It might help us all to acknowledge it We animals who call ourselves “humans” are not a lot more intelligent than many other living beings. We are just better able to communicate with each other and coordinate our activities more effectively, at our human time scale, than most other animals…

Some make us look foolish, and some make us look wise. We are imperfect mirrors for each other’s lives. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Read every story from Jim Mason (and thousands of other writers on Medium): https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership

It comes down to how brains are built and grow — Many people are worried about recent developments in artificial intelligence, and rightly so. From sophisticated facial recognition software to software that can generate cogent text and surprising works of art, computational devices that people have created seem about to out-perform our human abilities, possibly rendering us obsolete. In assessing that…

We have helped them become symbiotic and even parasitic to our minds and bodies Time was when telephones were unintelligent devices attached by cords to our walls. I joke that phones should be kept tied up like they used to be, because of the dangerous animals that they are. But…

And I’m already becoming a bit fond of it. I think I have a good passive mental vocabulary of English words, but I was surprised to encounter a short one that I don’t remember seeing or hearing before. It’s “fond” — not the adjective but the noun — and it…

Would you want an experienced self-driving car or the latest general version? The recent development of many artificial cognitive agents, such as robotic devices and large-language models for text generation, raises an interesting general question about the value of individualization. We humans, taking ourselves as a pinnacle of an “intelligent”…

Or are there inevitable limits to growth of complex decision-making structures, including and beyond biological ones? Stephen Arthur has written a very interesting article, “How I Know There Are No Aliens” (https://medium.com/@sxarthur_80712/how-i-know-there-are-no-aliens-d85e826c41f1), in which he begins “The Great Silence contradicts what should be. Intelligent alien species should be millions or…

How desirable is that in this age of incipient artificial intelligence? There’s a well-known song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “The King and I” with the lyric “Getting to know you, Getting to know all about you. Getting to like you, Getting to hope you like me …” which expresses…

And what that tells us about ourselves and other thinking beings We humans have an unusual ability to ask ourselves and others the causes and reasons for things and events that we experience. “Why is the sky blue?” is a familiar example of a question that a child may ask…