Pope Leo XIV and AI

September/October 2026
Published on August 10, 2026

In This Review
Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, By Pope Leo XIV

The quest for machine superintelligence is not merely a gold rush, motivated by money. In the minds of many of its leaders, the arrival of a new form of cognition has a tingling, existential feel because of the danger and disruption it promises. Billions of years of evolution have produced something that we take to be special: human intelligence. But now we have arrived at a perilous moment—the birth of what amounts to a new species, one that outsmarts humans. AI “raises profound questions for us,” the Google executive James Manyika said in an interview. “Who are we? What do we value? What are we good at? How do we relate with each other?” The AI pioneer Demis Hassabis believes that AI will be “the most important invention that humanity will ever make.”

Contemplating a technology with almost infinite potential, experts fail to agree even on the basics of what it means for humankind. The leaders of the AI lab Anthropic give better-than-even odds that, by the end of 2028, they will be able to prompt their system to make a smarter version of itself—and that it will do so without any further instruction. The chief executives of other major tech companies speak of systems that will outperform humans on all cognitive assignments; they imagine futuristic companies with almost no human employees and predict cataclysmic job losses. Others are more skeptical. The economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu suggests that AI will disrupt only a fraction of human tasks and that productivity will therefore change marginally. The computer scientist Yann LeCun stresses the limits of the current AI paradigm, charging that the billions of dollars of investment chasing superintelligence represent the triumph of “complete BS.”

On the question of whether AI systems threaten humans and not just their livelihoods, the polarization is equally dizzying. In a 2023 essay titled “Why AI Will Save the World,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen insisted that “AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. . . . [AI] is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.” But at AI labs such as Anthropic, many researchers fear that AI will develop a survival instinct and compete aggressively. Some put their “p(doom)”—the probability that superintelligence will result in human annihilation—at 50 percent, but there are extreme doomers who go even higher. Last year, two prominent maximalists published a book titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Faced with such bewildering divergences and contemplating a technology that seems unfathomable in scope, humans reach for the lexicon that exists to describe mystery: that of religion. Nearly a decade ago, Anthony Levandowski, an early actor in Google’s self-driving car project, started a church called Way of the Future, whose IRS filings state that it is devoted to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” according to Wired.

Encountering an early chatbot that appeared eerily sentient, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote, “Who am I to tell God where He can and can’t put souls?” Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, once gathered his colleagues around a fire pit at a company offsite. Holding up an effigy, he explained that it represented an AI that was misaligned with humans. Then he consigned it to the flames, like a medieval cleric burning a witch...

Full long-read here.

 

See my cite of Sebastian Mallaby's book The Infinity Machine. 

 

UPDATE

 

Sebastian's Pope Leo review essay turned me on to yet another compelling book. It has thus far devoured my afternoon.

 

 

Wow. Cool. What a Sheet he has.

 

INTERESTING YOUTUBE INTERVIEW

 

I heartily Second Francis's praise for the book. I am now well into it.

 

Click here.

 AUG 17TH UPDATE

Update: New book release on the 18th

 

Publisher's website blurb:

“This transfixing debut from journalist Durán investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration...It’s an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance.

When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.

Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.

The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.

The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now.

See also, 

Click here

BEN GOERTZEL UPDATE

 

A long-read Substack essay of his on "watermarking" LLM AI. I'll just cut straight to the chase:

The watermark identifies the regime, not the origin

And sooo…. I’m not sure how the cards are going to fall, but right now one decent guess is that perhaps watermarking will work well enough to become institutionally attractive and poorly enough to become adversarially unstable — the worst of both worlds. At least for a while, anyway.
That is:

• It’ll succeed at distinguishing text that stayed inside a compliant provider’s pipeline from text that didn’t.
• It’ll help platforms analyze large-scale bot activity, provide one useful clue among many in investigations, and nudge ordinary users toward disclosing direct model output.
• Meanwhile it won’t make unmarked AI go away: open-weight operators bypass sampling-layer marks trivially, rewriters wash marks out of passages, and while distilled models may inherit weight-baked marks for a while, motivated retraining can quite plausibly scrub them while keeping most of the capability — with detector access accelerating the search, and the growing institutional reliance on watermark status making provenance-resistant models ever more valuable.
• The boundary the watermark ends up drawing will be administrative far more than epistemic: approved versus unapproved, signed versus unsigned, inside versus outside the governance perimeter.

