First and foremost, James Evans and his colleagues are my greatest role models at the moment, and I can’t think of a better research plan than to follow in their footsteps. This blog post is thus merely friendly chatter about their recent Science essay, but, me being a scientist, it just comes across as a […]
Category: Artificial intelligence
Essay time: AI and science’s happy ending
I’ve been a bit disappointed with the debate about the future use of AI in science. Either it has been short-sighted: “Wow, let’s try this thing we’ve always been doing, but with chatbots instead” or pessimistic without any real arguments. So, in remedy, I wrote an essay, channeling my inner Marvin Minsky. Download! 👏🏻 It! […]
The holistic tribes
This blog post is hopefully the beginning of the lecture notes for an upcoming course. Ultimately, I want to rectify the story of the development of ideas around complex systems, which has neither been a steady and well-informed progression nor a succession of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, but rather something messy and disconnected: a story of […]
What I was gonna say (Tractatus edition)
This is a post about how AI (if used to the best of our abilities) might rid science of its knowledge memes. Which are prone to become factoids, or overshadow more important results. While adding slides to my keynote talk at the inaugural Cudan conference on cultural data analytics, I wanted to say something about […]
Human black boxes
Just some plain reflections that must have been expressed better by someone else, somewhere else. AIs are often criticized for being black boxes—good at predicting, but bad at explaining. They get it right, but we don’t know why. That AIs are black boxes doesn’t mean that humans are not (which is an opinion I often […]
Signs ‘O’ the times
A double-bill blog post with snarky comments about two trending ideas that I’m not much of an expert on. The state of disruption In a much-discussed paper from the beginning of the year, Park, Leahey, and Funk proclaimed that science is becoming decreasingly disruptive. This was somehow seen as a worrying trend, but imagine the […]
Analogies at the edge of reason
Making analogies is the engine of human intelligence, but for humanity as a whole, and our collective-intelligence enterprise called science, it is an obstacle. I’ll try to expand on that in this, maybe not sharpest of posts. Hypotheses In science and life alike, we use analogies as shortcuts to form hypotheses. Any other strategy—experimenting, making […]
Minds, Machines and Herbert Simon
Our designed reality Two years late to the party, I discovered the brilliant review paper “Machine Behavior” by Iyad Rahwan and an all-star cast. Its premise is that we need to let systems relying on artificial intelligence be scientific study objects in their own right, even though they are, to some extent, engineered. The article […]
The man-machine battle moves beyond the board
Korea is, in general, a TV-friendly country. Regular restaurants have sets continuously showing soap operas, news, or reality shows. The surprise for the last two days was that my lunch restaurants were showing a board game. Students all over campus were watching it too. Baduk (a.k.a. go) is quite popular TV entertainment, but very niched […]
Petter Holme 