In 2018, DARPA (the US' military "advanced research" department) published a tender for non-invasive brain stimulation devices to augment military personnel. The bid was won the year after by a research team at Carnegie Mellon University that received $19.48 million to develop a wearable brain stimulation device. The news is in line with DARPA's more longstanding interest in developing "neurotechnology", which can be broadly defined as cyberphysical systems to interact with

Sam Altman is seeking $7 trillion  (!) to develop a new computer chip to help speed up "advanced AI" development. Is it worth it? Who will pay for it? Just less than a year ago, prominent scientists wrote a letter  to call for a global halt on AI development that has since been signed by over 33K people around the world. Guess what? Not much changed, except the major AI hype wore off. The "intelligent" chatbot that spurred industrial strikes and awe is now mostly a brainstorm

Imagine your computer to know your mental weaknesses better than you do. Creepy? Perhaps, yes. But what if it helps to prevent you from falling for scams? What if it stops you before you do something harmful to yourself or someone else? Would you use this technology? To some extent, big online advertising companies have already figured out when to target whom with certain content. They are called recommender systems and thrive on heaps of data on what you browse, buy and sear

This series "Why I am not afraid of singularity anytime soon" takes a closer look at potential flaws in our human understanding of singularity and why I think we should all be more concerned about other crises of humanity rather than about super intelligence. If you missed the first two parts on human stupidity  and an evolutionary definition of intelligence , check them out here: part 1 , part 2 . Finally, we will delve deeper into the question "what is super intelligence, a

Last time in the first part of this series  "Why I am not afraid of singularity anytime soon", I argued that human stupidity poses a much more immediate threat to our existence than super intelligent artificial intelligence (AI). I explained how stupidity originates from our biases and heuristics, and their recurring challenges we need to overcome as a consequence. Now, before we dive into the second main reason for why we should not be afraid of super intelligent AI, this po

In recent years, people from the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have publicly expressed their concern about the potential existential risks of "super intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) systems" for us, human beings. In this blog series, I want to share my two main reasons for why we should not be afraid of super intelligent AI or "robots taking over our world" at all. Firstly, human stupidity poses a much more immediate threat to ourselves. Secondly, why should

In this post I argue for a radically different approach to let machines learn to fully understand a natural language, as I believe the current exploitation of pure text-based methods is reaching a ceiling and will not yield full language comprehension. Instead, I propose to use gamification of language in an interactive multi-sensory virtual game. 2024 update: in the era of large language models, I still believe in what I wrote in this post early 2020. In short, human languag

In part 1, I wrote about the various concerns we as society should have about the non-transparent use of big personal data. The main issue at hand is the invisible but increasingly invasive type of manipulation through personal profiling based on a constant monitoring of our online behaviour. How do we make sure that we as individuals are not becoming slaves of marketing and stay critical about what we perceive in a concrete world? One thing is certain. In a world where many

I recently saw "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" - a documentary named after American author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff's book released in October last year. Its title is a provocative description for our era's paradox. Where data is the new gold, on the backs of people naively giving away rights to be monitored by commercial parties. I can say the documentary discussed things I did not even know about. For instance, Pokémon Go actually being a Google founded "start-up" (

In the realm of what artificial intelligence (AI) can (not) do compared to humans, I want to share some thoughts in this post on something that has fascinated me lately: the experience of beauty. Have you ever visited a museum and encountered a piece of art that was so beautiful that it elicited an emotional response from you without you being able to control it? Or maybe have you ever seen someone so pretty, you simply stared at them for a moment in admiration? Let's assume