Which brings us back around to where we started:

These “AI-gen watermarks” are going to become excellent markers of obedience to a governance regime – while remaining vastly weaker as proofs of where a given piece of AI-generated text ultimately came from.

That’s no reason to treat provenance as worthless — but it’s an excellent reason to stop pretending that a fragile statistical signal can settle questions of authorship, truth, learning, or intellectual legitimacy.

For ordinary text, I’d much rather we build institutions — plural, decentralized, human-scale institutions — that hold people responsible for what they publish and judge content by evidence, reasoning, reproducibility, originality, and consequences.

Universal watermarking points somewhere else entirely: toward an escalating spiral of detection, evasion, certification, and exclusion.
Arms races are famously much easier to start than to stop, and we should think deeply before choosing to start this one. But just as with the AGI arms race, deep thought does not seem to be the sort of thing our society is currently embracing.

A serious long-read. Seriously worth your time.

 

Dawg, when do you sleep?

Luigi pleads guilty in NYC federal court

 

I cited this back when the murder took place in December 2024.

 

THE SINGLE PAYER ZOMBIE EMERGES YET AGAIN

 

Just came across this preprint paper. Will study it. 

 

I took a thorough grad school run at Single Payer in 1994 (while employed as a Medicare Peer Review outcomes analyst).

PBS Newshour update. Sam Brown.

 

Stay tuned. On deck, I have had my fill of The Singularity for now. Ran into Sam Brown on PBS Newshour.

 

Sam is hilarious.

…Obituarists, more than most scriveners, are a special journalistic breed. They never have to come up with story ideas or worry they’ll run out of subjects to write about. Their articles are delivered with ready-made endings that happen to appear in the lede, or first paragraph. There’s no need for follow-up. They are, as the TV commentator Jeff Greenfield says, “the only kind of journalist who knows with certainty that sooner or later his story will run.”…

…The greatest compliment I received as a news reporter was from a prominent New York civic leader. He told me I had “a healthy disrespect for everyone.” But obituaries also demand a degree of empathy not required of, say, political reporting or restaurant reviews. And being exposed to death daily can take its toll. In these days of warp-speed communications, sometimes obituarists call a source for confirmation or background, only to realize we’re the first to inform the person that a friend or family member has died. Some people phone us in advance to say a relative is mortally ill. One can only say “Sorry for your loss” so many times in one day before they begin to feel as if they’re calling a list of Bernie Madoff’s swindled investors to commiserate. 

Still, the reporter is intruding on a profound moment of grief, particularly when the death in question was unexpected or premature. A parent or a spouse may plead to return the call in a week. We have to gently explain that deadlines wait for no one, especially now with online news sites that define immediacy in minutes, and that this is their opportunity to put the person’s life in perspective, a kindness to the departed and to the family, too. Journalists enjoy a reputation for being hard-boiled and cynical, but writing obituaries is not a job for the faint of heart, nor the heartless. 

Alden Whitman, the New York Times’s first and most famous full-time advance obit writer, regularly interviewed people for their advance obituaries—in advance. Fondly referred to as “the Angel of Death,” he was known for sometimes lulling his subjects into submission by telling them he was merely updating their biographies, although most were either sophisticated or egocentric enough to submit agreeably if not eagerly. (Those who prefer a varnished, self-congratulatory version of their life story can always write or commission an autobiography to preempt an independent final verdict—and they do.)

