok. Technologies of escape, like the smartphone, tap into our habits of secession.
The way we talk about distraction has always been a little self-serving—we say, in the passive voice, that we’re “distracted by” the Internet or our cats, and this makes us seem like the victims of our own decisions. But Crawford shows that this way of talking mischaracterizes the whole phenomenon…” read full story
“Syringe-injectable electronics” a paper published in nature nanotechnology describes a new technique that allow scientists to introduce a nanoparticle mesh into the brain.
The structure could allow not only to register, transmit and record neural activity but also eventually be used to stimulate neurons with a precision beyond our current skills. It’s low degree of invasiveness and rejection makes the possibility of applying such studies in normal, functional beings during usual activities.
“…speech is produced using the cerebral cortex of the brain, meaning with the right electrodes and system in place we should be able to reconstruct speech just from brain waves.
This is what a team from Cognitive Systems Lab at KIT and the Wadsworth Center in New York has managed to do. Using 7 epileptic patients who volunteered for the study, they each had an electrode array attached to the surface of their cerebral cortex in order to monitor brain waves related to speech. A combination of this information combined with machine learning and linguistic knowledge allowed a system to be created that can reconstruct what is being spoken.
The video below shows the speech decoding system in action.” read full article
Microsoft revealed its image recognition software was wrong just 4.94% of the time
A month later, Google reported it had achieved a rate of 4.8%.
Now, Chinese search engine giant, Baidu, says their specialized supercomputer, Minwa, has bested Google with an error rate of 4.58%
Anexpert human ? 5.1%.
In this article Jason Dorrier tells us how deep learning A.I. software is applying big data to improve it further.
“Could a smile be a useful signal for a computer? Might we be able to do something interesting with such a genuine, unfiltered bit of input? Probably. I would like to review every YouTube video that made me laugh in 2012. I’d be delighted if my computer pointed me to a Gchat conversation, long forgotten, that made me crack up in college.
Granted, in a world of presumed total surveillance, it’s upsetting to imagine our computers having access to something as intimate as our unmediated emotions. That’s our last stand against the bureaucrats and the brands, the unquantifiable inner sanctum of self.
But supposing some alternate arrangement in which we could actually trust our devices and the people making them, emotion could be a profoundly powerful principle to design around”… full story on wired
“Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans
When a chimpanzee gazes at a piece of fruit or a silverback gorilla beats his chest to warn off an approaching male, it’s hard not to see a bit of ourselves in those behaviors and even to imagine what the animals might be thinking. But dolphins are something truly different. They “see” with sonar and do so with such phenomenal precision that they can tell from a hundred feet away whether an object is made of metal, plastic, or wood. They can even eavesdrop on the echolocating clicks of other dolphins to figure out what they’re looking at. Unlike primates, they don’t breathe automatically, and they seem to sleep with only half their brains resting at a time. Their eyes operate independently of each other. They’re a kind of alien intelligence sharing our planet—watching them may be the closest we’ll come to encountering ET.
Dolphins are extraordinarily garrulous. Not only do they whistle and click, but they also emit loud broadband packets of sound called burst pulses to discipline their young and chase away sharks. Scientists listening to all these sounds have long wondered what, if anything, they might mean. Surely such a large-brained, highly social creature wouldn’t waste all that energy babbling beneath the waves unless the vocalizations contained some sort of meaningful content. And yet despite a half century of study, nobody can say what the fundamental units of dolphin vocalization are or how those units get assembled.
“If we can find a pattern connecting vocalization to behavior, it’ll be a huge deal,” says Kuczaj, 64, who has published more scientific articles on dolphin cognition than almost anyone else in the field. He believes that his work with the synchronized dolphins at RIMS may prove to be a Rosetta stone that unlocks dolphin communication…” read full story in National Geographic