Humboldt, the Romantics, and What AI Loses by Averaging
AI has supercharged scientists—but may have shrunk science
Analysis of 41 million papers finds that although AI expands individual impact, it narrows collective scientific exploration
AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION
Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.
AI That Evolves in the Wild | Edge.org
I’m interested not in domesticated AI—the stuff that people are trying to sell. I'm interested in wild AI—AI that evolves in the wild. I’m a naturalist, so that’s the interesting thing to me. Thirty-four years ago there was a meeting just like this in which Stanislaw Ulam said to everybody in the room—they’re all mathematicians—"What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think?" It’s a higher-level symptom. It’s not how the brain works. All those guys knew fully well that the brain was not fundamentally logical.
Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
“And what those stories teach us about how AI will revolutionize math”
AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture
Generative AI deserves scientific attention. But the rush to study it is producing a feedback loop of topical and methodological convergence, flattening scientific imagination and crowding out the pluralism needed to keep research adaptive, resilient, and intellectually generative.
Why Centralized AI Is Not Our Inevitable Future
Sam Altman’s vision of a “gentle singularity” where AI gradually transforms society presents an alluring future of abundance and human flourishing. His optimism about AI’s p…
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
The Room Where AI Happens
A weekend at the Curve conference—an AI insider gathering in Berkeley revealed how people think about AGI timelines, China, creativity, and writing
StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space...
The Edge of Mathematics
Terence Tao, the legendary mathematician, explains the promise of generative AI.
How the world's top AI models were revived
The personality clashes and industry confusion behind the 20-day saga.
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell
Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to revolve around whether large models are intelligent, autonomous agents. Some AI researchers and commentators speculate that we are on the cusp of creating agents with artificial general intelligence (AGI), a prospect anticipated with both elation and anxiety. There have also been extensive conversations about cultural and social consequences of large models, orbiting around two foci: immediate effects of these systems as they are currently used, and hypothetical futures when these systems turn into AGI agents perhaps even superintelligent AGI agents.
What we can’t measure about AI – yet | Aeon Essays
The costs of transformative innovations are immediately clear: it’s the longterm gains that are hardest to understand
Ultra-Processed Information: AI and the Coming Deluge of Noise | Frankly 128