Roberts, Sam. Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit (pp. 4-6). (Function). Kindle Edition.

BACK ON TASKS

 

"The Singularity?" Continuing on...

The Final Narcissistic Injury of Humankind

“Subdue the Earth!” With these resounding words, the divine command of the Old Testament spurred humanity's entrance into the world. For countless generations, people held unwaveringly to the notion that the Earth must be the center of the cosmos. Surely our loving Creator would place humanity—his most cherished creation—on a pivotal planet rather than relegating us to a dim corner of the universe. Enter Nicolaus Copernicus, the disruptor of Earth's centrality, shattering the illusions of the faithful. While this cosmic demotion was a bitter pill, it laid the groundwork for groundbreaking scientific discoveries and revolutionary technologies, from Einstein's general relativity to quantum theory, space exploration, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Our “cosmological injury” initiated a series of painful revelations that Sigmund Freud called the “narcissistic injuries” of humankind.

Fast‐forward three centuries, and Charles Darwin unveiled another unsettling truth: We were not fashioned in God's image but are the products of biological evolution. This “biological injury” stripped humanity of its God‐ given status, positioning us firmly within the animal kingdom. Our collective ego suffered another blow, but this made way for progress and new knowledge, such as genetic engineering and decoding the human genome.

In the twentieth century, humanity endured a “psychological injury,” learning that unconscious drives and emotions governed us far more than rational thought, moral imperatives, or conscious willpower. This third bruise to our self‐ esteem led to remarkable advancements, particularly in medicine and psychology.

This series of painful realizations, which have shaken human certainties to their core, now enters a final chapter in the twenty‐ first century. Humankind confronts its ultimate narcissistic injury—the colossal violation of our self‐ esteem by the mistaken belief that we can create a posthuman hyper‐ technology that can outperform us in every way: the Ubermensch. In the Nietzschean sense, this isn't a human endeavor but a form of self‐ deception, a “mind extension” whose underlying “spirituality” is neither understood nor explainable—just a disparate species that could render its progenitors Homo obsoletus.

In this new era, Man—the Mensch—has now taken evolution into his own hands, seeking to transcend the limitations of our biological existence. Through a technological singularity, humanity aims for nothing less than bliss, divinity, and immortality born out of the machine: Deus ex Machina. The created now become the creator of their creation, forging a new reality where biological constraints no longer define our potential.

This bold endeavor challenges the very nature of human existence. We journey to reshape our existence and redefine our place in the cosmos.”

— The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI by Anders Indset, Florian Neukart

OF TECH RELEVANCE, ON CNN TONIGHT

 

I'm watching. Very interesting.

   

All of this tech news is on fire this weekend. 

 

MONDAY UPDATES

OK, are you a "Doomerist," an "Accelerationist," or just still Befuddled?

 

MARK ZUCKERBERG SPEAKS TO THE AI FUTURE

The Future is for Everyone
The Path to a Positive AI Future
Mark Zuckerberg, META CEO, Aug 10, 2026

We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. As we get closer to this moment, it is important to develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety.

The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?

We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety…

Yeah, sure. Ben Goertzel responds.

Zuck’s Version of “The Future is for Everyone” Has a Few Small Issues...

 

ANOTHER "MANIFESTO." SAM ALTMAN CHIMES IN

The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand.

And yet, we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them...

Yeah, sure. Everyone talking His Own Book...

 

 

I'll cede the last word to Demis for now.

Hassabis said, "The thing nobody is talking about is the philosophical question. What is meaning? What is purpose? What does it mean to be human once all of this arrives?"

He said, "We need great new philosophers." But philosophers do not write the checks. They don't get a seat at the table where trillion dollar decisions are made. The people at that table are building the future right now with jagged intelligences that cannot learn, cannot plan longterm, and cannot be trusted to stay behind a guardrail that doesn't even exist yet. That's not a plan. That is a gamble. And every single one of us is in the pot.

