Functionalism
John Searle proposed a definition of "Strong AI" in 1980.
"The appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states."
He refined it over the years, and was, I think, eventually satisfied with equating it with functionalism - that is, the thesis that each and every mental state is constituted solely by its functional role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_mind)
MIT report on AI Use
I think MIT has managed to reach across the usual bureaucratese and written something important.
"The Institute community...must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission."
"AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond."
Chinese Room
Consider a program which receives and outputs Chinese characters so perfectly that humans cannot distinguish it from a Chinese-speaking person. Now assume you are in a room, receiving Chinese characters slipped under the door. You follow an English version of the computer program step-by-step, which instructs you to return output Chinese characters. You would not understand the conversation: similarly, the computer is not capable of understanding.
The fading qualia
If you replaced, one by one, the neurons of a brain with a functionally identical component, for example based on a silicon chip, would the consciousness slowly fade away?
Half my timeline is about how much everyone hates AI, and the other half is about how people feel threatened by all the posts by people who love AI.
On learning programming in an age of LLMs
"Software developers have already, for decades, been working on top of abstractions they didn't understand. If you were a web developer, you didn't know much about compiler programming...
A good rule of thumb was: Understand the level of abstractions directly below the one you work in, as well as the one above. That would enable you to troubleshoot most problems."
I was thinking that sycophancy was one thing that Asimov didn't predict in his robot stories. But in "Liar", Herbie interprets the First Law as not allowing him to say things to humans that they don't want to hear, so that's a pretty similar interpretation. Other robots are perceptive enough to interpret emotions, but apparently Herbie's ability to see the psychological damage directly made a difference.
I think it is certification that is under attack by AI, not really learning.
If Imperial College grants a degree to someone, they are saying, "This person is guaranteed to have a certain amount of knowledge about this subject" and they need to back up that guarantee. Hopefully they will come up with ways to do that beyond insisting the students don't wear their smart glasses during a test.
The real energy use of agentic AI
"My personal and professional AI usage now emits a bit more per year than running an electric clothes dryer, and about half as much as driving an electric car 11,500 miles in California or taking one San Francisco to New York round-trip flight in economy. It is about 8% of the annual emissions of a typical American gasoline car, and roughly 2% of the average American’s ~18-ton annual greenhouse gas footprint."
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-real-energy-use-of-agentic-ai
Of Robots in Literature
"robots are ‘humanity's attempt to almost create a new life-form in a way. Like we're "God", for lack of a better term, trying to create new creatures.’ And here I am at the juxtaposition of these perspectives, which isn’t devoid of its own woes"
https://navirambles.substack.com/p/of-robots-in-literature
A side benefit of AI coding help
I do a lousy job at taking personal notes. I get involved in getting a build set up just the way it needs to be, then come back in couple of months having forgotten everything I did and needing to make some changes. But I suspect I can get around this by adding instructions to the repo so an AI can reproduce what I did sometime later.
One thing the Golden Age sci-fi writers got wrong about AI is that, as far as I know, no one predicted that the intelligence would be on a central server rather than on the machine. Isaac Asimov's "Catch That Rabbit" touches on it a little bit, with some Bluetoothy communications.
AI, jobs, and the next generation
Good essay. Yes, I know it's from a Microsoft VP. I have an eternal complaint about AI prognostications, which is that when people highlight the good things that AI does, they are almost always talking about complicated deep learning models; but no one cares about those - it's the easy-to-use large language models that everyone's worried about. Tell us what great things those are doing if you will. Or can.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2026/06/10/ai-jobs-and-the-next-generation/
Speculating about why an LLM gave a wrong answer is like trying to guess why a C++ program segfaulted - the possibilities are endless. It could have been training weights, or a prompt, or a RAG, or something in the fine tuning, or a bad tool. Without knowing how the system was constructed there's no way to guess.
RE:
Misaligned (@misalignedmag@mastodon.social)
The larger question is, how do we improve the ability of the NHS to give health advice so people don't feel the need to ask generic LLM's instead?
Why would you expect a word generator be able to do arithmetic?
Lessons Learned about Technology and Reform
"But if you believe, as I do, that teaching is anchored in a relationship between an adult and a student then relationships cannot be replaced by even the most well designed software, efficient device (including ChatbotGPT) or virtual reality."
Teaching, perhaps. *Education* is about getting a passing grade to move on to high school, or college, or a good paying job. Fixing this would truly be transformative.
Unmesh Joshi: Code has always served two distinct but intertwined purposes.
"First, code is a set of instructions to a machine...Second, code is a conceptual model of the problem domain."
I've always found the conceptual model idea to be less important than Conway's Law, though. Agentic programming will probably be subject to it as well - but there had better be someone who understands the organizational structure!
The obvious next step is a programming language designed specifically for LLM's to output. I wonder what that might look like?
It seems odd that there hasn't been more interest in publishing prompts. Yes, you used AI to make a nice program - give me the prompt so I can run it too. What, you wrote a book using AI? I like reading books, what prompt did you use to make yours?
Calling it now: we don't need to worry about AI because it won't have any significant effect on the economy
Companies buying chips and datacenters will boost some earnings. Coders will find it bumps their productivity some. It's handy for answering general knowledge questions in a variety of areas; better than search, for now, at least as long as it has fewer ads. But it's not going to replace jobs in any kind of large-scale way, any more than self-driving cars have replaced human drivers.
RE: 
Jason Lefkowitz (@jalefkowit@vmst.io)
I wonder if this involves Prisoner's Dilemma strategy. If you only play a single round, defecting is always the correct strategy. Cooperation only becomes a useful tactic if you know you will be playing the opponent again another time.
