The Guardian recently featured an article produced by ‘GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator’. It’s an essay intended to reassure us humans that AIs do not want to take over, still less kill all humans. GPT-3 also produced a kind … Continue reading
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Can you remember with your leg, and is that part of who you are? An interesting piece by Ben Platts-Mills in Psyche suggests it might be so. This is not Psyche the good old journal that went under in 2010, … Continue reading
This short piece by Tam Hunt in Nautilus asks whether the brain’s electromagnetic fields could be the seat of consciousness. What does that even mean? Let’s start with a sensible answer. It could just mean that electromagnetic effects are an … Continue reading
Cormac McCarthy asks an interesting question here, and gives the wrong answer, also interestingly. Along the way he manages to describe in simple language a fundamental problem of how our minds work, one that he rightly says, remains mysterious – though … Continue reading
Scott Morrison’s “secret powers” are being heralded in much of the media as proof that he was up to no good. The simpler explanation is that on governance issues, he was often just not much good. As a journalist and … Continue reading
I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political … Continue reading
Australia punches above its weight in the medical research space. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is the main government granting agency in the field of medical research. On October 16th, it was announced that future mid-level and … Continue reading
What Do We Owe Afghanistan? Nathan J. Robinson & Noam Chomsky August 3, 2022. Current Affairs. “The oppressed people of afghanistan will know the generosity of america and our allies.” — George W. Bush, Oct. 7, 2001 The 9/11 attacks could have been dealt with as a crime. This would have been sane and consistent with precedent. […]