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In the old days of artificial intelligence — in other words, more than about ten years ago — one of the big debates was whether an artificial or computerized intelligence would ever be able to pass the Turing test. Designed by the pioneering computer scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing in 1949, before computers as we know them even existed, the test was designed to see whether an artificial intelligence could behave in a human-enough way to convince people that it was a person (Turing called it “the imitation test”). Whatever you think of AI engines or LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, most of them seem to be able to pass the Turing test with flying colours. They are carrying on conversations (sometimes with each other), and generating human speech and text in convincing ways, to the point where even tools that determine whether writing is AI-generated are being fooled.

At this point, it would be hard to argue that these AI engines aren’t intelligent, in some definition of that term. In addition to human-like writing, they have passed pretty much every math, science, and legal test we can design, they are designing new proteins and detecting cancer much faster and more accurately than humans can, and so on. But intelligence isn’t all there is to being human. We also believe that being human involves something called “consciousness,” which we all pretend to understand but is difficult to define. In most cases, it involves an awareness of ourselves as thinking beings — an ability to stand at a distance from ourselves, in a virtual sense, and observe ourselves thinking and behaving; in other words, an understanding that we are alive (there isn’t an approved Turing test for consciousness yet, but someone has proposed one).

The primary foundations of consciousness are the individualized experiences that we have of the world around us, which philosophers often call “qualia” — a word derived from the term “quality” (if you’re interested, there’s a long and in-depth discussion of the concept on the Astral Codex Ten blog). What is included in this term are all the ways we interact with our surroundings: the taste of foods, including the things we like or dislike; the sound of a favourite song; the feeling of different materials when we touch them; how all of these sensory experiences can make us feel psychologically, or how they can evoke a memory; the concept of certain things being “beautiful” or “ugly;” and of course our emotions — our love for a child or a partner, our anger at those who have wronged us, our joy when something good happens to someone we like.

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Continue reading “AI forces us to think about what consciousness means”

From the Wall Street Journal: “Lead pollution in ancient Rome was so high that it dropped the population’s IQ by around 3 points, if not more. Elites were exposed to lead through water pipes, cooking pots, bath tubs, cosmetics and the syrups that sweetened their wine. But the most widespread exposure for Romans came from industrial pollution caused by the mining and smelting of metals used to make money. Romans melted down galena, a lead-rich ore, to extract the silver needed for coins, and lead was a major byproduct of the process. McConnell and his colleagues examined airborne lead that drifted north from ancient Rome and was preserved in ice cores extracted from Greenland. The samples dated between 2,500 and 1,400 years ago—an era that included the rise and fall of the empire.The researchers matched the chemical fingerprint of the lead found in the cores to lead sources in the empire, according to McConnell.”

The Heslington Brain is a human specimen that is more than 2,600 years old

From Wikipedia: “The Heslington Brain is a 2,600-year-old human brain found inside a skull buried in a pit in Yorkshire by York Archaeological Trust in 2008. It is the oldest preserved brain ever found in Eurasia, and is believed to be the best-preserved ancient brain in the world. The skull was discovered during an archaeological dig commissioned by the University of York on the site of its new campus on the outskirts of the city of York. The area was found to have been the site of well-developed permanent habitation between 2,000–3,000 years before the present day. A number of possibly ritualistic objects were found to have been deposited in several pits, including the skull, which had belonged to a man probably in his 30s. He had been hanged before being decapitated with a knife and his skull appears to have been buried immediately. The rest of the body was missing. Although it is not known why he was killed, it is possible that it may have been a human sacrifice or ritual murder.”

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Continue reading “Ancient Rome was so polluted with lead people’s IQs dropped”

From Wikipedia: “Claudette Colvin is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus. It occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed on February 1, 1956 to challenge bus segregation in the city. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the district court’s ruling. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to the state of Alabama to end bus segregation.”

