|
TESCREAL
TESCREAL is an acronym neologism proposed by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres that stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalist ideology, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins. They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered around artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech. Origin Gebru and Torres proposed the term "TESCREAL" in 2023, first using it in a draft of a paper titled "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence". ''First Monday'' published the pap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Timnit Gebru
Timnit Gebru (Amharic and ; 1982/1983) is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. She is a co-founder of Black in AI, an advocacy group that has pushed for more Black roles in AI development and research. She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). In December 2020, public controversy erupted over the circumstances surrounding Gebru's departure from Google, where she was technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team. Gebru had coauthored a paper on the risks of large language models (LLMs) acting as stochastic parrots, and submitted it for publication. According to Jeff Dean, the paper was submitted without waiting for Google's internal review, which then asserted that it ignored too much relevant research. Google management requested that Gebru either withdraw the paper or remove the names of all the authors employed by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Big Tech
Big Tech, also referred to as the Tech Giants or Tech Titans, is a collective term for the largest and most influential technology companies in the world. The label draws a parallel to similar classifications in other industries, such as "Big Oil" or "Big Tobacco". In the United States, it commonly denotes the five dominant firms—Alphabet Inc., Alphabet, Amazon (company), Amazon, Apple Inc., Apple, Meta Platforms, Meta, and Microsoft—often called the "Big Five". An expanded grouping, sometimes termed the "Magnificent Seven", includes Nvidia and Tesla, Inc., Tesla. The concept of Big Tech can also extend to the major Chinese technology firms—Baidu, Alibaba Group, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi—collectively referred to as BATX. History In the late 20th century, IBM, Apple, Inc., Apple and Microsoft dominated the IT industry. After the dot-com bubble wiped out most of the Nasdaq Composite stock market index, surviving tech startup company, startups expanded their market shar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Effective Altruism
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called , follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement gained popularity outside academia, spurring the creation of research centers, advisory organizations, and charities, which collectively have donated several hundred million dollars. Effective altruists emphasize impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social and economic inequality ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rationalist Community
The rationalist community is a 21st century movement that formed around a group of internet blogs, primarily LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten (formerly known as Slate Star Codex). The movement initially gained prominence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its members seek to use rationality to avoid cognitive biases. Common interests include transhumanism, statistics, effective altruism, and mitigating existential risk from artificial general intelligence. Beliefs The community began with a simple idea: "Each day, we aim to be less wrong about the world than the day before." They refer to rationality as the art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions. Public perception and media coverage focus on the group's use of Bayesian inference, which some adherents claim is the "least imperfect" way to think. Tara Burton wrote in ''The New Atlantis (journal), The New Atlantis'': "Central to the rationalist worldview was the idea that nothing — not social niceti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Prize-winners being featured since its inception. In print since 1845, it is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. ''Scientific American'' is owned by Springer Nature, which is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. History ''Scientific American'' was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus Porter (painter), Rufus Porter in 1845 as a four-page weekly newspaper. The first issue of the large-format New York City newspaper was released on August 28, 1845. Throughout its early years, much emphasis was placed on reports of what was going on at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Patent Office. It also reported on a broad range of inventions including perpetual motion machines, an 1860 devi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Space Colonization
Space colonization (or extraterrestrial colonization) is the human settlement, settlement or colonization of outer space and astronomical bodies. The concept in its broad sense has been applied to any permanent human presence in space, such as a space habitat or other extraterrestrial settlements. It may involve a process of occupation or control for exploitation, such as Space mining, extraterrestrial mining. Making territorial claims in space is prohibited by international space law, defining space as a Common heritage of humanity, common heritage. International space law has had the goal to prevent colonial claims and militarization of space, and has advocated the installation of international regimes to regulate access to and sharing of space, particularly for specific locations such as the limited space of Geostationary orbit#Orbital allocation, geostationary orbit or the Moon. To date, no permanent space settlement other than temporary Space habitat (facility), space ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Document Journal