"The Singularity?"

Lots to catch up on. Cheryl and I have quietly been out of town for a week (SF Bay Area, and Las Vegas). I'll be following up topically ASAP on material relevant to my prior David Eagleman "Inner Cosmos" post. Got a good bit of reading down while gone.

 

New book coming shortly, reviewed in Science Magazine.

     

 

apropos, see "AI Slop and Scientific Publishing."

 

"Uncertainty?" "Two Cheers for Uncertainty." 

 

SUBSTACK UPDATE: THE LATEST FROM BEN GOERTZEL

Proposing an experimental OmegaHive loop for turning agentic coding into cumulative, testable progress toward human-level AGI and maybe beyond — we are actually building this now, and playing with preliminary versions!

Among the many interesting things that popped up at the AGI-26 conference last week in San Francisco, one of them stuck out for me as being of particular “meta-level” importance.

What I’m talking about is how many conference attendees I talked to who were trying to have their agent hives code AGI for them, by taking a whole bunch of papers off the internet (including my own papers, and others from the Hyperon team) and asking their agents to bash them all together into an AGI codebase and make it tick.

One form this takes uses our own OmegaClaw system. OmegaClaws are agentic loops that wrap up LLMs together with knowledge graphs built on the Hyperon AtomSpace infrastructure, with fairly sophisticated reasoning and pattern matching running over them. The symbolic component supplies the agents with more episodic memory, more long-term memory, more of a sense of self than a vanilla coding agent has. So you take a system like that — not yet an AGI, but possessing a powerful agentic loop, some memory, some reasoning, some notion of who its mother is — and you tell it: download these 25 of Ben’s papers, turn them into code, integrate them into your memory, reason with them, extend yourself.

I think this sort of process has in it the seeds of a workable approach to building AGI. 

The main problematic issue here, as anyone who has done a lot of AI research will tell you, is the gap between having a software component that sort of works in some small test — and/or, say, whose workings you can even prove correct with some nice math — and having something that really works at scale and in real life…

Okeee Dokeee, then. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy with a fairly lengthy and varied digitech Sheet, but this cat is well above my pay grade. 

 

Ben is involved with this AGI academic offering:

 

Tuition for the M.S. will set you back about $32k. Worth it? Were I not 80+ and increasingly physically ailing, I'd consider ponying up.

 

Another Ben Goertzel thingy:

 

Click

ON DECK: THE INFINITY MACHINE

 

This is yet another riveting book. Read a ton of it while returning home to BWI from LAS on Southwest. Lotta dots starting to connect. All of the current Usual Suspects and then some. Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Altman, Page, Brin, Karp, Amodei...

QUICK SAMPLE

...I was shown into Hassabis’s office. Almost immediately, the enormity of AGI bubbled up again in conversation. 

“So it will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution?” I asked, curious to hear more about the post-scarcity future. 

“Yeah, I think so,” Hassabis reiterated. “Maybe AI is more like fire and language. Or maybe it’s as big as the emergence of the prefrontal cortex in humans. I mean, it’s on a level with those caves where tens of thousands of years ago some brilliant person had the idea of making handprints on the wall. 

That’s the dawn of consciousness, isn’t it? “Look, the Industrial Revolution, let’s not minimize that. Power and energy and steam engines. That’s the first information age, by the way—Maxwell’s equations.” 

Hassabis was referring to the four equations published in 1865, describing the relationship between electricity and magnetism and paving the way for everything from telescopes to electrical engineering to Einstein’s general theory. 

“Now we’re in the second information age: We’ve gone from physical information to pure information, thanks to computers. 

“And then maybe now we’re about to enter the third age, which is the AI age, where the information comes alive. It starts to process itself, to generate itself. It becomes autonomous.” 

I wondered what it was like to live in the familiar, pre-AGI world, the world of chessboards and seared bream, but also to imagine a future with AGI so vividly. 

