Chatting with chatbots about the climate crisis
November 15, 2024
Last week, I had another adventure in AI land. This started by accident, as so many adventures do. It all came about because I read about an interesting symposium organised in Amsterdam by Anaïs Augé’s and Gudrun Reijnierse on “Public responses to the language of science communication: Uptake, acceptance, resistance”. As part of this symposium, …
Organoid Intelligence
October 25, 2024
I have written about organoids and intelligence, especially of the artificial kind. However, I haven’t explored ‘organoid intelligence‘ until now. Despite this concept emerging around 2022, it escaped my attention. So, I have some catching up to do. In this post, I’ll first briefly define organoids and organoid intelligence. Then I’ll examine the pioneers who …
Playing with AI/Playing with fire
October 11, 2024
Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I have been fascinated by all new AIs that we can now ‘play’ with and that have made ‘artificial intelligence’ accessible to anybody who wants to give it a go. Remember the recipes for soup in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet or the Limericks on climate change …
Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again
October 4, 2024
The word ‘superintelligence’ has been bandied about a bit recently, most prominently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who said in a blog post on 23 September, 2024: “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a …
Intelligence
September 27, 2024
Since the recent explosion of discussions around artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, even super-intelligence, people have started to wonder what intelligence actually is… A rather futile enterprise in my humble opinion, as ‘intelligence’ is a word like ‘love’ or ‘justice’ that has endless meanings, but there we are. Some scholars come at it from an …
AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors
August 30, 2024
I would love to write a blog post entitled “What is it like to be an LLM”, but I have to leave that to others who are really into large language models or to the LLMs themselves. Instead, I have to resign myself to thinking about the question: “What is an LLM like?” This means …
From large language models to DNA language models
August 9, 2024
In October 2023 I wrote a blog post about a convergence of large language models or LLMs and DNA. LLMs are subset of generative AI that focus on generating and understanding human language and producing human-like text. DNA is often compared to a language or a code. In the post I quoted a representative of …
Bio-hybrid robots and responsible innovation
August 2, 2024
Do you remember the film that I call in my mind ‘number five is alive’ or to give it its real name “Short Circuit”? It came out in 1986 and features an experimental robot that is struck by lightning, gains intelligence, escapes a military facility, and goes out to learn about the world. The abiding …
Using Claude for science communication: The case of the genome as autoencoder
July 28, 2024
I am just back from a walk thinking about Kevin Mitchell and Nick Cheney’s recent paper (preprint) on the genome as autoencoder, rather than a blueprint or recipe. This paper caused quite a stir and you can find a good summary in this post by Jessica Hamzelou for the MIT Technology Review. Walking along, I …
Large language models, meaning and maths
July 26, 2024
I was reading an article in The Guardian about two novels by Benjamin Labatut. One novel, published in 2020, is entitled When We Cease to Understand the World and deals with quantum mechanics and war. The second novel The Maniac, published in 2023 and just out in paperback, is about John von Neumann, which brings …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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