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Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has released the seventh annual issue of its comprehensive AI Index report, written by an interdisciplinary team of academic and industrial experts. This edition has more content than previous editions, reflecting the rapid evolution of AI and its growing significance in our everyday lives. It examines everything from which sectors use AI the most to which country is most nervous about losing jobs to AI. But one of the most salient takeaways from the report is AI’s performance when pitted against humans. For people that haven't been paying attention, AI has already beaten us in a frankly shocking number of significant benchmarks. In 2015, it surpassed us in image classification, then basic reading comprehension (2017), visual reasoning (2020), and natural language inference (2021). AI is getting so clever, so fast, that many of the benchmarks used to this point are now obsolete. Indeed, researchers in this area are scrambling to develop new, more challenging benchmarks. To put it simply, AIs are getting so good at passing tests that now we need new tests – not to measure competence, but to highlight areas where humans and AIs are still different, and find where we still have an advantage.

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 Founded in 2022 in Berkeley, California, Profluent has been exploring ways to use AI to study and generate new proteins that aren't found in nature. This week, the team trumpeted a major success with the release of an AI-derived protein termed OpenCRISPR-1. The protein is meant to work in the CRISPR gene-editing system, a process in which a protein cuts open a piece of DNA and repairs or replaces a gene. CRISPR has been actively in use for about 15 years, with its creators bagging the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2020. It has shown promise as a biomedical tool that can do everything from restoring vision to combating rare diseases; as an agricultural tool that can improve the vitamin D content of tomatoes, and slash the flowering time of trees from decades to months; and much more.

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There is a strong connection between inflammation and melancholy. Depressed people tend to have higher circulating cytokine levels, which contribute to the stereotypical symptoms of malaise: tiredness, discomfort and angst. Isolation and rest, in turn, help the body recover. This link between the immune system and emotional well-being can help explain why we are drawn to happy people. Their faces and body language demonstrate that they are healthy. Not only are they unlikely to carry a lot of pathogens, but some of their beneficial microbes could be transferred to us – for example through kissing.

Beauty as a biological construct - Aporia

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As one of nature’s creations, we’re not exempt from the unforgiving pressure to stand out in the crowd. Like the peacock, we desire to be noticed and liked. And like the peahen observing him, we gauge the characteristics of potential mates. Females tend to be more selective, particularly with respect to short-term mating, as they are the ones who bear the major costs of reproduction. Males work to get them swooning with songs, bright displays and feats of daring. Maverick and Goose performing “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” in the original Top Gun movie is an obvious example. One thing men and women alike look for in both mates and associates is absence of infection and disease.

Beauty as a biological construct - Aporia

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In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun. The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited today, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before. For decades, there’s been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to us — the great apes, for example — have conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own. In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknowledge that consciousness may also be widespread among animals that are very different from us, including invertebrates with completely different and far simpler nervous systems.

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Eating a fatty, sugary Western diet (read: junk food) during the crucial years of brain development impairs memory long-term, new research has found. Caused by a reduction in a neurotransmitter associated with Alzheimer’s disease, the memory impairment wasn’t reversed by switching to a healthy diet in early adulthood. Synonymous with junk food, the Western diet has deservedly gotten a bad rap regarding its impact on physical and mental health. Broadly defined as a diet high in processed foods, saturated fats, and simple sugars, it’s associated with excessive caloric intake, obesity, and metabolic dysfunction. But how does eating a Western diet impact the functioning of a growing brain? Adolescent brains are a ‘work in progress’. Between the ages of 10 and 24, the brain undergoes significant changes that are greatly influenced by factors such as genetics, hormones, sleep, and diet. Previous studies have linked diet, particularly the consumption of a Western diet, with cognitive dysfunction. A new study by researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) has examined how a high-fat, sugary diet damages the teen brain, affecting memory. They conducted their research on juvenile and adolescent rats.