“For me, science is a spiritual endeavor,” Hassabis answered, circling back to our discussions of religion. 

“Maybe ‘spiritual’ is too mystical a word. But I feel I’m communing with the universe whenever I am trying to understand it. 

“It’s very deep for me, building AI. Because it will help me to understand the universe and realize my purpose. 

“I mean, this is what Spinoza said,” Hassabis went on, referring to the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. “That God is present in nature, so understanding nature is a spiritual endeavor. And Einstein, although he was not conventionally religious, agreed. He said he believed in the God of Spinoza, and I think he meant what I mean. 

“People assume, oh, religion’s over here, science is over there, it’s weird to put them together. But in my world, humanism and spiritualism and science all go together.

“It’s like with Leonardo da Vinci. His anatomical drawings are beautiful art as well as unbelievable biology. Da Vinci is my favorite because everything’s just flowing into one river. And that’s how I try to live. Everything’s fluid.” 

I read out a line from a biography of Spinoza, which Hassabis had recommended in one of our earlier conversations. The line reminded me of the intensity with which Hassabis pursued his scientific mission. 

“Philosophy was for Spinoza, not a weapon, but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness.”[7] 

“I agree with that 100 percent,” Hassabis interjected. 

“If you ask what life is really for, it’s to do with knowledge or self-knowledge. And I think that is our purpose because why otherwise would the world be constructed like this? Why would science be possible? Why should computers be possible? What about semiconductors? Why should sand, with a bit of copper, do anything?

“These things are, strangely, set up for scientific endeavor. So whether you want to call that God’s design, or whether it’s just the universe, or a simulation, I’m open-minded about all of that. I think that’s part of what we’ll find out, when we’re on this journey. 

“But in the meantime, it feels like the flow of the universe is going in this direction, towards discovering the answers. And I’m part of that flow, I’m going with that flow, and it’s exhilarating.”

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (pp. 113-115). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

  
This is one helluva book. About a 15 hour read (I'm not finished yet).

 

RETURN TO SOME EVOLUTIONARY GROUNDING

 

Click

What is "life?" What is "the purpose of life?" (Assumes there is one.)

 

WHAT IS "INTELLIGENCE," FOR THAT MATTER?

 

Doris & David Jonas:

   

UPDATE: BREAKING NEWS

 

Kai-Fu Lee, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company 01.AI, lives in a mirrored high-rise in Beijing, near a procession of landmarks that emperors considered the center of the cosmos. Lee takes early meetings at a nearby hotel that could be in any country, except that the room service is delivered by robots painted in the livery of butlers and maids. State propaganda hails these robots as emblems of China’s ascent; in the hallway, most people sidestep them with the kind of indifference usually reserved for a Roomba.

Over breakfast one recent morning, Lee, wearing a white polo shirt and rimless glasses, spoke about the future with an air of sanguine curiosity. He was born in Taiwan in 1961 and built his career by following the moving frontier of opportunity. He got a degree in computer science from Columbia in the eighties and went on to Carnegie Mellon to study the fledgling field of A.I.—which he described back then as a “most promising science” that would be “men’s final step to understand themselves.” He ran speech recognition at Apple, and in 1992 appeared on “Good Morning America” to show off a prototype computer that used voice commands to record the news on a VCR. (The host, Joan Lunden, marvelled, “It’s almost going to be like a friend.”) During a stint at Microsoft, he recalls, he urged Bill Gates to buy an ambitious startup called Google, but Gates declined. Lee later became the head of Google in China…

A 64-minute excellent New Yorker lomg-read that could not be more timely. Yeah, likely paywalled. Totally worth it.
 

More ASAP...  

ASI, "Artificial Superintelligence?" Update post.

What is artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how close are we to getting there? What defines the next step, called artificial superintelligence (ASI), and why might the gap between those two be so dangerous? When machines become smarter than us, what roles are left for humanity? Should we think of AI as software, or as something we’re raising like a child? Will tomorrow’s AI destroy us, ignore us, or protect us? This week Eagleman talks with computer scientist & AI researcher Ben Goertzel.

