Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some c...

The Two Negotiations; Stirrings in Europe

This paper traces the fictional roots of recent claims by those in the AI industry that superintelligent machines pose an existential risk. This irrational anxiety, given that fiction is not science, that grants AI agency is not only a distraction from real concerns, but a psychological displacement, an unconscious defense that substitutes a new object, autonomous machines, in place of one that cannot be acknowledged: responsibility for the environmental and societal damage caused by a resource-intensive industry that persists, despite the climate catastrophe, with a mechanistic worldview, one that treats nature, including humans, as a lucrative commodity. Initially seduced by the story of AI evolution, Stanley Kubrick consulted computer scientists when he was making 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released a year before the moon landing. In the problematic cycle of fiction directing science, the film’s depiction of AI has, in turn, shaped research in the field. Yet, if at first Kubrick embraced the scientists’ vision of evolving, intelligent, immortal machines, by the time he was working on A.I. Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, the field was entering one of its many winters and environmental concerns had dampened faith in technological progress. Kubrick again consulted AI scientists, but this time he returned the field to its fictional roots and presented AI as a dark fairy tale about a corporation that persists with the myth that it can turn ’mecha’ into ‘orga’ despite the climate crisis.

All of the editors-in-chief and associate editors of Springer Nature's Journal of Philosophical Logic have announced their immediate or pending resignation and the launch, as of today, of a new "diamo...

The adornments on the heads of male Lady Amherst’s and golden pheasants partially block their sight, according to new research, marking the first known sex-based differences in field of vision within…

Nach Risikoprüfung des Einsatzes von Palantir-Software in der Schweiz bekam der US-Konzern eine Absage, trotz jahrelanger Hofierung von Behörden und Armee. Den Eidgenossen sind die Risiken zu groß. Da...

Putin signs decree formalizing Russification of occupied Ukraine through 2036, setting 95% "Russian identity" targets for four oblasts.