''Document Journal'' is an independent culture, arts, and fashion magazine founded in New York in 2012. Published biannually in the spring and fall, the magazine is printed in book format and distributed globally. ''Document'' focuses on American and global culture, and features prominent voices of art, literature, and fashion. ''Documents editor-in-chief and creative director is Nick Vogelson. Notable Contributors * Inez & Vinoodh * Mert and Marcus * Juergen Teller * James Valeri * Joe McKenna * Bruce Weber * Mario Sorrenti * Grace Coddington * Hedi Slimane * Richard Prince * Collier Schorr * Craig McDean * Larry Clark * Hans-Ulrich Obrist * Rei Kawakubo * Hilton Als Hilton Als (born 1960) is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for ''The New Yo ... * Klaus Biesenbach * Tyler Mitchell Externa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born 18 October 1964) is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy. Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. Between 1994 and 2004, he was also an active writer for the magazine '' Computer Shopper'' and was responsible for its monthly Linux column. He stopped writing for the magazine to devote more time to novels. However, he continues to publish freelance articles on the Internet. Early life and education Stross was born in Leeds, England. He showed an early interest in writing and wrote his first science fiction story at age 12. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Pharmacy in 1986 and qualified as a pharmacist in 1987. In 1989, he enrolled at University of Bradford for a post-graduate degree in computer science. In 1990, he went to work as a technical author and programmer. In 2000, he began working as a writer full-time, as a technical writer at first, but then became successful as a fiction writer. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Existential Risk Studies
Existential risk studies (ERS) is a field of studies focused on the definition and theorization of "''existential risks''", its ethical implications and the related strategies of long-term survival. Existential risks are diversely defined as global kinds of calamity that have the capacity of inducing the extinction of intelligent earthling life, such as humans, or, at least, a severe limitation of their ''potential'', as defined by ERS theorists. The field development and expansion can be divided in waves according to its conceptual changes as well as its evolving relationship with related fields and theories, such as futures studies, disaster studies, AI safety, effective altruism and longtermism. The historical precursors of existential risks studies can be found in early 19th-century thought around human extinction and the more recent models and theories of global catastrophic risk that date mainly to the Cold War period, especially the thinking around a hypothetical nuclear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acronym
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation. For some, an initialism or alphabetism connotes this general meaning, and an ''acronym'' is a subset with a narrower definition; an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters. In this sense, ''NASA'' () is an acronym, but ''United States, USA'' () is not. The broader sense of ''acronym'', ignoring pronunciation, is its original meaning and in common use. . Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term ''acronym'' can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and they do not agree on acronym space (punctuation), spacing, letter case, casing, and punctuation. The phrase that the acronym stands for is called its . The of an acron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman (born January 4, 1973) is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the 2013 book '' Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection,'' which won the Zócalo Book Prize. In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts. Education Zuckerman is a graduate of Williams College, where he received a B.A. in Philosophy in 1993. He then spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Legon, Ghana and the National Theatre of Ghana in Accra, where he studied ethnomusicology and percussion. Career Zuckerman was one of the first staff members of Tripod.com, one of the first successful "dot com" enterprises, where he worked from 1994 to 1999. There, he was in charge of the design and the implementatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial General Intelligence
Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Some researchers argue that state‑of‑the‑art large language models already exhibit early signs of AGI‑level capability, while others maintain that genuine AGI has not yet been achieved. AGI is conceptually distinct from artificial superintelligence (ASI), which would outperform the best human abilities across every domain by a wide margin. AGI is considered one of the definitions of Chinese room#Strong AI vs. AI research, strong AI. Unlike artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), whose competence is confined to well‑defined tasks, an AGI system can generalise knowledge, transfer skills between domains, and solve novel problems without task‑specific reprogramming. The concept does not, in principle, require the system to be an autonomous agent; a static model— ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