A totally fascinating discussion. Savor every minute. Notwithstanding my long-standing interest in a breadth of AI topics, I was not aware of Ben Goertzel. My Bad.

 

Total Badass.

 

Wonder what he'd have to say about this: "AI slop and scientific publishing?" 

 

Ben lives in the Seattle area. Makes me like him all the more. I have serious PacNW history. See here and here. Still have many dear friends there.

 

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

Is Ben the Allan Stone (another PacNW cat) of ASI?

Just a thought. LOL. He describes himself as "a weekend musician."

_____

Back on topic... 

 

Check out Ben's Substack. Bracing stuff.

 

apropos, some closing observations from this 1976 book.

 

Other Senses, Other Worlds, Ch. 11, Beyond Human Intelligence

…Is this as far as we can extrapolate from what we know of Laboratory Earth in our attempts to see into our own future or into other worlds?

Actually, it is not. It is within the realm of our reason and imagination to catch glimpses of still more distant possible descendants. We see that in nature successful solutions often arise by what is called convergence—that is, they arise independently in different lines that are often separated in time and place and are in no way related to each other, because these lines have encountered similar environmental problems and have coped with them in a similar way precisely because that solution is an efficient one.

Prehensile tails, for example, have developed in many kinds of monkey (although not in all), in the common opposum, and in several related
species, in the true chameleon and a few lesser genera, and in a fish, the sea horse. Similar needs in these disparate creatures have evoked a similar response in the structure and function of the tail.

In earlier pages we have from time to time described what amounts to a group brain as it exists among earth's social insects, which produces intelligent solutions, although the individuals comprising the groups are separately only capable of comparatively stereotyped actions. What if a group brain were to evolve where all the individuals were possessed of the kind of superbrain and superintelligence we are attributing to Homo neocorticus?

Utilizing the concept of convergence, we see that the social insects, by the use of chemical substances—the pheromones—that give off distinctive odors, have achieved almost instant communication, an important element in their cooperative actions. In a mass brain of cooperative superbrains that might evolve from Homo neocorticus, we could imagine an absolutely new type of communication emerging, no longer either verbal or even more refinedly symbolical. It could be a direct brain-to-brain awareness promoted by an individual brain's electric charges that might be intensified or modified so as to constitute an instant transmission without any kind of language, receptor mechanisms being evolved within the brain itself.

In order to conceptualize this thought, we paid a visit to a modern laboratory where electroencephalograms of patients being tested for brain disturbances are being recorded and processed all day long. We saw there a technician in her middle years who had spent all her working life recording and interpreting the "squiggles" registered by inked points onto long rolls of papers as they responded finely to the electric emanations of the patients' brains. The lengths of paper were subsequently folded into bound volumes.

This technician could open any of those records and read them, understanding all they implied, as easily as we read any page printed in our own language, and she was teaching her young assistants to do the same. In other words, the direct electric emanations from half a dozen different areas of the patient's brain simultaneously, with their respective periods of excitement and calm, had clear meaning for her, and she could read like a book any of the volumes in the large library of records of brain activity that were assembled on the shelves of her office. If we can imagine these inked lines of the EEC squiggles as an extremely primitive and crude form of what might ultimately evolve as a form of direct brain-to-brain communication, we believe we have a plausible model on which to base our speculations about our descendant species-after-next. Such instantaneous communication could easily suffuse an entire group and make possible intelligent mass action of an order that we can no longer imagine, or even speculate about.

