*BAM! feeds are streams of content drawn daily from the internet and categorised with the aid of intelligent search keywords pertaining to mind, brain, neurological research, consciousness, identity, memory, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
BAM Blog
BAM Blog

LAWS versus soft power

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A few days ago we highlighted the open letter presented at an AI conference by a thousand scientists, calling for a ban on the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). I suggested there would be blowback to the effect that a ban would not succeed. While anyone might have expected protests from the military […]

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Beware pre-Singularity marketing babble

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Whatever forecasts are made for the moment when machine intelligence exceeds the power of human intelligence, one can be sure that the hypesters will be out ahead of the science, babbling of capabilities achieved before they have even been thought through properly. An early example of this phenomenon can be found on a blog created […]

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Rising IQs and belief in God

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Evidence accumulates to the effect that notwithstanding junk food, reality TV and celebrity culture, humanity is actually getting smarter. The Flynn Effect to which this article refers mentions the phenomenon associated with New Zealand-based philosopher James Flynn, who has built a thoughtful and engaging career on his early observation about rising IQs worldwide over the […]

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Computers aid in brain mapping

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Swiss researchers based in Geneva and Lausanne have successfully applied a “new computational method” to the study of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), so sharpening the generally fuzzy images to which neuroscience has been accustomed and enabling the distinction of up to 13 separate, colour-coded neural networks operating at any given time within the human […]

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End game for attention deficit is stupefaction

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After only a few months of compiling this library of blogs on matters of human and artificial intelligence, BAM has established its First Law of Smarts in the online world where these matters are discussed. Simply, the amount of intelligence employed in any act of communication will be in inverse proportion to the amount of […]

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Can AI and brain research learn from animals?

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A recent confluence of stories in the BAM intelligence feeds prompt musings about animal intelligence beyond what mere mortals can show, given sensory advantages that animals possess that could inspire their own advances in pattern recognition. Humans have evolved visual capabilities that have inspired advances in the arts and sciences that underpin much of what […]

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War and the risks of artificial stupidity

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A professor at the People’s Liberation Army National Defence University in Beijing wrote an article entitled “As possibility of third world war exists, China needs to be prepared”. Reaction from 20 American experts affiliated with the New America Foundation appeared online under the title “Here’s the Defining National Security Question of Our Time”. Apart from […]

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Ethics and AI: more human intelligence needed

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In a fascinating article in the journal Nature, four specialists from the world of computer science and robotics address what the article’s sub-title misleading suggests are the “societal risks from intelligent machines”. As these contributors make clear from each of four distinct perspectives, the risks are clearly much less “from intelligent machines” and more from […]

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Crispr in the court of public opinion

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A philosophical poser in today’s Financial Times appears in an article entitled “Geneticists quest for crisper prose in the book of life”. At issue is the emerging gene editing technology known as CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, (not the most illuminating acronym in the world of science). In essence, the technology has […]

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Situation vacant: mind uploaders wanting

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If we are “nothing more than the signals flitting through our brain” it might just about make sense that this little mashy blob of signal-facilitating could be cryonically preserved – frozen for the dubious benefit of some posterity that might thaw it out – and then the zippity-zap of signalling could again begin. Assuming that […]

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