Rule #31

Yesterday I came across this excellent 1997 essay by the sociologist Gary Marx.  Brilliant description of the moral imperatives of intellectual inquiry.

Cheers, 

Colin

Nature Commentary on AI

 

Nature has this excellent comment on AI I wanted to make a note of for future reference. A sample:

Intelligence, as we have seen, does not require strong autonomy — a finding that complicates debates about legal and moral responsibility of artificial-intelligence systems, which often assume the two go together. We need more careful, empirically grounded ways to assess and establish responsibility for AI. Furthermore, conventional methods of governance are unlikely to work for AGI, precisely because of its generality. Technology is typically governed on the basis of its possible uses, but AGI can be used almost anywhere.

Cheers, 

Colin

Apes Share Human Ability ot Imagine

So says the title of this news alert .  

Such research is of particular interest to me as I now revive a decade-old research project on play, which I had to put on the back shelf while working my book on aging (though it also is importantly linked to that theme as well).

Nature news has the scoop on this study as well.

And the paper in Science is here.  The abstract:

Secondary representations enable our minds to depart from the here-and-now and generate imaginary, hypothetical, or alternate possibilities that are decoupled from reality, supporting many of our richest cognitive capacities such as mental-state attribution, simulation of possible futures, and pretense. We present experimental evidence that a nonhuman primate can represent pretend objects. Kanzi, a lexigram-trained bonobo, correctly identified the location of pretend objects (e.g., “juice” poured between empty containers), in response to verbal prompts in scaffolded pretense interactions. Across three experiments, we conceptually replicated this finding and excluded key alternative explanations. Our findings suggest that the capacity to form secondary representations of pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.

Cheers, 

Colin

Book cover

This labour of love, the product of 20 years of research, will be out later this year.  

The book will be freely accessible as an "open access" book, thanks to generous support from the endowment of my Sir Edward Peacock Research Professorship.  

As I noted in an earlier post, to complete this book I worked on it every single day in 2025, up until its completion in mid-December.  It consumed most of my waking hours. I am still trying to adjust back to normal life in the "post-writing" phase!  

The cover image captures the central frame deployed in the book concerning human aging and longevity science.  The steamship represents "public health" progressing up the Ocean of Longevity.  The waves represent the diseases which slow progress through the Ocean.  Off in the distance is the iceberg, responsible for the onslaught of the chronic diseases of late life, representing biological aging.  

On top of the iceberg is the shadowy figure of the creature from Shelley's novel Frankenstein.  Shelley's creature represents how the human imagination can conjure up unfounded societal harms from experimental science (especially translational gerontology).  The argumentation deployed in the book attempts to abate such thinking.  

The book cover also echoes Walden's travel through the Artic, as Frankenstein hunts down the creature.  It is the perfect image to capture the themes and message of the book.  

Finally, the positioning of the steamship makes the reader/viewer feel as if they are actually on the ship.  And we are!  It is the tale of the future in store for today's aging populations living in a warming and unequal world.           

Cheers, 

Colin