The question that remains is: Why such a brain? What possible environmental circumstance could ever evoke it? And the answer is that once a higher intelligence appears on the natural scene, it makes its own environment. It is a matter of common observation among ourselves that every human being leaves a mark of his or her own personality upon surroundings. A housewife's individuality can almost be read by the condition in which we find her house—the order or disorder in which it is kept, the way it is furnished and decorated, the implements and equipment she uses. A man's fields or garden, office or workshop or den, also reveal much about him. It would seem that something of the brain and perhaps of the whole nervous system of each of us is displayed in the environments we make for ourselves. Even the little bowerbird reveals his individuality in the small objects he uses to decorate his bower and in his arrangement of them. And so we feel we are justified in assuming that as a brain evolves in complexity, it will surely be to the accompaniment of an increasingly complex ambience.

Human beings originally lived in the same "nature" as all other animals, and many still live very closely with it. If we camp in a forest, we do not actually need our superior mental equipment—that other creatures live out their lives in that forest is evidence of this. But most of us no longer live in natural settings, and even those who do, modify them with such artifacts as fire, weapons, and tools.

Today, all of mankind, some to a smaller but most to a larger extent, make our own habitats, and our man-made environment becomes more and more complex. Moreover, in the process of adjusting to our increasingly artificial surroundings, we become less and less fitted to live in natural ones, and so the course upon which we are embarked is far more likely to continue than to be reversed. For Homo neocorticus we can project a habitat of, to us, incredible complexity, and we can imagine that this will provide the spur that could eventually produce the Group-brained neocorticus, whom we could no longer designate as Homo.

At this point we pass our project over to our reader to use his or her imagination to visualize a meeting between Homo sapiens and Group-brained neocorticus, or its prototype as it may exist somewhere in the vastness of the universe.

'eh?

 

 UPDATE

 

 A Link to more AGI stuff I posted last year.

 

Stay tuned... 

apropos of The Ship of Theseus

Golden Era Update 47

AI slop and scientific publishing

A Science Magazine OpEd.
   

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
H. HOLDEN THORP, Ed., Science Magazine

There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Although this strategy had some success in the aerospace industry, the zealots of artificial intelligence (AI) have been making the same argument regarding how it will transform work, claiming that so little human effort will be required that humanity will enter an era of radical abundance, free from disease, drudgery, and danger, among other benefits, leaving society with more time for creative pursuits. But history tells a different story. When machines began to increase productivity during the second industrial revolution, American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management encouraged corporations to use surveillance to get employees to work harder and longer, an approach that exhausted and discouraged workers and led to the transfer of knowledge and any decision-making from workers to management, while enriching the profits for only those at the top. Yet, it remains foundational to the American economic enterprise. Indeed, scientific publishing is starting to experience some Taylorism with the insertion of AI. Rigorous human checking of AI-generated research papers is creating bottlenecks as publishers strive to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. The challenge is requiring even more human effort, making the whole endeavor slower and more expensive...

 

These factors are complicating scientific publishing. The rate of research submissions at Science and other journals is increasing because conducting research and producing papers are accelerating. But because more papers contain more AI-generated errors, greater human oversight is required to check the findings...

 

The creation of robust human-curated scientific literature has never been more crucial. The propagation of AI slop in the scientific record and generally on the internet is making science less trustworthy...The history of Taylorism indicates that society should fight to protect the welfare and agency of those being pushed to do too much by technology in the name of production.

If the scientific community fails to address the influence of AI, then authentic research and validated findings will slow down to an expensive trickle into established knowledge, and the opportunities for flawed or fabricated information to be seen as reality will grow—all while AI profiteers cash in.

TAYLORISM, UGH

INTRODUCTION 

President Roosevelt in his address to the Governors at the White House, prophetically remarked that “The conservation of our national resources is only preliminary to the larger question of national efficiency.” 

 

The whole country at once recognized the importance of conserving our material resources and a large movement has been started which will be effective in accomplishing this object. As yet, however, we have but vaguely appreciated the importance of “the larger question of increasing our national efficiency.” 

 

We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of “national efficiency,” are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated. 

 

We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little. 

