by Ali Minai As AI insinuates itself into our world and our lives with unprecedented speed, it’s important to ask: What sort of thing are we creating, and is this the best way to create it? What we are trying to create, for the first time in human history, is nothing less than a new…

by Ali Minai Artificial intelligence – AI – is hot right now, and its hottest part may be fear of the risks it poses. Discussion of these risks has grown exponentially in recent months, much of it centered around the threat of existential risk, i.e., the risk that AI would, in the foreseeable future, supersede…

by Ali Minai But nature is a stranger yet: The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost. —Emily Dickinson, “What Mystery Pervades a Well” The first article of this 2-part series laid out the idea of emergence in complex systems, discussed how the appearance of abilities such…

by Ali Minai Part II of this article can now be read here. One of the most interesting debates within the larger discussion around large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 is whether they are just mindless generators of plausible text derived from their training – sometimes termed “stochastic parrots” – or systems with a…

by Ali Minai How intelligent is ChatGPT? That question has loomed large ever since OpenAI released the chatbot late in 2022. The simple answer to the question is, “No, it is not intelligent at all.” That is the answer that AI researchers, philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists have more or less reached a consensus on.…

by Ali Minai Recently, I asked the students in my class whether they had used ChatGPT, the artificially intelligent chatbot recently loosed upon the world by OpenAI. My question was motivated by a vague thought that I might ask them to use the system as a whimsical diversion within an assignment. Somewhat to my surprise,…

by Ali Minai The events in Afghanistan over the last week are being seen as yet another “hinge moment” in history. The images of helicopters evacuating personnel from embassies and people chasing aircraft in desperation to get on them have been seared into the memories of all who have seen them. As a person from…

by Ali Minai Among all the fascinating mythical creatures that populate the folklore of various cultures, one that stands out is the golem – an artificial, half-formed human-like creature that comes to us from Jewish folklore. Though the idea goes back much further, the most famous golem is the one said to have been created…

by Ali Minai “Sadequain!” The very name is like a magic word that triggers a tumult of images in the mind. Arguably, no Pakistani artist has elicited more admiration, evoked more passion, and received more adulation than Saiyid Sadquain Ahmad Naqvi, the subject – and really, the hero – of the book “Sadequain: Artist and…

by Ali Minai One of the most interesting and memorable characters in sci-fi films is the T-1000, the shape-shifting, nearly indestructible robot from the classic film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are other, less prominent examples of shape-shifting intelligent beings in sci-fi – for example Odo, the chief of security on Star…

by Ali Minai Given where we find ourselves in this late November of 2020, it is hard to think of a book more relevant or timely than The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral. The author is the David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.…

by Ali Minai But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see,  I guess an’ fear! —Robert Burns, “To a Mouse” On January 24, 2017 – four days after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States – I sat down at my…

by Ali Minai I came to Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon by Lesley Adkins (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003) because I was looking to read about Henry Rawlinson – someone I had wondered about and admired for a long time. Copying the immense and inaccessible trilingual cuneiform inscription of…

by Ali Minai “I’ll just google it again”, said my daughter when I asked her to remember something. It was a very reasonable suggestion, but it led me down an interesting line of thought about the nature of knowing and its recent transformation. Much has been said and written about how the Internet has changed…

by Ali Minai Like most people who have time to think in these stressful days, I have been thinking about life after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed – mostly at a personal level, but also a little about the world at large. This essay is an attempt to put some of these thoughts down as…

by Ali Minai I must admit that when I first flipped through Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia by Albena Azmanova, it did not look too inviting. The blurbs on the jacket did nothing to reassure me, suggesting that this was yet another post-Marxist critique of greedy…

by Ali Minai For the last three years, I have struggled with a dilemma: As a reasonable, quite liberal person, what should I think of my 60 million fellow Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and the vast majority of whom continue to support him today? Normally, a personal dilemma is a private…

by Ali Minai Your love stirs the ocean into reckless storms. At your feet, the clouds drop their pearls. Dark smoke rises in the sky, a fire burns Where your love’s lightning strikes the earth. These energetic lines open Moon and Sun: Rumi’s Rubaiyat, Zara Houshmand’s brilliant translation of selected ruba’iyat – quatrains – by…

by Ali Minai Sometimes, history moves faster than thought. Something like that is happening in the United States in these early days of fall. Though the season is taking longer than normal to turn, the political season has changed more quickly than anyone expected. The opinions of last week – such as the long article…