The heir to a British fortune, he died of a heroin overdose in a hotel in Afghanistan

From The Guardian: “Many people die in Peshawar, violently or otherwise. Carlos Mavroleon didn’t want to die here. Certainly not in the small, claustrophobic hotel room where they found his heroin-soaked body, on 27 August 1998. He had packed it in to his 40 years. The old Etonian heir to a £100m fortune, he had been a war correspondent, a Wall Street broker, a lover of glamorous women from glamorous political dynasties. He had been a gimlet-eyed war reporter, blowing off the tension in the bars of Notting Hill. He commanded a unit of Afghan Mujahideen against the Red Army and had been a bodyguard for a Pakistani tribal chief. And, for most of his adult life, Carlos had been a regular user of speed, coke, Ecstasy, heroin and a variety of other pharmaceutical products.”

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Continue reading “Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to leave her seat”

From Wikipedia: “Alan Francis is a horseshoe pitcher from Defiance, Ohio who has won the World Horseshoe Championship 28 times — in 1989, 1993, 1995–1999, 2001, 2003–2010, 2012–2019 and 2021–2024. He holds the record for most championships with 2nd place belonging to Ted Allen, who has won 10. He is also the only player to consistently pitch over 90%, and is regarded by many as the greatest horseshoe pitcher ever. The New York Times wrote that he may be “the most dominant athlete in any sport in the country”. He began competing when he was 9, and won a record 4 Junior Boys World Championships, the first of which he won at the age of 12. He competed in his first world championship in 1978, held in Des Moines. He has by far the highest ringer percentage in history at 90 percent, and the most consecutive wins in history.”

This solar furnace in the French alps creates temperatures of 3,500 degrees Celsius

From RIBA Journal: “The Odeillo Solar Furnace in France – the largest in the world – was built by engineer Felix Trombe and opened in 1970. It is 48 metres (157 ft) high and 54 metres (177 ft) wide, and includes 63 heliostats. The sun’s energy is reflected via a series of 9,600 mirrors and concentrated onto a point about the size of a cooking pot to create temperatures reaching 3,500°C. The furnace is used by space agencies including NASA as well as scientists and technology companies to ascertain the effects of extremely high temperatures on materials intended for use in nuclear reactors or space vehicle re-entry. It is situated in Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via, in the region of Occitania, in the Pyrenees mountains south of France. The site was chosen because of the length and the quality of sunshine with direct light (more than 2,500 h/year) and the purity of its atmosphere (high altitude and low average humidity).”

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Continue reading “The most dominant athlete is a horseshoe pitcher from Ohio”

From CNN: “The oldest known tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament sold on Wednesday for $5.04 million, more than double its high estimate. The stone, which dates back around 1,500 years to the Late Roman-Byzantine era, sparked more than 10 minutes of intense bidding, according to a statement from Sotheby’s New York. The anonymous buyer plans to donate the artifact to an Israeli institution. The stone is a remarkable artifact from the ancient world, but it lay forgotten for hundreds of years. Weighing in at 115 pounds and standing two feet tall, the stone was discovered in 1913 during excavations for a new railway line, but the significance of the find was not fully appreciated and the stone went on to be used as part of the paving outside someone’s house for three decades, and the surface was exposed to heavy foot traffic.”

They bought a lottery ticket with his stolen credit card and he wants a share of the winnings

From AP: “Thieves used a stolen card to buy a winning French lottery ticket worth 500,000 euros ($523,000). But they vanished before cashing in —- and now they’re among France’s most famous fugitives. The man whose card was stolen, identified in police documents as Jean-David E., is offering to split the cash with the lucky winners. He wants his wallet back, too. The thieves, meanwhile, face the risk of arrest. As of Saturday, the state lottery operator La Française des Jeux, said that no one had submitted the ticket to cash out. Jean-David filed a police complaint about the theft, but is ready to withdraw it if the thieves come forward so that they can share the money. The lawyer launched a national appeal asking the perpetrators to contact his office to make a deal.”

