Michael Timothy Bennett & Elija Perrier in The Conversation:

On December 20, OpenAI’s o3 system scored 85% on the ARC-AGI benchmark, well above the previous AI best score of 55% and on par with the average human score. It also scored well on a very difficult mathematics test.

Creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is the stated goal of all the major AI research labs. At first glance, OpenAI appears to have at least made a significant step towards this goal.

While scepticism remains, many AI researchers and developers feel something just changed. For many, the prospect of AGI now seems more real, urgent and closer than anticipated. Are they right?

To understand what the o3 result means, you need to understand what the ARC-AGI test is all about. In technical terms, it’s a test of an AI system’s “sample efficiency” in adapting to something new – how many examples of a novel situation the system needs to see to figure out how it works.

More here.

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Chelsea Follett at Human Progress:

The writer P. J. O’Rourke famously quipped, “When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.” So let us take his advice. James Wynbrandt’s The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces provides plenty to chew on. As the New York Times Book Review put it, “Wynbrandt has clearly done his homework.”

Our ancestors’ teeth were in an appalling state. As Wynbrandt points out while quoting the Old Testament, calling a woman’s teeth white as sheep and noting that none were missing once counted as high praise worthy of a love poem. After all, healthy teeth were far rarer in the past than today. The first mass-produced bristle toothbrush did not appear until around 1780 in England during that country’s industrialization. Our preindustrial forebears had only a primitive understanding of what was causing their teeth to rot, fall out, and constantly ache.

More here.

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George Lauder in Harvard Magazine:

Sharks present an interesting case study because unlike other fast swimmers such as tuna or swordfish, which have smooth skin surfaces, shark skin is rough—covered in teeth-like structures called denticles. Although ichthyologists have known for decades that denticles likely hold the key to a shark’s ability to quickly and efficiently move through the water, how they contribute to speed remained a mystery.

Lauder’s laboratory ran a series of experiments last summer that used small pieces of shark skin to explore how they interact with water. Samples were placed in tanks that move water over the skin at a known rate. The researchers added particles to the water so they could see with microscopic imaging systems how it flowed over the denticles. When they analyzed the resulting data to calculate the friction at the interface between skin and water, they found that the water flow created small fluid vortices that reduced drag. Lauder compares the phenomenon to the dimples in a golf ball, which enable golfers to hit the ball about twice as far as a completely smooth ball. “You would think that you would want to be as smooth as possible to be most effective at moving through a dense fluid like water,” he says, “but actually you don’t want to be as smooth as possible. That roughness really matters for efficiency.” Lauder and his colleagues are now using their findings to “print” artificial denticles with properties similar to shark skin that could one day coat the surface of underwater robots to help make them more efficient swimmers.

More here.

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Kayti Burt in Time Magazine:

It’s been three long years since Squid Game first premiered on Netflix to become the streamer’s most-watched TV series, ever. The Korean-language drama was an unexpected cultural phenomenon, drawing one in four Americans into its tale of deadly competition. That being said, you would be forgiven for not remembering all of what happened in Season 1 ahead of the second season, which begins streaming on Dec. 26. For those who are a bit fuzzy on where we left protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), who the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) is, and the basic rules of the titular game, here is a recap with everything you need to know heading into Season 2.

What to remember about the protagonist Gi-hun, aka Player 456

While Squid Game is an ensemble drama, the story thus far has centered around Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456. When we meet Gi-hun in Season 1, he is an affable deadbeat dad who has to borrow money from his elderly mom to take his daughter out for her birthday. While he struggles with a gambling addiction and the debt he has accumulated as a result, he is a good guy who tries his best to be there for his mom, daughter, and friends—but he often fails. When Gi-hun is approached by The Recruiter (The Trunk’s Gong Yoo) to take part in a game with the chance to win billions of won, he sees it as an opportunity to finally set his life right.

More here.

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The Editors at n+1:

When exactly did we stop hearing the word postmodernism? Fredric Jameson’s death this fall at the mighty age of 90 left us wondering. (The question reemerged a few weeks later with the reelection of Donald Trump, who for all his ominous contemporaneity is trailed by a permanent miasma of the tacky, made-for-TV ’80s.) The subtitle of Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has enjoyed an enduring popularity into the 21st century, with academic treatises on this or that form-and-content dialectic recycling the formula like they’re trying to solve the 1980s landfill crisis.* But the headline term now has the status of relic, an outgrown holdover from a wavier time. Art critics we know report avoiding postmodern as a descriptor unless writing in the past tense; academics abandoned it years ago somewhere on the battlefields of the theory wars. In literature and film, one encounters rather less metafiction and upcycled kitsch than might be expected in our AI- and IP-laden times. One recent exception, Francis Ford Coppola’s brashly pomo production Megalopolis, confirmed our suspicion that only architects still embrace the P-word — architects, and a smattering of far-right YouTubers, who decry “postmodernism” as a gateway drug to low-IQ wokeness, immorality, and (only sort of wrongly) Marxism.

more here.

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John Whitfield at Aeon Magazine:

It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.

In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known. This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war – some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.

more here.

