So here's an essay I wrote for Aeon magazine some years ago about consciousness and zombies. It's about the history of how "consciousness" came to be considered a scientific problem. It wasn't always so.
The industry’s been incredibly successful in conflating all things that could be called AI with LLMs in a way that’s really tough. There are plenty physics/math/materials papers that use ML and similar techniques that don’t require industry collaboration and can produce good work, as you say, but if you call that AI today, especially in a headline of a paper (I work at a science mag), it ends up adding to the noise about LLMs, almost as if ChatGPT did it. To be fair, this is on journalists too, we were at an earlier time way too eager to call everything AI, but at places that don’t have a science desk, or cover the business of science more than science itself, industry PR was more than happy to do their part in confusing and conflating too
The list proposed BY SEE WOO contains a number of proposals which use the word '' ''Intuition '' and because oF that can be considered as among the list of fake news as influenced by Silicon Valley's business ;
I agree completely with HaIrer's interview :See'' KANTOR 'Problem '' in an older message from Michael ..
Indeed, I can't see any unicorns here https://openscilm.allen.ai/ (arxiv paper here https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14199 , and two recent (last week) articles in Nature here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10072-4 and there https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00347-9 ). Just about literature reviewing, though.
Hey M - you may enjoy this piece on how post-structuralism applies to LLM's by my friend David Berreby
https://robots4therestofus.substack.com/p/no-thoughts-no-desires-yet-it-speaks
Thank you! This ties in neatly with the zombie theme. The recent article in Nature claiming that LLMs have AGI
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00285-6
is just another way of arguing that humans are zombies.
I just read the Nature piece. Thanks for link. Shame on them for publishing such idiocy!! I want to do a SS on why AGI is such an idiot term. Sigh.
So here's an essay I wrote for Aeon magazine some years ago about consciousness and zombies. It's about the history of how "consciousness" came to be considered a scientific problem. It wasn't always so.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem
The industry’s been incredibly successful in conflating all things that could be called AI with LLMs in a way that’s really tough. There are plenty physics/math/materials papers that use ML and similar techniques that don’t require industry collaboration and can produce good work, as you say, but if you call that AI today, especially in a headline of a paper (I work at a science mag), it ends up adding to the noise about LLMs, almost as if ChatGPT did it. To be fair, this is on journalists too, we were at an earlier time way too eager to call everything AI, but at places that don’t have a science desk, or cover the business of science more than science itself, industry PR was more than happy to do their part in confusing and conflating too
just commenting to recommend the Decameron as a text about surviving plague
The list proposed BY SEE WOO contains a number of proposals which use the word '' ''Intuition '' and because oF that can be considered as among the list of fake news as influenced by Silicon Valley's business ;
I agree completely with HaIrer's interview :See'' KANTOR 'Problem '' in an older message from Michael ..