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Continue reading “Tablet with ten commandments was used as a paving stone”

From the WSJ: “Nontra Yantaprasert couldn’t wait to take her husband’s shorter and easier-to-pronounce last name. She didn’t know what kinds of problems it would cause.His last name is Null, the same word used by computer scientists to mean “no value” or “invalid value.” The Nulls of the world, it turns out, endure a lifetime of website bouncebacks, processing errors and declarations by customer-service representatives that their accounts don’t exist. After becoming a Null, she was due to travel to India in 2014 on a nonrefundable flight for a friend’s marriage, but her visa hadn’t arrived in the mail. The Indian consulate told her it had tried multiple times but the computer system couldn’t process her last name, she said. Null was first coined 60 years ago by a British computer scientist and has since been incorporated into many of the systems that make American commerce run, from hotel reservation sites to government agencies.”

This French widow created the modern champagne market almost singlehandedly

From the Smithsonian: “Highlighted by its distinctive gold-yellow label, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne is hard to ignore. In 2012, it was the second highest selling brand of champagne in the world, with 1,474,000 nine-liter cases sold worldwide. But Veuve Clicquot wasn’t always so successful: if it weren’t for the efforts of a cunning 19th-century business mind, the champagne might never have existed. That remarkable mind belonged to the eponymous Widow (veuve in French0) Clicquot, one of the world’s first international businesswomen, who brought her wine business back from the brink of destruction and invented a process that helped create the modern champagne market as we know it. By the time she died in 1866, Veuve Clicquot was exporting champagne to the far reaches of the world, from Lapland to the United States.”

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Continue reading “When your last name is Null nothing works properly”

From The New Yorker: “For Wilson Bentley, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century microphotographic innovator and bona-fide snowflake obsessive, contemplating the dazzling panoply of kaleidoscopic snow-crystal formations was a pastime that never lost its lustre. In fact, it is through Bentley’s encyclopedic collection of more than five thousand snowflake photographs, a portion of which are now housed in the Smithsonian Institution, that we got the notion of snowflakes’ singularity in the first place. Bentley was born in 1865 and raised on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. His father and brother spent their days tending to the property. Bentley was expected to pitch in, too, but he was more interested in studying the land than in working it. He became enthralled with a microscope given to him by his mother, a former schoolteacher, and discovered that each snowflake had its own careful and fleeting geometry.”

Archaeologists have found the first pharaoh’s tomb in more than a hundred years

From the BBC: “Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago. King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty. A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropoli. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings. The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh. Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located. Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.”

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Continue reading “He invented a new way to take photographs of snowflakes”

If you’ve been following court cases that relate to artificial intelligence, you probably saw some headlines about a recent federal court decision in the US District Court for Delaware, in a copyright-infringement case filed by Thomson Reuters against a company called Ross Intelligence. I saw headlines that claimed this was a “landmark ruling” and a “major win” for content creators, that the AI industry was on the ropes, that this decision marked a turning point in the debate over copyright and artificial intelligence, that fair use is over as a defense for AI training, etc. etc. Is this accurate? Not really. It is definitely true that the court’s ruling is the first significant federal decision related to AI and copyright. But there are a number of reasons why this case doesn’t have as much impact on AI and copyright as the headlines might lead you to believe.

Before I continue, I should note my bias on the question of AI and copyright: Faithful readers of Torment Nexus will recall that in a previous post, I discussed the issue of whether the indexing of content by AI engines should be considered fair use. As I tried to argue in that post, it’s my view that it should. Do LLMs scrape and ingest copyrighted content in large quantities, in most cases without permission? Yes. Do they use this content to generate responses to questions or prompts that relate to the topics discussed in the original versions of that content? Yes. Nevertheless, I believe — as a number of copyright and intellectual property experts do — that this activity should fall under the fair-use exception in US copyright law, for a number of reasons outlined in that post. I’ll get to some of that later, I just wanted to get my bias up front before I continue.

First, some of the facts related to this particular case: Thomson Reuters, which operates the Reuters news-wire service, also owns a number of professional databases that make up the majority of its business. One of those is called Westlaw, and it’s fascinating to me that for years the company had what amounted to a monopoly on the method of citing legal cases in US courts. It seems bizarre now, but Westlaw owned a copyright that covered the system of page-numbering used in US courts, so you literally couldn’t even refer to a previous case for precedent without infringing on Westlaw’s copyright, and the company spent years suing everyone who tried to use it without paying for it — like Lexis-Nexis, a competing legal database. That monopoly over page numbering was mostly dismantled in the late 1990s, but Westlaw still has a copyright on the way cases are summarized, something known as “headnotes.”

