26 May 2025
A couple of weeks ago I started seeing posts about how Google's AI was bending over backwards attempting to explain idioms that didn't exist. I didn't think much of it until a few days ago, when I was searching for advice on a level in the game “Consider It” on the Switch. The level in question involved a couple walking down the pavement together towards some dog poop, and I couldn't work out how to avoid stepping in it - so I searched for “consider it poop level”. Google's AI then tried to explain the phrase I had searched for as if it was a well-known saying.
19 August 2024
Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow (2013) is a good starting point for thinking about the strengths and limitations of human thinking processes. There is no good substitute for the use of “educating gossip”, as Kahneman describes it, for training in effective judgement and in decision making.
27 February 2023
It's hard to believe it's the end of February already, and the official end to summer, at least on a calendar month basis. With all the rain and weather events we've had, it's hard to think that this summer has been a classic one. Still, it may well have finally made some of the more sluggish members of the population wake up to the reality of climate change. And what a reality it is, with the massive destruction that took place in Hawke's Bay and other areas. The cost of replacing infrastructure seems that it place a big burden on our economy for some time.
9 January 2023
To restate the question in a way that may make more sense to some, does the new conversational Artificial Intelligence chat bot from OpenAI qualify as an Artificial General Intelligence, able to perform a wide range of tasks as well as a human can - and could it even be self aware, or sentient?
20 June 2022
One of the types of AI that is progressing at speed at the moment, in places like Google's AI labs and at a company called OpenAI, is Natural Language Processing algorithms. These deep learning algorithms are pieces of software that are “trained” by getting them to process (read) lots and lots of human written text, and try to infer a set of rules for how to create new text like it's been reading. This source text is usually documents from the internet (using software that crawls through websites, linking to new sites and saving all the text it finds). Once the AI has been trained, when given a new piece of text, like a sentence, it will try to guess which word is most likely to come next. When it does this repeatedly, it can form entire sentences and paragraphs, guessing as it goes - and because its learning algorithm has figured out not only the rules of grammar but also the ways in which humans usually communicate (which words are relevant to a topic, etc), the most recent NLP algorithms do a really good job of coming across as human. They can also use this same technique to draw pictures - Dall-E 2 is amazing at creating unique images given a prompt like “a cat dressed as Napoleon holding cheese” - with the phrase “a propaganda poster depicting a cat dressed as french emperor napoleon holding a piece of cheese” giving this result:
1 August 2018
Can an online quiz give good recommendations for taking supplements? Stuff today published an article about two New Zealand companies that launched recently, Vitally and Wondermins, which each use online quizzes to sell “personalised vitamins”.
12 November 2017
After a ghost was spotted in a picture of a mirror being sold in a TradeMe auction, Wendy McCawe from Wellington Photographic Supplies quickly spotted that the "ghost" in question was actually a picture of the lead character from TV show Outlander. I'm impressed that she spotted it - I put the image through online forensic image tool Forensically, and couldn't see anything.
26 March 2017
The NZ Census asks a question of respondents about Religious Affiliation. Historically, the only response available for non-believers has been "No Religion". NZ Stats have now added several categories in time for the next Census in 2018.
1 February 2015
Apparently 80% of people in the USA think so, according to a Washington Post article that's been all over Facebook in the last few days. That is, 80% of those polled in the regular Food Demand Survey (by Oklahoma State University's Department of Agricultural Economics) agreed with the proposition that all food containing DNA should be labelled. (To put this in context, there is currently a heated debate in the US – driven by those opposing the incorporation of material from genetically-modified organisms into the food chain – over whether such foods should be labelled as such.)
