A new book is out by the journalist Tom Chivers, author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy and How to Read Numbers. The Wall Street Journal likes it. Kirkus Reviews calls it “An ingenious introduction to the mathematics of rational thinking.” Oliver Burkeman wrote, “Life is shot through with uncertainty, but in this fascinating,…
Category: Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
The Horserace Part 3: “The ‘Paul’s Dead’ Election”
I have frequently here decried the quality of our national political media outlets, writing that they focus on the horserace, not the impacts electing one or another candidate might bring to all of us. Many people have jumped (surely unknowingly) on my bandwagon, saying they want “less about the horserace,…
Rigorous Imagination, Scenario 1: AI and 2024
September 18, 2023 Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the most discussed issues of the calendar year. As it happens, it’s a nearly perfect test case for the approach outlined in my forthcoming book, Fatal Certainty: How a Cult of Prediction Made the Twenty-First Century an Era of Strategic Shock…
The Truly Strategic May Be the Intrinsically Human (AI vs. Rigorous Imagination)
[excerpt from Fatal Certainty] … Every algorithmic predictive system ultimately must be created out of whole cloth, its equations, variables, operands, etc. representing some reality completely outside of our computer systems, which we would like to predict. And every element of an algorithmic system represents an assumption about how something…