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Continue reading “Breaking down a federal court’s ruling on AI and copyright”

From CNN: “The patient consulted a doctor about a chronic cough that was concerning him. During his first couple months of treatment, he was diagnosed with pneumonia, thickening and stiffness in the right lung, and bronchiectasis, or damage of the breathing tubes. When the patient finally reached Munavvar’s clinic at the age of 47, they ran multiple tests, including a CAT scan, and conducted a white light bronchoscopy, a procedure involving the insertion of a scope inside the airways to view the lungs. The doctor noticed extensive shadowing and a thickening lump in the lower right lung. These symptoms, along with the spread of a bacterial infection in the pockets of the lower right lung, led his team to believe that the man had a tumor, which needed prompt removal. But when doctors performed surgery on a man to remove what they suspected to be a carcinoma, they instead found a toy traffic cone he had swallowed in 1974.”

The poet John Milton coined almost twice as many words as William Shakespeare

From The Guardian: “To many scholars he is still the sublime English poet. But John Milton deserves to be remembered for rather more than Paradise Lost. According to Gavin Alexander, a lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing approximately 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency.”

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Continue reading “A lung tumor turned out to be a toy he swallowed 40 years ago”

From MIT: “Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near the lunar south pole that could harbor water ice, and to put a communications satellite on lunar orbit. But the mission will also bring something that’s never been installed on the moon or anywhere else in space before—a fully functional 4G cellular network. Using point-to-point radio in space wasn’t much of an issue in the past because there never have been that many points to connect. Usually, it was just a single spacecraft, a lander, or a rover talking to Earth. And they didn’t need to send much data either. But it could soon get way more crowded up there: NASA’s Artemis program calls for bringing the astronauts back to the moon as early as 2028.”

A ceremonial gavel used by Canada’s Black Watch Regiment is from the 1814 White House

From Dokumen: “On 13 September 1958, the 3rd Battalion Black Watch returned to Philadelphia. The battalion flew and were met at the airport by a guard of honour from the 111th. The September visit marked the second time in 195 years that “The Black Watch Chair” would be occupied. The formal banquet included a double-tiered head table, and was held at Philadelphia’s exclusive Union League. The guest speaker was the adjutant general of the Pennsylvania National Guard, AJ Drexel Biddle, Jr. He was followed by the assistant to the Canadian military attaché to Washington, Colonel John B Allan, who presented a fine Highland claymore from the Queen Mother on behalf of the Imperial Black Watch to George H Roderick, the assistant secretary of the United States Army. On Sunday, an exhibition game of CFL Football was played between the Ottawa Rough Riders and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. At halftime, the 111th and Black Watch paraded and exchanged mementoes. The 111th colonel presented a wooden gavel, carved from a window of the original White House, burned by a British fleet in 1814.”

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Continue reading “Nokia is setting up the first 4G cellular network on the moon”

From The Guardian: “A humpback whale briefly scooped a kayaker into its mouth off the Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed in an incident caught on camera. Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan when a humpback whale surfaced, engulfing Adrián and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go. Dell, just metres away, captured the moment on video. “Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son was released from the whale’s mouth. Experts say it’s just not possible for a humpback whale to swallow something as large as a person, since they normally consume tiny fish known as krill. While their mouths are massive — as wide as 10 feet — their throats are much smaller, roughly the size of a human fist.”

Scientist solves the mystery of the Summerville Ghost that has haunted a town since the 1950s

From The Daily Mail: “Since the 1950s, people in Summerville, South Carolina have told stories of a ghost haunting abandoned railroad tracks. Legend has it that a man working or traveling on the railroad was hit by a train and killed, and after her death, his wife began haunting the area – walking with a lantern. People have claimed to see an eerie glow hovering over the tracks and strange lights seemingly floating in the air that sometimes rush towards them or grow in size. Locals also claim to have seen shaking cars, slamming doors and whispered voices being heard without a source near houses and buildings running along the rail line. Dr Susan Hough, a geophysicist at the Earthquake Hazards Program, believes a natural explanation may be the reason for the paranormal activity. She believes the hauntings are actually after-effects of minor earthquakes.”

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Continue reading “A kayaker was briefly swallowed by a humpback whale”

From National Geographic: “Officials in the Brdy region of the Czech Republic were at an impasse.Despite securing more than one million dollars’ worth of funding for a new dam to address water issues, the project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits for such a structure couldn’t be acquired. But then, everyone woke up one morning in January to find that the job had been completed—by eight beavers. For free. Beaver dams can be massive structures. The largest beaver dam on record is in Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada, stretching the length of seven football fields. The dam is so big, it can be seen from space. “At this point, nothing that beavers do surprises me,” says Ben Goldfarb, a science journalist and author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.”

The founder of New Yorker magazine almost lost it during a late-night poker game

From The Conversation: “Inside that first edition, a reader would find a buffet of jokes and short poems. There was a profile, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and a few ads. It was not terribly impressive, feeling quite patched together, and at first the magazine struggled. When The New Yorker was just a few months old, Ross almost even lost it entirely one night in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Bayard Swope. Ross didn’t make it home until noon the next day, and when he woke, his wife found IOUs in his pockets amounting to nearly $30,000. Fleischmann, who had been at the card game but left at a decent hour, was furious. Somehow, Ross persuaded Fleischmann to pay off some of his debt and let Ross work off the rest. Just in time, The New Yorker began gaining readers.”

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Continue reading “Some eager beavers saved the Czech government $1.2 million”

From Defector: “If neighbors peeking behind curtains at the idling 18-wheeler thought to call in a complaint, the husband and wife receiving the delivery didn’t notice. They were too busy unloading boxes—more than 800 of them. That problem cost $43,000, a sum that represented the entire life savings of Mr. Fox and his wife, who at that point had been surviving on public-school salaries. Friends and family never really said it out loud, but they were certainly thinking it: This was insane. What about the three kids and that mortgage? Tucked inside those boxes were 120,000 plastic cups. They were turned upside down, each with a hole drilled through the middle of the base. The couple’s future hinged on convincing thousands of kids that stacking these plastic cups in pre-determined patterns was … fun. And to convince the parents of those kids to actually buy these cups, despite not even being able to drink from them.”

There are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth

From McGill: “Think of your last card game – euchre, poker, Go Fish, whatever it was. Would you believe every time you gave the whole deck a proper shuffle, you were holding a sequence of cards which had never before existed in all of history? Consider how many card games must have taken place across the world since the beginning of humankind. No one has or likely ever will hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards as you did during that game. It seems unbelievable, but there are somewhere in the range of 8×10⁶⁷ ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros. To put that in perspective, even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat. This is the nature of probabilities with such great numbers.”

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Continue reading “Stacking cups as a game was invented by this guy’s dad”

If you’ve been reading the news at all, you probably know that Elon Musk — and/or a group of twentysomething programmer/hackers with nicknames like “Big Balls” (no, I am not making this up) — have taken control of significant parts of the functional machinery of the US government, including the Departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They are installing external servers and shutting down billions of dollars worth of payments, as well as firing tens of thousands of federal employees. Do they have the authority to do this? Donald Trump has issued an executive order saying that they do. The courts disagree, but it remains to be seen whether Trump will obey the courts or simply ignore them. Can he do that? Perhaps. Is there any way for the state or Congress to stop him? Not really. Is this the beginning of a constitutional crisis? Probably.

This isn’t a political newsletter, so all of that is outside my purview at the moment, although I have to say it is troubling in the extreme. From a technological point of view, however, what is interesting to me is that even with all of that going on — running and/or dismantling the entire federal government — Elon Musk still managed to find the time to put together a $97-billion hostile takeover offer for OpenAI. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal describes it:

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, upping the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT. Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday. The unsolicited offer adds a major complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement. “We will make sure that happens.”

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Continue reading “Does Elon Musk want to buy OpenAI? Yes and no”