Plenty of crossover in today’s Grail news briefs stories…
- Shocking new evidence suggests Norse hunters met indigenous North Americans 500 years before Columbus.
- 39,000-year-old exquisitely preserved mammoth is earliest evidence of humans in the Arctic.
- The Arctic seed vault difficulties show the flawed logic of climate adaptation – why we need to prevent climate disaster rather than plan for it.
- Chemists finally unravel the mystery of Siberia’s explosive craters.
- Scientists confirm there are 40 huge craters at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
- Jets from black holes cause stars to explode, Hubble reveals.
- Beyond anthropomorphism: we need a new language to describe the reality that animals love, grieve and fear.
- The brain’s twilight zone: when you’re neither awake nor asleep.
- London newspaper plans to revive dead art critic with AI, and lay off real writers. Can we stop with this language – he’s not being “revived”, it’s just copying his writing style.
- No god in the machine: the pitfalls of AI worship. (Podcast/audio version)
- Image of the Day: the Cave of Swimmers – 9,000-year-old rock art of people swimming in what’s now the arid Sahara.
Quote of the Day:
The sense of there being a ‘thinking thing’ behind AI chatbots is also driven by the now-common wisdom that we don’t know exactly how AI systems work. What’s called the ‘black box problem’ is often framed in mystical terms – the robots are so far ahead or so alien that they’re doing something we can’t comprehend.
That is true, but not quite in the way it sounds. New York University professor Leif Weatherby suggests that the models are processing so many permutations of data that it is impossible for a single person to wrap their head around it. The mysticism of AI isn’t a hidden or inscrutable mind behind a curtain – it’s to do with scale, and brute power.