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Where is the mind, Arendt asks, when it withdraws from the world of appearances? It is “Nowhere”: “Though known to us only in inseparable union with a body that is at home in the world of appearances by virtue of having arrived one day and knowing that one day it will depart, the invisible ego is, strictly speaking, Nowhere.” According to Arendt, to truly think, we have to step away from the world of appearance and retreat into ourselves. Once this retreat is effected, we can pull the idea for contemplation into our mind. We move into our mind and out of the body — and there, away from others, and, in a sense, away from ourselves, we can truly practise thinking.

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence

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Hi there, random question but what happened to the space collective site? Is there any way I can view the posts and content/other ways I can access it? All the links are broken. I always intended to dig in but seems I missed my opportunity

Hello there, I am sorry to say that the space collective site went offline 2 years ago, and the posts are unavailable (you may find some of mine and others posted on different sites). I write mainly on Medium and some publications such as Substack.

[wildcat2030]

Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.

What if we lost our smartest 5%? - Aporia

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 vertebrates. More than a research project, oVert was a collaboration between like-minded specialists across 25 institutions whose sole objective was to add value to museum collections by making them more widely available. Importantly, these images provide an insight that would only otherwise be obtained by destructive dissection and tissue sampling.

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For the first time in human history, there's a non-zero chance, and maybe even a probability, that the vast majority of human work might simply not be needed within a decade or two – and a real pathway to get there, that multiple multi-billion dollar companies are pushing toward with all their resources.

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Unless you’ve had the relevant experiences, what it is like to be a person or an animal very different from yourself is, in a certain fundamental way, inaccessible to you. It isn’t that you can’t imagine something in place of the experience you haven’t had. It’s that this act of imagining isn’t enough to let you know what it is really like to be an octopus, or to be a slave, or to be blind. You need to have the experience itself to know what it is really like. This brings out another, somewhat less familiar fact about the relationship between knowledge and experience: just as knowledge about the experience of one individual can be inaccessible to another individual, what you can know about yourself at one time can be inaccessible to you at another time.

The Vampire Problem: A Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Paradox of Transformative Experience – The Marginalian

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A team of researchers including Steven Phelps of the University of Texas at Austin has created the first brain-wide map of regions that are active in prairie voles during mating and pair bonding. The researchers found that bonding voles experience a storm of brain activity distributed across 68 distinct brain regions that make up seven brainwide circuits. The brain activity correlates with three stages of behavior: mating, bonding, and the emergence of a stable, enduring bond. Most of these brain regions the researchers identified were not previously associated with bonding, so the map reveals new places to look in the human brain to understand how we form and maintain close relationships. Earlier studies concluded that male and female brains often use fundamentally different mechanisms to produce the same behaviors, such as mating and nurturing offspring. But in this study, bonding males and females had nearly identical patterns of brain activity. “That was a surprise,” says Phelps, a professor of integrative biology and senior author of the new study in the journal eLife. “Hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone are important for sexual, aggressive, and parental behaviors, so the prevailing hypothesis was that brain activity during mating and bonding would also be different between the sexes.”

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While current diagnostic definitions of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are relatively new, the general condition has been identified by clinicians under a variety of names for centuries. Recent genetic studies have revealed the condition to be highly heritable, meaning the majority of those with the condition have genetically inherited it from their parents. Depending on diagnostic criteria, anywhere from two to 16% of children can be classified as having ADHD. In fact, increasing rates of diagnosis over recent years have led to some clinicians arguing the condition is overdiagnosed. What is relatively clear, however, is that the behavioural characteristics that underpin ADHD have been genetically present in human populations for potentially quite a long time. And that has led some researchers to wonder what the condition's evolutionary benefits could be.

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I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force – The Marginalian

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There’s a quote by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, who said: “Human beings are to independent thinking as cats are to swimming. They can do it, but they prefer not to.”

Who Controls Your Thoughts? - Nautilus

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‘metaphor permeates all discourse, ordinary and special, and we should have a hard time finding a purely literal paragraph anywhere.’ Metaphors are (metaphorically) woven into the fabric of our language and thought, shaping how we grasp and articulate abstract concepts. We should therefore feel free to prudently explore alternative metaphors and judge whether they perform better. A collective effort to notice and change the metaphors we use has enormous potential to reduce individual and societal harm.

How changing the metaphors we use can change the way we think | Aeon Essays