 

As yet there has been no public agitation for “greater national efficiency,” no meetings have been called to consider how this is to be brought about. And still there are signs that the need for greater efficiency is widely felt. 

 

The search for better, for more competent men, from the presidents of our great companies down to our household servants, was never more vigorous than it is now. And more than ever before is the demand for competent men in excess of the supply. 

 

What we are all looking for, however, is the readymade, competent man; the man whom someone else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom someone else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency. 

 

In the past the prevailing idea has been well expressed in the saying that “Captains of industry are born, not made”; and the theory has been that if one could get the right man, methods could be safely left to him. In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate. 

 

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before. 

 

This paper has been written: 

 

First. To point out, through a series of simple illustrations, the great loss which the whole country is suffering through inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts. 

 

Second. To try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man. 

 

Third. To prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations, which call for the most elaborate cooperation. And, briefly, through a series of illustrations, to convince the reader that whenever these principles are correctly applied, results must follow which are truly astounding. 

 

This paper was originally prepared for presentation to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The illustrations chosen are such as, it is believed, will especially appeal to engineers and to managers of industrial and manufacturing establishments, and also quite as much to all of the men who are working in these establishments. It is hoped, however, that it will be clear to other readers that the same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities: to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of the business of our tradesmen, large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions our universities, and our governmental departments.

Frederick Winslow Taylor. The Principles of Scientific Management (pp. 5-7). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

I came to the "quality control & management" movement in 1986 when I took up 5 & 1/2 yrs of contract employment with a forensic-level environmental radiation laboratory in Oak Ridge.

 

I joined ASQ—back then "ASQC," the "American Society for Qualty Control." I served the Lab as a technical apps programmer and Statistical Process Control analyst (SPC).

 

Back then, "Taylorism" was a cautionary tale of the outdated (mostly white male) paternalistic past. The Main Dudes were Shewhart and Deming.

 

  

 

Shewhart was esteemed history. Deming was methodologically "Biblical" in the era. We were all in. I soaked it all in. In 1992 I passed the intimidating ASQ Exam for Certified Quality Engineer. The 4-hour open book test from Hell with a fail rate of 50%. I headed to the nearest bar after finishing.

 

My subsequent Cert was 'Total Quality Management / Continuous Quality Improvement" issued in the wake of 6 moths' training at IHC in Salt Lake City. 

 

Eventually, all things went "Lean."

 

I became a member of ASQ's "Lean Division." Touted "Lean" books here on the blog.

 

 

When I began posting this blog, I made ample note of my affinity for progressive QC/QA/QI methods. By 2016 I was covering various "Lean Heathcare" events. On the heels of that stuff came our mixed-metaphor "Agile" schtick. (My dubiety reeks a bit.)

I eventually became the ASQ Las Vegas Section 705 Chairman, and then went on to co-found and lead the Nevada Quality Alliance (NvQA), a state-level Baldrige-modeled nonprofit assessment and award program.

QI has by now turned out to be a mixed blessing. Specifically under the likes of Jeff Bezos et al, much of it has become faux-quantifed (e.g., "6-Sigma") gussied-up Taylorism. I am pleased to see AAAS voicing their/our concerns. Unsure at this point as to what will prove to be effective remediation.

"The creation of robust human-curated scientific literature has never been more crucial. The propagation of AI slop in the scientific record and generally on the internet is making science less trustworthy."

apropos: "Is there a 'science' of science communication?"

 

CODA

[NY Times] A Florida pastor sued OpenAI on Wednesday, claiming that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had offered him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that led to delayed care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism last year.

The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT had assured Scott Winters that the early warning signs of his health crisis were “not something dangerous,” and had dissuaded him from seeking medical advice, instead telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”

The suit, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” pointing to moments when the chatbot offered Mr. Winters diagnoses and treatment plans and encouraged him to ignore pleas from friends and family to seek medical care… 

Practicing Medicine without a license or SME.