Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Can deep learning systems learn to manipulate symbols? The answers might change our understanding of how intelligence works and what makes humans unique.
The high stakes explain why claims that DL has hit a wall are so provocative. If Marcus and the nativists are right, DL will never get to human-like AI, no matter how many new architectures it comes up with or how much computing power it throws at it. It is just confusion to keep adding more layers, because genuine symbolic manipulation demands an innate symbolic manipulator, full stop. And since this symbolic manipulation is at the base of several abilities of common sense, a DL-only system will never possess anything more than a rough-and-ready understanding of anything.
By contrast, if DL advocates and the empiricists are right, it’s the idea of inserting a module for symbolic manipulation that is confused. In that case, DL systems are already engaged in symbolic reasoning and will continue to improve at it as they become better at satisfying constraints through more multimodal self-supervised learning, an increasingly useful predictive world-model, and an expansion of working memory for simulating and evaluating outcomes. Introducing a symbolic manipulation module would not lead to more human-like AI, but instead force all “reasoning” operations through an unnecessary and unmotivated bottleneck that would take us further from human-like intelligence. This threatens to cut off one of the most impressive aspects to deep learning: its ability to come up with far more useful and clever solutions than the ones human programmers conceive of.
Don't count Bill Gates among the fans of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Those digital asset trends are "100% based on greater fool theory," the Microsoft co-founder said Tuesday at a TechCrunch conference, referencing the notion that investors can make money on worthless or overvalued assets as long as people are willing to bid them higher.
Doing the work the ACLU use to do.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought—the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.
Non-invasive detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection by canine olfaction could be one alternative to NPS RT-PCR when it is necessary to obtain a result very quickly according to the same indications as antigenic tests in the context of mass screening.
We present two arguments: despite being a key explanatory variable in existing research, perceived lower economic status vis-à-vis other individuals (an indicator of relative deprivation) is unlikely to motivate people to participate in violence; by contrast, although virtually unexplored, a projected decrease in one's own economic status (prospective decremental deprivation) is likely to motivate violence. Multilevel analyses of probability samples from many African countries provide evidence to support these claims.
Belief in God among Americans dipped to a new low, Gallup's latest poll shows.
While the majority of adults in the U.S. believe in God, belief has dropped
to 81% — the lowest ever recorded by Gallup -and is down from 87% in 2017.
Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God,
Gallup reported.
Younger, liberal Americans are the least likely to believe in God, according
to Gallup's May 2-22 values and beliefs poll results released Friday.
Political conservatives and married adults had little change when
comparing 2022 data to an average of polls from 2013 to 2017.
The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62% of whom believe
in God), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%), while belief in God
is highest among conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%).
The poll also found that slightly more than half of conservatives and
Republicans say they believe God hears prayers and can intervene,
as well as 32% of Democrats, 25% of liberals and 30% of young adults.
Gallup said it has documented steeper drops in church attendance,
membership and confidence in organized religion, which suggests that the
practice of religious faith is changing more than general belief in God.