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Aaron Horvath in The Hedgehog Review:

In 2017, the MIT Media Lab launched MyGoodness, an online game billed as a way to teach players to “maximize the impact of [their] charitable donations.”¹ The game’s premise is simple. In each of ten rounds, you’re given one hundred dollars and asked to choose between two charities, each representing a different mix of characteristics. In one round, for instance, Charity A provides clean water to thirty-six adult women in South Asia and Charity B provides nutritious meals to twenty-eight senior men in Eastern Europe. In another round, Charity A provides medication to thirty-one girls in Southern Africa and Charity B provides medication to one boy—a family member of yours—in North America. The options are endearingly illustrated. Nutritious meals are depicted as bowls of rice, medication is depicted as a first-aid kit, and beneficiaries are depicted as yellow potato-like people wearing tattered clothes and forlorn expressions. When you pick a charity, the chosen potato people smile and throw their arms aloft as confetti fills the air. You’ve just saved their lives. The others aren’t so lucky. While their counterparts celebrate, the ones you’ve passed over turn blue and fall off the screen dead because of your decision.

For all its cartoonish simplicity, MyGoodness adamantly positions charity as a series of rational calculations with life-and-death consequences. To be an effective giver, the site explains, your contributions should “result in saving the maximum possible number of lives.” You should research your options and let dispassionate analysis guide your open wallet. You shouldn’t let biases like geographic proximity or personal relationships steer your largess.

More here.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Evolution was a “training process” selecting for reproductive success. But humans’ goals don’t entirely center around reproducing. We sort of want reproduction itself (many people want to have children on a deep level). But we also correlates of reproduction, both direct (eg having sex), indirect (dating, getting married), and counterproductive (porn, masturbation). Other drives are even less direct, aimed at targets that aren’t related to reproduction at all but which in practice caused us to reproduce more (hunger, self-preservation, social status, career success). On the fringe, we have fake correlates of the indirect correlates – some people spend their whole lives trying to build a really good coin collection; others get addicted to heroin.

In the same way, a coding AI’s motivational structure will be a scattershot collection of goals – weakly centered around answering questions and completing tasks, but only in the same way that human goals are weakly centered around sex.

More here.

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Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

One afternoon in the early 1980s, Tariq Ali, wearing only a towel, leapt into a room in Private Eye’s Soho offices. His mission was to liberate the magazine’s editor, Richard Ingrams, from a tiresome interview with Daily Mail hack Lynda-Lee Potter. “Mr Ingrosse, sir,” said Ali, posing as an Indian guru, “Time for meditation. Please remove all clothes.”

It’s a terrible shame Potter is dead because I’d love to have heard her side of the story. Did she, as Ali reports, nearly faint before making her excuses and leaving? Was she taken in by the ruse that concluded with Ingrams and Ali giggling over pastries in the nearby Maison Bertaux? Or did she, as seems more likely, immediately recognise Britain’s foremost Lahore-born, Oxford-educated Trotskyist intellectual, after whom the Rolling Stones reportedly named their song Street Fighting Man – if only from his fabulous moustache? We will never know.

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Stopping by Woods

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Laura Kipnis in The New Republic:

In a 1939 essay, the critic Philip Rahv argued that there have been two main types in American literature: the solemn and semi-clerical, which he associates with Henry James, and the exuberant, open-air lowlife embodied in Walt Whitman. Between them, James and Whitman represent the distinction between “life conceived as a discipline” and “life conceived as an opportunity.” Knowingly or not, Lili Anolik’s dual biography, Didion & Babitz, endeavors to revive Rahv’s opposition, this time for the ladies. Her protagonists, Joan Didion and the lesser-known writer-party girl Eve Babitz, met in Los Angeles in 1967, and were friends for perhaps seven years with, according to Anolik, lasting effects on American letters and culture.

In Anolik’s update on the Rahvian opposites, Didion was manufactured and careerist, as deliberate a creation as a character in one of her books, leading a life of dull industry while leeching off Babitz’s vitality. The exuberant Eve, who never passed up a drug, a bed partner, or an adventure, couldn’t be bothered with reputation.

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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

OpenAI’s new o3 artificial intelligence model has achieved a breakthrough high score on a prestigious AI reasoning test called the ARC Challenge, inspiring some AI fans to speculate that o3 has achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). But even as ARC Challenge organisers described o3’s achievement as a major milestone, they also cautioned that it has not won the competition’s grand prize – and it is only one step on the path towards AGI, a term for hypothetical future AI with human-like intelligence.

The o3 model is the latest in a line of AI releases that follow on from the large language models powering ChatGPT. “This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models,” said François Chollet, an engineer at Google and the main creator of the ARC Challenge, in a blog post.

More here.

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Nick Marx & Matt Sienkiewicz at The Conversation:

While Jimmy Kimmel cries and Jon Stewart rants, the right wing in the U.S. has successfully depicted itself as the new home for free speech and cutting edge comedy. We explored this development in our book, “That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them.”

The right has become a home for comedians not by making political arguments through jokes, but by positing that there are funnier things to do than to argue.

Liberal comedy and political satire have stuck to the same formula of Stewart’s “The Daily Show” for much of the 21st century.

It goes something like this: A sarcastic, eloquent host uses meticulously researched data to describe a pressing social issue, and then delivers a punchline directed at right-wing hypocrisy. The resultant pairing of righteous laughter and anger has been repeated by “The Colbert Report,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” and “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” among other comedy programs.

These satirical shows filled the void left by an increasingly profit-driven news media. However, they have come to prioritize political preaching at the expense of laughs.

More here.

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