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Update: Princeton appears to be GRE optional for this cycle. https://gradschool.princeton.edu/admission-onboarding/prepare/gre
I have used two platforms I have thought reasonably good, Expensify and Ramp. Both should integrate with most university ERPs…
John was my undergrad advisor. I wouldn’t have gone to graduate school without his suggesting it, and his help with…
He was a serious and brilliant thinker and writer, whose work was not only profoundly insightful but also an immense…
Sad news. I only met him a couple of times (he was one of those US philosophers with strong Australasian…
This is a wonderful corrective to panic over people who can’t distinguish between real paintings and AI-generated paintings — the…
This isn’t meant as a comment on Pangram specifically, but doesn’t putting papers through an AI tool risk ‘leaking’ the…
…at IAITV. And here is a much better obituary of Dennett (i.e., no philosophical mistakes!) than most of those in the popular media (including the NYT).
I read the obituary in arstechnica that Brian links to above.
I recall Dennett as a New Atheist, but otherwise, as a non-philosopher, I am not familiar with his work.
I'm curious: in all the comments in the previous thread, no one mentions Dennett's politics.
Is it in bad taste to ask (I have no idea) what were his political positions?
Prof. Dennett was a chronologically 'veteran' philosopher who nevertheless at least gave the appearance of having retained the ability to be on the cutting edge of much technological and scientific understanding, most saliently and recently as regards the perils of AI. On the one hand, one is presented with his life-long intellectual pursuit of the demystification of human consciousness (or consciousness as such), yet (albeit not necessarily paradoxically) I can't help but be astonished by the quasi-extraordinary powers he seems to ascribe to presently existing AI. As for example in this recent interview, wherein, per my understanding, he describes the present potential or indeed occurrence of AI as an invasive species (potentially) quite alien from humanity but simultaneously its inimitable mimic: "AI systems, like all software, are replicable with high fidelity and unbelievably fast mutations. If you have high fidelity replication and mutations, then you have evolution, and evolution can get out of hand, as it has in the past many times.
"Darwin wonderfully pointed out that the key to domestication is control of reproduction. There are species that hang around human houses and farms that are synanthropic. They evolved to live well with human beings, but we don’t control their replication. Bedbugs, rats, mice, pigeons—those are synanthropic, but not domesticated. Feral species are ones that were domesticated and then go feral. They don’t have our interests at heart at all, and they can be extremely destructive—think of feral pigs in various parts of the world.
"Feral synanthropic software has arrived—today, not next week, not in 10 years. It’s here now. And if we don’t act swiftly and take some fairly dramatic steps to curtail it, we’re toast.
"We will have created the viruses—the mind viruses, the large-scale memes—that will destroy civilization by destroying trust and by destroying testimony and evidence. We won’t know what to trust."
https://now.tufts.edu/2023/10/02/daniel-dennetts-been-thinking-about-thinking-and-ai
Prof. Dennett's latterly sibylline missives vis a vis the newly inaugurated but already, according to his understanding, quasi-fully emergent properties, qua perils, of AI strike me as both convincing proof of the undiminished quality of his philosophical lucidity 'to the last,' whose message is all the more exigent concerning the nature of the topic at hand: intelligence as mimesis, mimesis qua intelligence, the conflation of knowledge with subterfuge, so both constitute one and the same to the inestimable detriment of the human species. AI as constitutive of that which, as Wittgenstein so famously put it, "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent," i.e. an intelligence so alien to man that it becomes quite literally ineffable to the aforesaid.
Reading these excerpts from the TuftsNow interview, I was puzzled about exactly why AI, versus other kids of evolution that have occurred "in the past many times," is particularly fearsome. I assumed that the internet itself, for example, or the passé plague of PhotoShopping, both of which also destroy trust and reliable evidence, are distinct from new AI in a way that motivated Dennett's fears. I have only a superficial, layperson's understanding of the differences, and it is largely mediated by a monumental hype-machine, which is also destructive of trust. So I wonder how much of the hoopla is malarkey. It turns out that control of reproduction, mentioned above in the excerpts, is the key to Dennett's answer. Elsewhere in the interview he states,
"This is cultural evolution. My dear friend and colleague Susan Blackmore, who wrote the book The Meme Machine, has been talking since the time she wrote that book about a third kind of replicator, which she calls 'tremes'—technological memes that don’t depend on being replicated by human minds, but can be replicated by other software, taking the human being right out of the picture.
"We’ve known about this for 20 or 30 years, but now recent experiments have basically shown that this is not just possible in principle, it’s possible right now."
Seems to me that we should wield the power of AI to take only some human beings out of the picture, those like myself who are over 30 years of age, whom nobody should trust anyway.
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