Ponderings
A.I. search tools, chatbots and social media are associated with lower cognitive performance, studies say. What to do?
Whether technology makes people dumber is a question as old as technology itself. Socrates faulted the invention of writing for weakening human memory. As recently as 2008, many years before the arrival of A.I.-generated web summaries, The Atlantic published an essay titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Those concerns turned out to be overblown.
New York Times, 10 April 2025
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
The machines of which we are now speaking are not the dream of the sensationalist nor the hope of some future time. They already exist as thermostats, automatic gyrocompass ship-steering systems, self-propelled missiles—especially such as seek their target—anti-aircraft fire-control systems, automatically controlled oil-cracking stills, ultra-rapid computing machines, and the like. They had begun to be used long before the war — indeed, the very old steam-engine governor belongs among them—but the great mechanization of the Second World War brought them into their own, and the need of handling the extremely dangerous energy of the atom will probably bring them to a still higher point of development. Scarcely a month passes but a new book appears on these so-called control mechanisms, or servomechanisms, and the present age is as truly the age of servomechanisms as the nineteenth century was the age of the steam engine or the eighteenth century the age of the clock.
read Chapter 1, pp. 43-63
Economist
Science & technology | AI benchmarking: How to find the smartest AI
This is where ZeroBench and its peers come in. Each tries to measure a particular way AI capabilities are approaching—or exceeding—those of humans. Humanity's Last Exam, for instance, sought to devise intimidating general-knowledge questions (its name derives from its status as the most fiendish such test it is possible to set), asking for anything from the number of tendons supported by a particular hummingbird bone to a translation of a stretch of Palmyrene script found on a Roman tombstone. In a future where many AI models can score full marks on such a test, benchmark-setters may have to move away from knowledge-based questions entirely.
Something else
Como la Cigarra
Mercedes Sosa was both a singer and a political force as one of the prime figures in the Nueva Canción (or Nueva Trova) movement. Her entry in Last.fm seems to be written by a compatriot, and an obit in The Telegraph speaks a bit of her importance.
Mercedes Sosa, who has died aged 74, was the most renowned Latin-American singer of her generation; she was known as "La Negra" for her long, jet-black hair, and as "the voice of the voiceless ones", for her performances of songs which championed the rights of the poor.
Though not known as a songwriter, she was an unrivalled interpreter of works by her compatriot, the Argentinian Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Chile's Violeta Parra, both icons of the region's nueva canción movement towards the end of the 1960s, whose work often spoke of the struggle for human rights and democracy.
As a figurehead of the Left in her own right, Mercedes Sosa fell foul of the military junta that ruled her nation between 1976 and 1983 ... the object of state surveillance and intimidation by the "Triple A" death squad. At a concert in La Plata in 1979, she and her entire audience of 200 university students were arrested and detained. Although she was released as a result of international condemnation, the incident forced her into exile ...
The song was written by María Elena Walsh.