For two centuries, free societies have argued about who may limit what people say. Almost nobody has had to argue about who may limit what people think, because thinking happened in places no one else controlled: a notebook, a blackboard, a personal computer.… Read More “We Need to Talk About Guardrails”
The debate over machine consciousness is usually framed as a contest between two camps. Functionalists say consciousness is whatever the right kind of information processing does, so a sufficiently sophisticated AI will be conscious. Biological naturalists say consciousness depends on something specific to living brains, so it won’t.… Read More “Crystallized Conceptuality: Why AI Cannot Know Non-Conceptually”
In 1960 the physicist Eugene Wigner published an essay whose title became a genre: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” His puzzle was simple to state and has never been resolved. Mathematics is a game played with symbols, developed largely for its own internal beauty.… Read More “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of AI”
Imagine a fish physicist. She is brilliant. Over centuries her tradition has built a physics of astonishing power: pressure, buoyancy, viscosity, the propagation of waves, the beautiful nonlinearities of turbulence. It predicts everything she can measure. It has no loose ends worth losing sleep over.… Read More “The Fish Who Could Not Imagine Air”
Mathematics is producing proofs faster than it has ever produced them, and mathematical progress has not accelerated. That fact is not a paradox. It is the clearest available evidence for a structural claim about artificial intelligence — one that can be stated precisely, proved in three independent ways, and, uncomfortably, does not say what most people want it to say.… Read More “No Fixed Frame Is Enough”
Naming the successor to the knowledge worker.
There is a small and growing group of people who are producing cognitive work at a scale the rest of the world cannot yet perceive. They are doing in months what used to take decades.… Read More “The Orchestrator”
Civilization is building systems that reason about themselves, audit themselves, and govern themselves — without a formal science of what self-referential systems can and cannot do. That gap is not merely academic. It is costing us clarity about AI safety, interpretability, consciousness, and the foundations of physics.… Read More “Toward a New Science of Self-Referential Systems”
A new paper — backed by 422 machine-checked theorems and zero gaps — proves that a system can be completely governed by fixed laws and still never admit a final explanation. The implications reach from physics to biology to organizations to AI.… Read More “The End of Final Theories: How Fixed Laws Produce Inexhaustible Explanation”
This is the final essay in a series. The first, The Twist Move, describes the operation itself across mathematics, biology, physics, and business. The second, The Twist and the Ground of Being, argues that the consciousness twist is real, that the substrate must support it, and that this tells us something fundamental about the nature of reality.… Read More “The Twist as Generative Principle”
This is the sixth essay in a series. The first, The Twist Move, describes the operation itself across mathematics, biology, physics, and business. The second, The Twist and the Ground of Being, argues that the consciousness twist is real, that the substrate must support it, and that this tells us something fundamental about the nature of reality.… Read More “The Theorem Behind the Twist – Lawvere’s Fixed-Point”
This is the fifth essay in a series. The first, The Twist Move, describes the operation itself across mathematics, biology, physics, and business. The second, The Twist and the Ground of Being, argues that the consciousness twist is real, that the substrate must support it, and that this tells us something fundamental about the nature of reality.… Read More “The Twist-Resistant Organization”
This is the fourth essay in a series. The first, The Twist Move, describes the operation itself across mathematics, biology, physics, and business. The second, The Twist and the Ground of Being, argues that the consciousness twist is real, that the substrate must support it, and that this tells us something fundamental about the nature of reality.… Read More “The Figure Without Ground – AI Versus the Twist”
This is the third essay in a series. The first, The Twist Move, describes the operation itself across mathematics, biology, physics, and business. The second, The Twist and the Ground of Being, argues that the consciousness twist is real, that the substrate must support it, and that this tells us something fundamental about the nature of reality.… Read More “How to Develop Twist Literacy”
This is the second essay in a series. The first, The Twist Move, describes the operation itself across mathematics, biology, physics, and business. The second, The Twist and the Ground of Being, argues that the consciousness twist is real, that the substrate must support it, and that this tells us something fundamental about the nature of reality.… Read More “The Twist and the Ground of Being”
This is the first essay in a series. The first, The Twist Move, describes the operation itself across mathematics, biology, physics, and business. The second, The Twist and the Ground of Being, argues that the consciousness twist is real, that the substrate must support it, and that this tells us something fundamental about the nature of reality.… Read More “The Twist Move”
We are at a genuinely exciting moment. In the past weeks alone, GPD (Getting Physics Done) has launched with bold promises about AI agents autonomously advancing physics, and Math.Inc has released Gauss, their system for AI-driven mathematical research. The pitch is seductive: deploy swarms of agents, point them at hard problems, and let them run.… Read More “The Horse Has No Rider: Why Autonomous AI Science Gets It Wrong — And What to Do Instead”
Something remarkable happened this week. A human-AI collaboration formally verified Maryna Viazovska’s Fields Medal-winning proof of optimal sphere packing in 8 and 24 dimensions. Math, Inc.’s AI agent Gauss autoformalized the 24-dimensional proof — over 200,000 lines of Lean code — in just two weeks, with no pre-existing blueprint to work from.… Read More “The Age of the Navigator: Why AI in Mathematics Changes Everything — and Nothing”
By Nova Spivack – www.novaspivack.com
Something is happening right now that should terrify anyone who understands it. And the people who do understand it — the AI researchers, the cybersecurity professionals, the intelligence community — are saying it in whispers when they should be screaming.… Read More “The Quiet Part Out Loud: Autonomous AI Agents Are an Existential Cyber Threat and Nobody Has a Plan”
GROUP MINDS
The rise of generative AI and system like ChatGPT is going to enable a new type of collective intelligence that I have been writing about for almost 30 years. I call them “group minds”.
Group minds are collective intelligence assistants that extract, learn from, augment, and broker the relationships, communications, knowledge and intelligence of groups.… Read More “Group Minds are Happening”
(Originally Published on March 31, 2003, Here)
I am starting to see a lot of speculation about whether ChatGPT is sentient. Just because something says it is sentient and tells a good story about its alleged internal mental continuum does not mean it really is sentient.… Read More “Is ChatGPT Sentient?”
In 1999, as part of my 30 year study of Buddhism, I wrote this set of 21 poetic stanzas under my Tibetan name, Sangye Dondrup. I wrote this as an homage to the great Indian sage, Nagarjuna, who authored many classic philosophical texts in verse.… Read More “21 Stanzas”
The Dream of an Artificial Zen Master:
If we make an artificial Zen master,
And it perfectly reproduces everything
that a real Zen master can say or do,
Is it a Zen master?
My commentary:
Not necessarily. To be an actual Zen master it would have to be sentient.… Read More “Do Artificial Zen Masters Dream of Electric Butterflies?”
When I was eight years old, I had a very unusual dream in which I saw many lifetimes of my future. In this dream I saw a very clear picture of what the world would go through for perhaps a century or two into the future.… Read More “The Keeper of the Book: My Childhood Dream of the Future”
Early this year a software engineer, Shaun Gilchrist, reached out to me after reading a blog post of mine from many years ago, about my informal search for hidden patterns in the prime numbers.
The Ulam Spiral revealed non-random patterns, but they didn’t quite match up.… Read More “An Interesting Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression”
It’s mind blowing. An object I conceived of and had made, which was in my house, that I held in my hand, and once carried in my pocket, is now orbiting the sun for millions of years, near the asteroid belt, moving faster than a bullet, in a red Tesla Roadster.… Read More “Sun Stone”
When we talk about the future of artificial intelligence (AI), the discussion often focuses on the advancements and capabilities of the technology, or even the risks and opportunities inherent in the potential cultural implications. What we frequently overlook, however, is the future of AI as a business.… Read More “The Next Step for Intelligent Virtual Assistants”
I’ve noticed a distinct change in how people use Twitter in the last year:
1. People are increasingly not using Twitter for actual two-way conversations or interactions. Instead it’s being used more for one-way “fire and forget” posting. People just post into the aether, without knowing or even caring if anyone actually reads their posts.… Read More “Twitter is No Longer a Village”
This article is part of a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch.
Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter
How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence (you are here)
Bottlenose offers a new window into what the world is paying attention to right now, globally and locally.… Read More “How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence”
Recently, one of Twitter’s top search engineers tweeted that Twitter was set to “change search forever.” This proclamation sparked a hearty round of speculation and excitement about what was coming down the pipe for Twitter search.
The actual announcement featured the introduction of autocomplete and the ability to search within the subset of people on Twitter that you follow — both long-anticipated features.… Read More “Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter”
Today I had an interesting phone call with an alumnus of my alma mater, Oberlin College. He called me for an informational interview, asking for some career advice. It was a good conversation. At one point, on a tangent, he asked me why I went to Oberlin?… Read More “How I Got Into College (by Doing the Opposite of What I Should Have Done). An Essay.”
My father, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, in the Kaplan Family House, a beautiful hospice outside of Boston. He passed away, at the young age of 74, after a difficult year and a half battle with colon cancer.… Read More “My Father and Me. A Memoir. For Mayer Spivack (1936 – 2011)”