This is an interesting and important perspective written by two really smart guys. If an apprenticeship model for coders comes to pass, a higher education degree might become irrelevant again, as it was in the late 90's when everyone was rushing to hire the 18-year-old who'd built a cool program in his basement.
Some important AI-assisted ports in bioinformatics
Lior Pachter ports edgeR to Python using Claude. He says it's essentially complete but never explains how he determined the accuracy and completeness of his port? Seems like those would be important things to consider.
I wonder if you could foil aggressive AI scrapers by providing static web sites that use http instead of https for easy caching so the scrapers don't even make it to your server.
AI misinformation may have paradoxical consequences
"Websites that copied reputable news pages but with made-up stories were how the term “fake news” originated. Are you reading this column on Economist.com or Economist.co? Or perhaps you are only seeing a snippet on social media, shorn of context and without a link to where it came from."
Aurora: A Foundation Model for the Earth System
"Trained on vast amounts of data, it’s tuned to model the Earth’s systems. Aurora has already shown promise across multiple scenarios, including predicting the weather, tracking hurricanes and air quality, and modeling ocean waves and energy flows."
I first saw this in a Microsoft newsletter, and traced it through a Nature paper and a Github repo. It might be fun to play with!
GitHub - microsoft/aurora: Implementation of the Aurora model for Earth system forecasting
I suspect that LLM's reach their peak usefulness with HuggingFace, and everything beyond those models is just incremental improvements.
LLM's do a lousy job at analyzing a chess match. Of course they do; token generation doesn't account for the precision required. But I wonder if you had a good chess-match-analyzing API, could you use an LLM to turn the analysis into a well-written summary?
An AI read that people with Primary Headache Disorder were more likely to get Alzheimer's, and reported it as "People who have been awarded Ph.D.'s are more likely to get Alzheimer's". Beginning to think I just need to find my old Encyclopedia Britannicas and keep them handy.
I feel less guilty suddenly.
"A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding. Programmer Simon Willison said: "If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant."
A writing teacher on ChatGPT
"My conversations with A.I. showcased its seductive cocktail of affirmation, perceptiveness, solicitousness and duplicity — and brought home how complicated this new era will be...With ChatGPT, I felt like I had an intern with the cheerful affect of a golden retriever and the speed of the Flash."
"Eight best AI learning assistants in 2025".
What possible distinction could they have from one another beyond a few words of prompt? No one is training a model specifically to be a learning assistant.
Looks like some people are using AI summarizing tools.
Generative AI has its uses. But has anyone ever really used it to summarize an article, or an email, or a bunch of stuff? I think I would spend longer verifying its conclusions than I would just reading the documents.
The Labor Demand Shocks of Artificial Intelligence
"The easy answer is that it will increase the demand for labor, in much the same way as the wheel, the steam loom, the automobile and the computer. That is, in a very nuanced way.
Technology doesn’t replace jobs; it replaces tasks. Almost always, the tasks replaced are the most mundane, routine and trainable ones. In so doing, the technology makes the uniquely human part of the job more valuable."
Accessing LM Studio Server from WSL Linux
(Not complicated, just tricky to find the settings)
Went to a talk today about, "Planning for AI in your organization." The guy spoke approvingly of 20th century robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie, and then compared them to Thiel and Musk. I think the whole talk was a propaganda effort for turning everything over to oligarchs and letting them run things. I wish I'd managed to articulate that before the Q&A period was over.
You hear a lot about book reports and things that start with, "Sure! Here's 300 words about The Scarlet Letter." ChatGPT generally doesn't say anything like that to me though. I wonder if they've reworked it to stop doing that.
How not to build an AI Institute
"The median founder, investor, or civil servant will cheerfully roll their eyes at the mention of the Alan Turing Institute, what’s less understood is why the UK’s national AI institute has proven such a flop, despite spending over quarter of a billion pounds since its inception. To piece this together, I’ve spoken to current and former Turing insiders, figures from the world of research funding, academics, and civil servants."
https://www.chalmermagne.com/p/how-not-to-build-an-ai-institute
Portlander creates AI-powered device to monitor street health
"Zajack’s Traffic Monitor is an, “open source roadway object detection and radar speed monitoring,” device made from simple and widely available components. It uses a wide-angle camera, a very small (Raspberry Pi) computer, and machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) code to watch for objects in the street."
Sounds fun! I doubt it would make much sense in my little 'hood though.
I find the argument, "I asked an AI agent something and it gave me a wrong answer, therefore we should never use AI" to be a peculiar one.
I don't know why there's such a kerfuffle about AI's reading and writing emails. If I have anything important to say I send an instant message.
People who can think through and understand complicated problems will never be replaced.
The days of memorizing arcane syntax to get a computer to do what you want are quickly coming to an end.
Know what would fix stop-and-go traffic even better? Not driving.
"Boston Is Using AI for Good to Fix Stop-and-Go Traffic...with the help of Google Research's Green Light project, AI-optimized intersections have already seen traffic reduced by 50%."
#Boston #CarsRuinEverything #AI
Using AI in pursuit of better bike paths
"The AI Bike Mapping and Wayfinding Project aims to revolutionize bicycle infrastructure mapping and improve cyclists’ safety in Santa Barbara County. The project’s key objectives include AI training: Data from Google Street View, OpenStreetMap and an advisory committee will inform, train and develop a tested AI model."
Once again, I think there are easier ways. @markstos have an opinion?
Re: coding for kids: I suspect that, due to AI, we are somewhere near a sea change in coding practices, on the level of interpreters or object-oriented programming. I wonder how one would implement "prompt engineering for kids".
Just tried doing a search for "automatically tag photos" and discovered that there's nothing left on the web but sites generated by #ChatGPT. Search is dead. Anybody know a good tool for automatically tagging photos?