All posts tagged: Gleick

Artificial and Unintelligent | James Gleick

Artificial and Unintelligent | James Gleick

Published by skeptic

Richard Powers’s new novel, Playground, features an artificial intelligence resembling the new generation of “large language models,” like ChatGPT and Gemini. At one point a character grumbles: “You see? They think we’re too simple to know how to google things. They think we need an artificial nanny app to digest the facts and tell us what they mean.” I liked that, so I posted it to social media. A user responded with a surprising question: is chatGPT wrong? I was trying to find more information on the quote and it says is from “The Circle” by Dave Eggers. I performed a quick reality check. Yes, I replied, if ChatGPT attributed “artificial nanny app” to Dave Eggers, it was definitely wrong. The wheels in my head kept turning, though, and I decided to try ChatGPT for myself. I started a session and typed, “Here is a quotation from a recent novel. Can you tell me more about it?” The bot answered instantly and confidently: The quotation you’ve provided—“You see? They think we’re too simple to know …

James Gleick, interviewed by Daniel Drake

James Gleick, interviewed by Daniel Drake

Published by skeptic

James Gleick opens his essay from our January 18 issue with a bang: “Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice.” From this playful premise, he examines where philosophical questions of free will converge with science, making the case for human agency by teasing out which physical processes give rise to volition. He quotes the neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell: “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does.” Gleick is the author of seven books, including biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman, an introduction to chaos theory, and a history of information, which won the 2012 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Since 2008 he has written twenty articles for the Review, on subjects ranging from dictionaries to death. He was also one of the inspirations for the character Ian Malcolm in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. I wrote Gleick last week to ask him about chaos theory, how to test for free will, and whether we’ll know if AI has gained consciousness before it’s too late. Daniel …

The Fate of Free Will | James Gleick

The Fate of Free Will | James Gleick

Published by skeptic

Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now. Yet a peculiar fact about the state of the sciences in the early twenty-first century is that many authorities—physicists, neuroscientists, and even philosophers—will tell you that this sense of agency is an illusion. In their daily lives, these same experts pick out clothing, choose wallpaper, and order from restaurant menus, but when they study the matter professionally they doubt that …