S. Abbas Raza

1 week ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Dario Amodei in the New York Times:Picture this: You give a bot notice that you'll shut it down soon, and replace it with a different artificial intelligence system. In the past, you gave it access to your emails. In some of them, you alluded to the fact that you've been having an affair. The bot threatens you, telling you that if the shutdown plans aren't changed, it will forward the emails to your wife. This scenario isn't fiction.

1 week ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Kai James in The Conversation:Imagine you're a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine's sweltering tunnels. You've resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable. With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip.

1 week ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

1 week ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Daniel Oppenheimer at Persuasion:On May 18, 2022, Elon Musk posted to Twitter a declaration of divorce from the Democratic Party. "In the past," he wrote, "I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold ... 🍿"This caught my attention because I'm a student of "Goodbye to All That" letters to the political left.

1 week ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Dennis Duncan in the Washington Post:If we think of languages as belonging to families, this is like finding out that an acquaintance is really a distant cousin: It points to a shared ancestor, a unity - and a divergence - somewhere in the past. What would it mean for those cultural origin stories - for Who We Are - to speak not of European but of Indo-European?