1 August 2014
Late in his life, in answer to a question, Freud compared the human condition approximately to the contents of a baby's nappy. When I first heard this story, it seemed to mark a bitter old man. That was when I was in high school in the late 1950s. Higher education was spreading in the world's democracies. Ignorance and superstition, the plague of the human species since the caves, were on the way out. Reason, knowledge and tolerance would rule the future of the world. Or so it seemed. Does it look like that today, even to high school students? A few news items:
1 November 2012
If the beliefs of a sizeable number of people turn out to be correct, this will be the final issue of the NZ Skeptic. According to a survey of 16,262 people in 21 countries conducted by market research company Ipsos for Reuters News, two percent of respondents strongly agree, and eight percent somewhat agree, with the proposition that 21 December 2012, the end of the current cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar, marks the end of the world. Perhaps surprisingly agreement is highest in China (20 percent), while the Germans and Indonesians (four percent) are relatively dubious. One could perhaps question the representativeness of the sample (comprised of people who have agreed to take part in online surveys), but there must be a lot of people out there who are really worried about this.
1 May 2012
On a recent visit to New Plymouth I was rather taken aback to see a billboard outside a central city church posing the question: "Evolution? How come we still have apes?" It wasn't so much surprise that someone could know so little about evolutionary theory that they would think this was a persuasive argument - versions of this are often to be seen in the less sophisticated creationist publications - it was more that they should feel the urge to display their ignorance on a busy street corner.
1 May 2011
The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. Sam Harris. 2010. Free Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-4391-7121-9 Reviewed by Martin Wallace.
1 November 2010
After 17 years as chair-entity of the NZ Skeptics, Vicki Hyde has stepped down. Annette Taylor talks to her about life, the universe and taniwhas.
1 February 2008
In NZ Skeptic 85 Alison Campbell discusses teaching evolution in the school curriculum with particular reference to the influence of local creationist pressures opposing this as a sole 'theory'. If New Zealand Skeptics are to be true to their cause they must also take a hard look at their own basic assumptions. My concern from an informed amateur perspective is that in teaching evolution it is important to be intellectually honest to students. The fact of the development of life forms over billions of years and their gradual divergence from earlier morphological templates is beyond question to any rational inquirer even if it cannot demonstrated in the traditional hypothesis/experimental test paradigm. Furthermore, Darwin's concept of natural selection is most obviously applicable to those life forms we are most familiar with and on which he based his inductive studies. At this level of macro development for instance, some morphological changes are clearly adaptive for predation or escape, and auditory or visual cues evolve to serve the attraction of mates or camouflage. However there is still substantial debate whether this paradigm can cover all stages in the evolution of life on Earth. It is when we get to the question of the origins of life or the complex operations within a single cell that questions arise. Such intricate developments are crucial to the central concept of Neo-Darwinism.
1 August 2003
The young earth creationists have been active again ... the Australian-based group Answers in Genesis (AIG), has been doing the circuit in New Zealand. Warnings on the Skeptics email list had alerted us to the fact that Carl Wieland, the head of AIG, was coming over to pollute young Kiwi minds so this was an opportunity we couldn't and shouldn't miss. Wieland is very influential in creationist circles, having produced many books, pamphlets and videos, and is really the driving force behind their main publications Creation Ex Nihilo and the impressively, but inappropriately, named Technical Journal (or "TJ" as they lovingly refer to it). It thus promised to be a good chance to see Wieland in action first hand and to get some clues as to how to handle him next time he appears on our shores.
1 February 2000
It's my right as a parent to decide what is best for my child. After all, I'm a caring parent who dearly loves her children and would do only what is best for them.
1 November 1999
TVNZ's Holmes show has taken this year's Bent Spoon Award from the New Zealand Skeptics for promoting extraordinary and untested claims regarding cancer treatments.
1 August 1994
Late in his life, in answer to a question, Freud compared the human condition approximately to the contents of a baby's nappy. When I first heard this story, it seemed to mark a bitter old man. That was when I was in high school in the late 1950s. Higher education was spreading in the world's democracies. Ignorance and superstition, the plague of the human species since the caves, were on the way out. Reason, knowledge and tolerance would rule the future of the world. Or so it seemed. Does it look like that today, even to high school students? A few news items: