D.J. MacLennan

Image ©Mark Tomlinson Concerned about viruses, porn, and spam choking up the internet? Just wait until the AI rats get to work. As bioethicist James Hughes has pointed out, we should not assume that malign forms of artificial intelligence that may emerge would be of the UFAI (unfriendly artificial intelligence) variety. ‘Unfriendliness’ implies ill will, which [...]

A wide-eyed Merida. Image ©Alice the Photo Ninja I used to be political; now I’m just politic. Following on from my recent article Neuro with Everything, where I raised the vexatious issue of so-called neuropolitics, I will now take a deeper refractory look at our psychological blocks against things constitutional. Why are we uncomfortable about the mechanics of nationhood? [...]

Image ©Cornelia Kopp When Daniel Dennett coined the term ‘greedy reductionism’, in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), he may not have fully realised just how byzantinely gluttonous some ‘high tech’ forms of such reductionism could become. Dennett was taking aim at the false type of reductionism; the kind that ‘gobbles up’ entire layers of complexity warranting [...]